Begin: The eMail Wars

Do you remember back in April I mentioned that we were approaching the tipping point between the traditional in-house (Microsoft) email solution and an external (Google) hosted solution. I think the next 30 months are going to be very turbulent as these two giants duke it out to gain a superior market position in the government cloud space. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal in which Google is establishing its secure g-Cloud.

While the article doesn't mention which certification Google received, I think it is likely that it is the traditional Certification and Accreditation (C&A). Under the C&A we would be able to assume all of the physical controls are in place like physical access, redundant power, data sanitization. If we used this service, I'm assuming that we (the Agency) would be responsible for establishing the application-level controls like user authentication etc. Also interesting is that Microsoft is creating a cloud solution to compete with Google. So the competition will be between Google Docs and Office in the cloud.

In a side note, I noticed just yesterday that my personal email, Hotmail (Microsoft) which I've had since 1995 has had a significant change. I'm sure Microsoft is very happy with the change, but I'm very near abandoning my Hotmail account because it no longer integrates well with my iGoogle page on my Droid. On my computer, it looks better, with enhanced controls, but on my smartphone when I open the gadget, instead of displaying the inbox within the iGoogle page it bounces me into my inbox. That is not the way I want to consume the service. As such, I'll give them a few days to see if they are going to fix it, but I may switch to use my gMail as my primary personal email and sacrifice Hotmail for all the spam things that I sign-up for.

WBT Dev Part 8 Close-Captioning

Look at Part 1 of this series to understand the context of this entry.

It only makes sense that on the 2oth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) I take time to talk about close-captioning. We have the video of the slides and we also have the audio. But this isn't enough. People who can't hear would miss part of the content, and that isn't fair. Thus I recommend close-captioning everything. It will help you to meet Section 508 of the ADA.

First, remember, we have those scripts. That will be our starting point. However I can't just copy and paste the script into Camtasia. It contains a lot of formatting from Word. So, I'll copy the text and paste it into Notepad so that I can remove the formatting and make some additional tweaks. What you'll see in the Text version of the script is a document that has virtually no formatting except for line spaces. This is important. You must put in breaking spaces to have comfortable transitions from one line to the next. For example, the entire thing starts off with 3 blank lines. The reason for this is because I am not talking in the first second of the presentation. There is about 3 seconds of blank space before I begin speaking and I leave the close-caption blank until I begin.

You will also see 3 spaces between the end of paragraphs and at the end of sections. Remember during the audio section I mentioned that I like about 2 seconds of space between slides? Well leaving the spaces in my script allows me to let the close caption of the previous slide end without displaying any of the future slide's content. But at some point the text file is done. Copy the content to your clipboard and then paste it into the close-caption sub-menu in Camtasia.

The default width in characters is 32. That makes the text of the caption pretty big. I personally like to go for about 42 characters per line of text. Also, you can choose to "Overlay" the caption on top of the video or not. I very strongly recommend not using the "Overlay" feature because it changes the font. It makes the font white in color, but puts a black border around it. Anyway, just my opinion.

The other feature is the "Display" feature. This will allow you to generate both close-captioned and non-close-captioned movies from the same project. If you want to create a movie without the caption, just toggle the "Display" option and render.

The actual marriage between the audio-video and the caption begins when you hit the "Start" button. Be ready for this. This part takes some practice to get good at. The trick is to click the red text at the same instant in which you begin that line. Then you wait for 2 lines and do it again. As you go through the script you have to scroll down in Camtasia. This is where it gets tricky. You have to time your scrolling so that it doesn't occur while you need to click. It sounds easy, but trust me, you will mess up a few sessions before you get the hang of it. Bullets are the most difficult because it is often just one line for the bullet item and then 3 blank lines. This means that you have to scroll a lot.

You can see a couple of cool things as you progress. First, the red text has not yet been displayed. The black text is currently displayed and the gray text has already been displayed. You will also see the cc markers with timestamps on the left side. These correspond to the new Caption swimlane in our layers at the bottom of the screen. Once you get to the end, make sure you have 3 blank lines so that you don't linger on your last line of text. You want it to be blank for the quiz. Hit "Finish" to get out of the CC sub-menu.

If you are previewing the presentation and you see an instance in which the caption did not line up well with the audio you can zoom in on the layers and move it either right or left to occur earlier or later. If there is a big problem you can select one point and trash all of the later ones and start recording the close captioning from that point on.

Just keep in mind that this is one of the more difficult aspects of the entire project.

WBT Dev Part 7 Audio Enhancements

Take a look at Part 1 of this series to understand the context of this installment.

Yesterday I pointed out the next issue to deal with, noise. It is inevitable that during the recording, especially between slides, I had to breathe. Sometimes I'm flipping pages of the script. There is just noise that is distracting if I leave it in.

So, I want to make those transitions silent. Fortunately Camtasia figured out that we would probably want to do that a lot and they made it easy for us. As you can see below, you select a portion of the audio timeline that has noise and then hit the "Replace with Silence" button. This will reduce the audio volume for that selection to zero.

I also used the buttons just to the left of them to sometimes increase or decrease the volume by a quarter. This procedure does a good job of eliminating noise in transitions, but what about noise in the middle of a slide?

There is a feature to help with that. It won't eliminate the issue entirely but it will help to minimize it. Open the "Audio Enhancements" sub-menu and you will find a bunch of additional options. Here is a very important rule: Save your project before messing around in this area. You can undo (CTRL + Z) a lot of things including audio enhancements, but we're dealing with big files and big files have a tendency to crash. So save your work, try an enhancement and if it doesn't work, throw it away and come back to the project from your last save.

First, I have not had a good experience with the "Even out volume" control. When you use it it replaces some other edits you may have already implemented. Don't use that feature. I do recommend using the "Automatically detect and remove noise" feature. This does a good job of removing any clicking or chirping that may existing in your audio track. It only takes a second to run. It surprises me how quickly it runs. Also, when it is done a potion of your timeline will be selected. Don't worry about that. You will know that it has worked when your audio changes from teal to red.

I do not recommend using this sub-menu to "Manually remove noise". We already took care of that. I also do not recommend using any of the vocal enhancements. I just haven't had good luck with these.

Here is one audio conundrum though. The final product is clearly my voice. While I like my current job and role, I don't expect to be doing this forever. I really wanted to try to find some sort of voice modulator or enhancer so that the audio would be less me and more generic. The reason I wanted to do this is for out-year maintainability. If there is a change in the regulations or policy, I would hope that someone (not me) can just record the audio for the part that is different and not need to record the entire audio for the module. However the options that fit my zero dollar budget were pretty limited. I could either sound like a Speak and Spell or an auto-tuned crazy person. So I decided that I could live with my voice on the audio. But my ears are always open to find a tool to make the audio more generic so that anyone could record the audio and it would sound similar to someone else.

WBT Dev Part 6 Editing

Check out Part 1 of this series for an overview and context for what I'm discussing in this post.

The first thing I want to touch on is on the Smart Focus. Remember how in the previous post I said that we won't be using that? We we won't, but well will be using the Zoom capability. Here is what we're looking at:

Everything in the "Preview" window is what the user would see, including the two-inch black border around the PowerPoint image. Let's get rid of that. An important thing to know is that you should do this first. If you edit the zoom on frame 1 before you perform any other editing then it will carry over into all subsequent edits. If you don't, then every time you make an edit you must re-establish the zoom effect. Trust Me, do this first on frame 1, it will save you from needing to introduce this effect for all of the "Extend Frame" operations you will be performing (below).

As you can see, the left panel is where I control the zoom effect. Here I have set it to 45% and I made it an "Instant" zoom, which means that it just goes to that scale instead of zooming from 100 to 45% over a period of time. On the right side you see the preview of how it will look to the user and this is consistent with what I wanted. There is no extra or wasted space here. I'll click "Finish" on the Zoom properties and you will see in the timeline, I have a new swimlane for Zoom effects. I can return to the zoom properties by double-clicking on the icon in the zoom swimlane and making adjustments.

Next, from yesterday, remember I had about 3 seconds of dead space between slides? This little transition from slides 3 to 4 was problematic for 2 reasons.

First, you can see as I drag the right side of my selection tool it displays the duration of my selection. This indicates a little more than 3 seconds. My rule of thumb is two second of dead space. First, I like about a second and a half before opening the new slide and about a half second after the transition before the narration picks up again. As you can see from the image below I am off on both accounts. So I'll have to remove some time at the send of slide 3 and add a little time at the beginning of slide 4.

Removing time is simple. All you do is highlight the area to be removed, right click and choose "Cut Selection" (see below).

Done, the timeline will collapse. Adding time is a little more involved and tricky. If you needed to add time to the end of a slide, which will push the video to the right. But keep in mind this won't push the audio, you can pick a point on the video timeline, right click and choose "Extend Frame". This will keep the image on the video swimlane longer than normal. Since we are dealing with PowerPoint in this instance and not live video, I can extend frames without any nervousness because the video is not fluid like a live motion video. The rule about extending a frame is that you must extend by at least 1 second. This is no big deal because if you only need a half second, you can simply add 1 second and then come in a moment later and cut a half second from it. See below for the screenshot and keep in mind that I right clicked in the video swimlane.

In this instance however, I need to add time after the slide because my audio picked up too quickly. To do this I'm going to look in my audio and fund a break. I'll right click there and choose "Split". This will split the audio from the video and allow me to push it to the right.

As you can see (below) there is a gap now in my audio and I can slide it independent of the video and other audio. I could even open up Audio 3 and move it down there if I wanted to.

Caveat for you though, you will see in the Zoom track that I get a couple brackets there. I will need to introduce another zoom effect just like the first one anytime I use the split function.

Next, I cheated a little bit in this last image. I increased the volume for the last section before the slide transition so that you can see that I had a little bit of noise. Tomorrow I'll focus on eliminating that noise and some other audio effects.

WBT Development Part 5 Creating the Project

Please refer to Part 1 of this series for an overview and context of this post.

We have already created the visual component (.camrec) and the audio component (.wav). Now, I'll open Camtasia and "import" both of those media. Drag the video onto the video timeline and when you do you'll see the adjust video dimensions dialogue box.

If you are creating a production that has several parts, it is critical that you use the same dimensions for each piece. It would be wacky to have one that was bigger than the others. So, it doesn't matter what dimensions you use, (as long as it is legible) as long as you use those dimensions consistently in the project.

A note about the Smart Focus option here. That is a really good tool that zooms in and out based on what your mouse or cursor is doing. I have used that feature in the past, but since the video in this project is based entirely on a PowerPoint I didn't have any use for it this time.

Next, drop the audio into the timeline. You'll notice that it goes into Audio 2 instead of Audio 1. This happens because Audio 1 is reserved for the audio component that was recorded with the video. Since we didn't record any sound with the video it will be blank for the duration of the project. The project should look something like this:

You will see Thumbnails for each slide with a green marker identifying the point of transition from the previous slide. You'll also see the amplitude of the audio component. This particular shot highlights a good example of what I'll discuss next time, editing. Can you see that I have more than 3 seconds from when I stop talking in the previous slide before the next one picks up? That would be an uncomfortable amount of time. But I'll cover that next time. For now, save the project and know that when you do you are creating a virtual linkage to the files that were imported. Thus if you move the project, the video or audio files you must tell Camtasia where it is next time.

WBT Development Part 4 Video Time

Please refer to Part 1 of this series for an overview and the context of this post.

In the last episode I read the script to record the audio component and saved it as a WAVE file. It was more than 44 MB, so I can't really share it with you. But I can make a small MP3 out of it and link to that. This will give you a sense of where I am in the process.

Today, I need to take the baseline PowerPoint file and turn that into a video. This is easy to do because Camtasia has a plug-in for PowerPoint.

Open the PowerPoint, go to the "Add-Ins" and click the "Record" button. Since I recorded the audio separately I'm not going to use the microphone or any of the other components. But here is where we get a little tricky. How long should I stay on each slide? Here is what I did:

Before I hit the button to "Start" recording, I opened up my audio file and got it ready. I also got my paper script in front of me, so I could follow along. I hit the start button, then hit the play button on the audio and came back to the PowerPoint. Then I just followed along with what I heard and read. But this gave me a great opportunity to make notes about my flubbed words and the edits I would need later, so I marked them in my script. You can see from this particularly bad page from Module 3 that I started a couple sections twice and flubbed words a couple of times. These notes would help me later when I was editing.

I recorded and progressed through the presentation recording each slide with approximately the right timing. When I got to the end I saved the video file with Camtasia's ".camrec" extension. This is their video format.

Next time we'll start assembling the video and audio.

WBT Development Part 3 Audio Recording

Please refer to Part 1 of this series for an overview and context of this post.

OK, so I've received the scripts and the PowerPoints, which include case studies and quizzes. (I altered the PowerPoint slightly for purposes here, the actual PowerPoint has the quiz answers identified, and I removed them here.) I'm using Camtasia to perform the recording and rendering, so keep that in mind because the methods may change depending on the application or applications you are using to accomplish the task.

My false start in this procedure was to try to record both the audio and video at the same time. This would have made editing a breeze but I found that when I recorded both concurrently the audio quality was terrible. The reason for this is because when Camtasia records both audio and video at the same time the audio is recorded as an MP3, which is a somewhat low-quality audio recording. But then when you go to render the project it samples it down to even lower quality levels. As such when I made my first attempt, I found the audio to be so bad that I couldn't stand it.

So I went back to the drawing board. I played with different microphones and different computers. I'm using the Logitech Premium Notebook Headset. I think that it provides good quality for this type of content. I recorded at work, at home, I found really quiet offices. No matter what, I was still suffering from really poor audio quality. Then I focused on just recording the audio separate and apart from the video.

That was the trick. When you record the audio separate from the video you can save it as a Wave. This means that the audio file will not be compressed and will not have any degradation in quality.

Keep in mind though, in the final product we can't tolerate having the audio component be so big. It would make the overall production so large that it would take so long to load that people would just leave. But at this stage of the game it is OK to have a large file. We'll compress everything together when we go to the rendering process.

So for me, this was the first big step in the production process was to take all of the scripts, read them out and save the audio as wave files.

An important thing to note here for people attempting this for the first time, some of these are like 50 minutes. It is not reasonable to think that you will be able to record your audio for 50 minutes straight without any mistakes. I made literally hundreds of mistakes. Whenever I flubbed a word, I would go back to the beginning of the paragraph and start again while the recording was still rolling. I removed all the flubbed paragraphs during the editing process.

WBT Development Part 2 The Work Statement

Please refer to Part 1 of this series for an overview and context of this effort.

Literally almost 2 years ago, I am amazed that is was that long ago, I was asked to consult with people from the program. They had an outline and they wanted to create training based on it. I reviewed the outline and found that it was different than the content that I usually work to develop training for. My experience had been centered around training people to use technology, web applications etc. This was different. This wasn't something that I could spin up on and churn out some training. In short, I realized that I could not create the content. So I created a work statement that would acquire services to create the content.

Typically if I'm bouncing around an application, that is the visual component in my training, the human interaction with the application. In this instance there is no application, so I needed something to provide the visual. I chose PowerPoint. I knew that I would need a script to direct the audio portion of the final product as well. As a result, the work statement looked like this:

1.0 Tasks

The three Tasks are designed to achieve the objectives of the acquisition and provide the government with the right level of visibility into the project to both protect the investment and implement course corrections.

1.1 Task 1 Project Initiation

The contractor will work with FNS to describe in detail the content for each of the modules indicated in Section 1.5 of this document. Storyboards indicating the flow of the presentation shall be delivered and reviewed. Course corrections and adjustments will be implemented before proceeding with the development of the presentation.

The contractor will develop a template to be used for the PowerPoint presentations. The colors and format shall leverage, to the greatest extent possible, the design considerations indicated in the USDA Web Style Guide. The Contractor will develop a template for Case Studies in word. All templates will be submitted to the government for consideration and review and all comments shall be implemented before considering the deliverables to be final and complete.

1.2 Task 2 Instructional Design

The contractor will work to develop PowerPoint presentations, narrative scripts, explanative case studies, quizzes and a post test to teach processes and competencies to the audience. The contractor shall also develop a course evaluation to help inform future decisions about the training. The government shall consider and review each deliverable and all comments shall be implemented before considering the deliverable to be final and complete.

1.3 Task 3 Project Management

The contractor shall assign a single person to be the primary point of contact for this engagement. All information flowing to the government shall be from that primary point of contact and all information flowing to the contractor from the government shall be to that primary point of contact. The contractor shall develop a schedule and submit it to the government for review. The schedule will indicate the dates for the initiation of work on each of the twelve focus areas for instruction. The schedule shall indicate the estimated date for delivering each of the components for the focus areas including the storyboard, PowerPoint, script, case study and quiz. The schedule will also indicate the estimated date for delivering the PowerPoint design and Case Study design.

2.0 Schedule of Deliverables

Deliverable	Due	Quantity
Project Schedule	1 week of award	1
PowerPoint Design	In the schedule	1
Case Study Design	In the schedule	1
Storyboards	In the schedule	7
PowerPoint presentations	In the schedule	7
Scripts	In the schedule	7
Case Studies	In the schedule	TBD
Quizzes/Post-Test	In the schedule	8
Course Evaluation	In the schedule	1

Remember, I'll always be a Project Manager, so I never write about work without writing at least a little about how the work must be managed. But you can see in this excerpt a progressive elaboration in how the things we'll need take form and build momentum. I didn't simply say, deliver the PowerPoints and the scripts. Instead, we started with the design of the PowerPoint (which, I must say, looks very good in the final product). I think the storyboard was the critical deliverable for getting the contractor and the business to achieve consensus. That was the deliverable in which the magnitude and specificity of the content was agreed to.

I also think that calling the Case Studies out as discrete deliverables added value to the overall effort. This forced the contractor to treat that portion of the content differently than the rest. It also allowed the Agency to review and tailor the case studies independent of the content and to use them as the mechanism for driving home specific points in the PowerPoints and the scripts.

A word about the PowerPoints and the scripts here, I'm generally satisfied with the overall product, but if I had one regret it is in the construction of the slides. Some of the slides have 200 words on them. They are not slides, they are pages from a book. This series isn't PowerPoint 101, but if you have more than 50 words on a slide, you have too many words. I think in many instances the script simply reads the PowerPoint. That is not what is intended. In my opinion, the PowerPoints should have been pruned to be more simple and in most instances bulleted lists. The script will be visible in the close caption, so you wouldn't need to worry about fleshing out the details on the slide.

Lastly, I will say that there was one section in which I feel like I didn't do the content justice. The Case Study in Module 7 at about the 17 minute mark, the content goes through some spreadsheets. If I was developing this section of the content, I probably would have done it differently because I don't think it is as effective as it could be. I probably would have used some animations in the PowerPoint to more clearly highlight the areas to focus on.

All in all though, if I have one or two instances in about 5 hours of content, I think I can live with that. Those are the things that give me something to blog about.

Thus, the work was eventually awarded to a contractor who delivered all the products and I integrated them later to create the content. More later.

Web-based Training Development Part 1

I haven't written too many multi-part posts, but this is sure to be a several day affair. There are many different aspects that I want to touch on, so today I'll just give you an overview. But heck, why bother telling a story from the beginning, it takes too long. Here is what I created:

Module 1 - Applicant Choice to Participate in FDPIR or SNAP (16:46)

Module 2 - Household Composition (21:33)

Module 3 - Application Processing, Interviews and Verification (30:01)

Module 4 - Financial and Non-financial Eligibility Criteria (34:11)

Module 5 - Eligibility Determinations and Assigning Certification Periods (55:04)

Module 6 - Recertification, Change Reporting and Notice of Adverse Action (31:11)

Module 7 - Claims Against Households (33:18)

Module 8 - Disqualifications (27:45)

Module 9 - Fair Hearings (37:26)

Post Test

It is very specific training devoted to helping people who operate the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). My intent is not to talk about the content or even the program, I didn't have anything to do with the content. Rather, my intent here is to walk through the process of developing this content into the 9 modules and post test you see here. The creation of detailed and specific training.

As an alumnus of my Agency's team devoted to employee development, I found that we had tons of good content if we wanted to train on hard skills and soft skills. If we need to prepare someone to be a Project Manager, or server administrator, or if we need to talk about Emotional Intelligence or the Myers-Briggs; hard and soft skills, we can buy those types of experiences off the shelf. The problem though is that once you fill up the tank on that type of content, you will find that what people are craving is the knowledge and training that will help them in performing their unique and specific job. That type of training is typically not something that we can buy off the shelf. However, I hope that through this series, that we can take some of the fog out of the process and put us into a position in which WBT development is more of a commodity business.

I will walk through the very front-end process from a year ago in which I met with people from the program to talk about what they wanted to do and conceptualize this product. I'll start with their outline, then the Statement of Objectives I developed as well as the cost estimate.

Then, for me, a lot of time went by and I didn't see anything until the contractor delivered the artifacts specifies in the work statement. But eventually I receives some PowerPoints, scripts and quizzes. I did a lot of experimentation to achieve the right balance between quality and file size, and I think the final product represents a reasonable trade-off. I recorded the audio, the video, the close captions and integrated them together.

I put together the Table of Contents for each video. I developed the quizzes at the end of each module and developed the feed-back as well as the mechanism to send in results. Finally, I added the HTML wrapper to create links among the modules, and there you have it.

So I don't know how many posts I'll put together on this project. I discovered a bunch of nuanced technical issues that I want to write down, for my own sake as much as yours. But I suspect that it will be more than 5. So stay tuned in the coming days and weeks while I try to take a little time each day to pull it apart and walk through the process.

Update: I'll post some links to the parts of this series:

Part 2 - The Work Statement

Part 3 - Audio Recording

Part 4 - Video Time

Part 5 - Creating the Project

Part 6 - Editing

Part 7 - Audio Enhancements

Part 8 - Close Captioning

Part 9 - Markers and TOC

Part 10 - Quiz Time

Part 11 - Rendering the Project

Part 12 - Finishing Touches