Corporations use Camtasia Studio in Very Different Ways

Last month I delivered Instructor-Led Camtasia Studio training to two small groups: Once for Chick Fil A Corporate offices here in Atlanta and once for Castellini in Kentucky. Both companies were vastly different in their environment and in the ways they were planning on using the software. I wanted to share my observations to give you some ideas of how corporations are using this premier Screencasting software.

Chick Fil A- Embracing New Technologies

The Chick Fil A training center was amazing, huge and supplied 100% free gourmet food to all employees all day. If I had to go back to the corporate world this wouldn’t be a bad place to work.  The only downside is that everyone had to really dress up every day and I only own two dresses.

They had a group of 9 taking the training and several of them were professional Instructional Designers which is what you would expect at a large corporation like this. They didn’t need a lot of training on Instructional Design methods but what was really important to them was that everything they would create with Camtasia had to work on the IPad and Mobile devices. I learned a few months back that hosting your videos in a private folder at Screencast.com works well when you want them to be viewable on an IPad or IPhone.  The only problem is that Quizzes and the Hotspots in Camtasia are created with Flash and will not work on an IPad no matter where it is hosted. They were a bit disappointed with this and hoped that future versions of Camtasia would allow them to use these features on any device.

I also showed them how to use Handbrake to make their videos more compressed. They had learned from another company that they should produce their videos to AVI files in Camtasia then compress them in Handbrake for the smallest size. I haven’t tried this method but intend to soon.

Castellini- Full-Motion Industrial Videos with PowerPoint

Next I flew to Kentucky to deliver two days of Camtasia and E-learning Instructor Led Training to the Castellini corporation. The training took place in a training room in a 210,000 square foot fruit and vegetable processing facility. The students consisted mainly of subject matter experts, project leaders and a software developer who are creating a custom Learning Management System just for their Camtasia courses. Because none of the attendees had a background in learning design, the first couple hours of the training was spent helping them create the flow of a sample course. Their goal was to shoot video in their plant, mix it with some PowerPoints and deliver custom compliance training (as well as other courses) to the factory employees. I concentrated on showing them how to create parts of the video in PowerPoint 2010 then tape the short, full motion videos to import into Camtasia. Because their factory is noisy I suggested they not try to use any audio during the filming but simply add a voice over afterwards.

I got to know all the students a bit more at a lovely dinner they treated me to on the first night of training. It’s a nice perk when I get to meet our Camtasia Students face to face.

Although Camtasia Studio is best know for software demos, marketing videos and in the K12 classrooms, here we have two examples of large companies using Camtasia for their training courses and saving a lot of money over the more expensive and more complicated programs often used for this purpose.

BTW-If your group would like someone to deliver Instructor-led Camtasia Training anywhere in the country please let me know. I never thought I’d travel outside the Metro Atlanta area (hence the name of my site –Camtasia Training Atlanta) but I end up in Kentucky and can’t wait to do it again!

Cheers

Michelle Schoen