If you need to explain technical processes or software in an online course, screencasts are the perfect video format for you. In this article, you will learn why you should use screencasts and which tools you can use to easily and quickly create screen recordings.
In online courses, you can easily convey a lot of content in images, text, or short explanatory videos. However, in some cases, standard formats reach their limits:
Imagine you want to explain the use of a software to your course participants. You create screenshots and write instructions. Despite this, there are always participants who almost despair of putting your instructions into practice.
Classically, the following happens: The participant gets in touch by email to say they can't manage it. You as the course instructor ask what the problem is. The participant describes their issue, but the explanation doesn't quite work. This goes back and forth. Often, by the third email and fifth screenshot at the latest, neither of you knows where the other just clicked.
In companies, this challenge frequently arises during the onboarding of new employees in offices: They often have to find their way around many tools and processes in the first few days. Even the most detailed text instructions won't help much here. And colleagues often have little time to show it to the new employee once or several times.
As a rule of thumb: The more complex the process and the more individual steps, the more difficult a purely textual or verbal explanation becomes. In online courses, screencasts help you solve this problem. Below, we explain the term, give you practical tips, and introduce a simple tool.
What is a Screencast?
“A screencast is a video that shows content by recording what is happening on a computer, tablet, or smartphone screen.” Source
With a screencast, you record your screen and your mouse movement as a video. Your participants can virtually follow live what is happening on the screen, as if they were looking over your shoulder. Ideally, they recreate the steps directly themselves on a second screen.
For screencasts, you can choose to record comments live while recording or insert an audio track afterwards. This depends on the tool you use for the recording. Screencasts without sound are also possible, but they leave room for questions or misunderstandings.
PRACTICAL TIP: We recommend recording screencasts directly with sound. This is easier for you as the creator than adding an audio track afterwards using video software. And your explanations will perfectly match what is being shown.
Screencast videos in online courses convey complex processes simply and understandably.
Screencasts are an enormously powerful tool for successful online courses when used correctly. You should definitely keep the following tips in mind:
5 Tips for Perfect Screencasts for Online Courses
Find a quiet environment for recording, especially if you are recording with sound.
Use a good microphone! Your voice should be clear, distinct, and loud enough for your participants to understand your helpful comments. We tested four microphones for smartphones, laptops, and PCs for you: To the review “Microphones for Video Shooting”.
Clean up your screen! This might sound trivial, but it is important for your participants to keep an overview. Close all programs and windows you don't need.
Turn off notifications on your device! How often has a “New Email” banner including an alert sound burst into the middle of my screencast...
Go slowly! Especially when you already know the process you want to show very well, you probably click through it quickly. Remember: Your participants have to listen, watch, understand, and perhaps try it out in parallel or take notes.
PRACTICAL TIP: Imagine turning your own speed down to 50%. Move your mouse correspondingly slowly. This also applies to your speaking rate. Before you click, count silently to three in your head. This way, even slower participants can see where you are.
If you follow these 5 tips, you have a solid foundation for helpful screencasts for your online course. All you need now is a tool. Now I'll introduce you to my personal favorite tools:
2 Tools for Simple & Fast Screencasts
Important note: The following recommendation is based on our very personal experience: We have been working with this tool in the blink.it team for several years. We don't want to judge tools that we don't use ourselves 🙂 We do not receive any commission or similar for this recommendation, but make it out of our own conviction!
We in the blink.it team often create screencasts. We use them particularly often to explain new tools to colleagues (Blended Onboarding) or to explain the platform to customers. On our support pages, for example, you can find many screencasts showing processes on the platform. We mainly use two tools for this:
1. Camtasia:
Camtasia is a video editing software with an integrated screencast function. You can record audio directly or add an extra audio track afterwards. We also use Camtasia, among other things, in video shooting workshops for the professional editing of learning videos.
Camtasia offers many options. You can not only record screencasts, but also edit them: You can insert effects, text, shapes, images, and transitions. Due to the range of functions, which require some training, and the price of approx. 250€ (as of Nov 10, 2020), I recommend Camtasia if you want to regularly create extensive screencasts and other video formats for online courses.
Camtasia offers extensive features for screencasts and video editing. // Source: blink.it, own recording
2. Screencastify:
Screencastify is my personal favorite tool, which we in the team love to use for “quick and dirty” screencasts: quickly creating a screencast in between instead of writing a long text. That doesn't mean the screencasts on Screencastify are of poor quality—quite the opposite: the image and sound quality of the recordings are very good!
Screencastify is a plugin, i.e., a small program that you can integrate directly into your browser. The standard version is free and is absolutely sufficient for simple, short screencasts. In the free version, the video length is limited to 5 minutes. The paid version is also absolutely affordable at 49€/year (as of Nov 10, 2020).
I will show you how easily Screencastify works in the following screencast, very much true to the motto of this article “write less, show more”:
Fun Fact: The recording and effects were created with Camtasia, because I cannot make a recording with Screencastify and show the operation at the same time. This way, you have actually seen both tools in one video here 😊
