Ask most people building a course how to make it better and the answer usually involves more video: a welcome video, a video per module, a recorded walkthrough of every page. Video has become the default for instructor presence and for anything meant to be engaging, and it rarely gets questioned. I have made plenty of it myself. Over the past few years, though, a fair amount of my own work has gone out as audio instead, and I have come to think audio deserves to be the first question rather than the fallback. Does this actually need to be seen?
Koichi Kawana, who designed Japanese gardens, described simplicity as getting the most effect from the least means. That is a decent test for instructional media. If a piece of content works as sound alone, the video wrapped around it is often cost without much return.
What have I actually made in audio?
Most of this thinking comes from three projects. The first is the audio companion to Trying Microlearning in K-12 PD, a Creative Commons workbook I wrote for trainers. The core sections of the guide are also available as audio, so a trainer can get through the main ideas away from a desk and come back to the written templates when they sit down to use them.
The second is an accelerated one-credit EdTech methods course I taught for Dakota State University in fall 2024. The students were working adults, and each week they answered an essential question with a short audio or video recording. I put their responses together into a compilation podcast, and they listened to their classmates before revising their own thinking. In the end-of-course feedback, one student pointed to hearing classmates’ perspectives each week as the thing that helped them refine their own.
The third is E-Learning Lane, the short-form podcast I recorded on the go for more than sixty episodes. It is on hiatus now, and the archive stays on the site.
Why start with audio?
The case for audio comes down to a few things: 1) it ages well, in that nothing on screen can go out of date, whether that is an old interface, dated clothing, or a resolution that looked fine five years ago; 2) it is light, which matters in the rural districts I work with, where a teacher may be on a mobile data plan or a weak connection (I wrote more about that in Low-Bandwidth Course Design); 3) it can travel with someone, onto a commute, a walk, or a sink full of dishes, which suits adults fitting professional learning around everything else; and 4) it is cheaper to make and cheaper to fix, since re-recording a paragraph takes minutes and re-shooting a video can take an afternoon.
That last point is the one I feel most. E-Learning Lane episodes were recorded on the go, and the audio was informal and occasionally rough, which I said plainly in every episode description. That roughness was the price of making the show at all. If each episode had needed a camera, lighting, and editing, there would not have been sixty-some of them.
What does audio not do well?
Audio has real limits, and the Dakota State course ran into several of them. Students came in with very different comfort levels with recording, so they needed clear technical support and alternatives, which is part of why video responses were allowed alongside audio. Building the compilation podcast each week also took real time on my end, and the quick turnaround put pressure on everyone. A format that is cheap for the listener is not always cheap for the person producing it.
Some content also needs to be seen. A demonstration of a physical process, a walkthrough of an interface, or a math model laid out on a table does not survive as sound alone. The SPDG math course I am building right now is mostly video for exactly that reason, since the expert is demonstrating concrete and representational models and a listener would miss the point. And audio is not accessible on its own. Anyone who cannot hear it needs a transcript, and a transcript belongs with every audio file from the start rather than being added on request.
Does audio really last longer?
Longevity is the argument I made most confidently when I first wrote about this, and E-Learning Lane has complicated it. The recordings themselves have aged fine. The hosting has not. The show’s listings on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music depend on a paid hosting service that publishes the feed, and once I stop paying for it, those listings will go down. What will last is a folder of audio files in Google Drive, named by episode number and release date and linked from the podcast page. Google Drive is a platform too, but a folder of plain files can be moved somewhere else, and a feed tied to a host cannot. Audio outlasts video only if you keep the files yourself. Otherwise it lasts as long as the platform does, which is the same dependency problem I write about everywhere else on this site.
So when does it need to be video?
I do not think the answer is to stop making video. The question I try to ask now is simpler than any framework: would this lose anything important if the learner could not see it? If the answer is no, audio with a transcript is usually the lighter choice and the easier one to keep up. If the answer is yes, make the video, and make it for the part that needs to be seen. The difficulty is that the question is easy to answer with a yes out of habit, since video is what most course templates and most advice about instructor presence already assume.
If you have moved something from video to audio, or tried it and moved it back, I would like to hear how it went. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.
