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Create inclusive content with Office Mix and Sway

Here in Enable Ireland AT service we have been investigating using the Office Mix plugin for PowerPoint to create more engaging and accessible eLearning content. While we are still at the early stages and haven’t done any thorough user testing yet, so far it shows some real promise.

From the end user perspective it offers a number of advantages over the standard YouTube style hosted video. Each slide is marked out allowing the user to easily skip forward or back to different sections. So you can skip forward if you are comfortable with a particular area of the presentation or more importantly revisit parts that may have not been clear. The table of contents button makes this even easier by expanding thumbnail views of all the slides which directly link to the relevant sections of the video. There is also the ability to speed up or slow down the narration. Apart from the obvious comic value of this it is actually a very useful accessibility feature for people who may be looking at a presentation made in a language not native to them or by someone with a strong regional accent. On the flip side it’s also a good way to save time, the equivalent of speed reading.

From the content creator’s perspective it is extremely user friendly. Most of us are already familiar with PowerPoint, these additional tools sit comfortably within that application. You can easily record your microphone or camera and add to a presentation you may have already created. Another feature is “Inking”, the ability to write on slides and highlight areas with different colour inks. You can also add live web pages, YouTube videos (although this feature did not work in my test), questions and polls. Finally the analytics will give you a very good insight as to what areas of your presentation might need more clarification as you can see if some chooses to look at a slide a number or times. You can also see if slides were skipped or questions answered incorrectly.

Below is a nice post outlining some ways to create inclusive content using Office Mix and Sway, Microsoft’s other new(ish) web based presentation platform. Below that is a much more detailed introduction to Office Mix using… yes you guessed it Office Mix.

How Office Mix and Sway can help with student inclusion – Gerald Haigh

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