VoiceThread and Camtasia are two of the many tools that we are introducing to faculty for online teaching.   For those of you who don’t know about these tools, here is a quick intro.

VoiceThread is a tool that allows you to share images, audio, and presentations online and collect comments in the form of text and audio.  See the demo below, which was created within Voicethread:

Camtasia is a tool that lets you record actions on your computer screen to create presentations or training videos.  With Camtasia, you can produce a tutorial, a quick Web-based demo, or a narrated PowerPoint presentation.   

For our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, I was assigned to teach Camtasia, because I have been using this tool to delivery online instruction for my Chinese class.  Although I have been using Camtasia for a couple of year and am comfortable using it, I found myself struggling to find a good reason to teach faculty yet another tool after they had already been introduced to VoiceThread, a very powerful and easy-to-use application for both information sharing and collecting.

If we look at the whole functionalities of the two applications, we are really comparing apples with oranges.  But from the perspective of presenting information from PowerPoint, either can be used; the only difference is the production procedure and the presentation output. 

The following table is a result of my pondering about when to use which when it comes to selecting VoiceThread or Camtasia for online presentation from PowerPoint.

As interaction is becoming such a key for online learning, I thought all faculty would all opt for VoiceThread.  To my surprise, several faculty told me after the workshop that they would go with Camtasia, especially those who were thinking about teaching a hybrid course.  To these faculty, it is more important to find a nice way to present their information to the students than to get input from them, which can take place at the face-to-face session.   Also, for those who are comfortable using PowerPoint,  this one-click process seems to be less demanding than learning a whole new online tool.    

As someone who is charged with assisting faculty in selecting the right tool and methods for teaching online, I need to again apply the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Faculty Support  and give priority to faculty’s feeling of “safety” and “comfort”.  So my advice then is this: pick one that you are comfortable with to begin with (even if it means a one-way stream of information sharing), and then maybe for the second or third round, try a more interactive and exciting environment like VoiceThread.