View the SSDS Induction Presentation

The goal of this project was to produce and resource that could be used to replace the SSDS DVD at the induction session that are given to all new student starting at  the University of Leicester. This is because the the DVD is now out of date since the SSDS move to the Library.   

The technology I decided to use for this was Adobe Presenter, the presentation would be made up of an overview of SSDS and a section on each service. Each section would be voiced over by a service representative. These where:

• SSDS overview: Matthew Mobbs
• AccessAbility: Paula Dobrowski
• Careers: Martin Pennington
• Counseling: Dan Pitt
• Healthy Living: Gill Brennon
• Student Support (mental wellbeing): Hilary Craig
• Student Learning Centre: Steve Rooney
• Welfare: Clare Taylor

The content of the presentation was written by Pippa Druett and Myself.

Issues with the presentation

In the original plan for this resource it was intended to use some of the student clips from the DVD. These would come from raw footage film by AVS at UoL. This would then be edited in iMovie on the Mac, outputted in a .mov format. These would then be converted using Blaze Media Converter into a flash format (.flv). The format required to attach video to Adobe Presenter. However we found when the presentation was published the Soundtrack from the presentation and the vodeo clased, resulting in a total sound failure in the presentation, as seen here in the test version.

It was suggested that to solve this if silent video clips were attached to the presentation, and the isolated sound track were embedded in to the presentation soundtrack it should prevent the clash. However this is a tricky process of having to ensure the soundtrack timing is completely synchronised with the video. The would have further dependency on the streaming of both media being synchronised.

Feedback

Due to video issues the pure audio version was used at several of the induction sessions. The feedback received from this was mixed. Some said it was ineffective with large audiences and was quiet '"sterile". I'm not sure if this is a criticism of the presentation production or is true of Adobe Presenter as a medium.

Conversely to this, although it is not a good resource for a large audience, many have stated it's effectiveness as a standalone resource, this could lead to further development of the resource.

Future developments

To develop this resource into an effective standalone tool, some of the auto progression will have to be removed and more hyperlinks embedded to make it easier to navigate, to enable user to view distinct sections of the resource.

Finally, I would like to get the video with the presentation working, as this is a very useful and effective feature of Adobe Presenter and would just appear to be only of the Office 2007 glitches.