SkillCasting, LLC

When I’ve talked to people about remote collaboration on training projects, I mention that I use Skype. I still get some puzzled looks and questions like “What is Skype?”

The team over at Say It Visually has put together a great little over video of what Skype is. I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post.

When collaborating on training creation, we can have a free voice call over Skype. This enables all sorts of recording opportunities. I’ll go into recording Skype conversations in more detail on a later post.

Provided we both have good internet connections, our audio quality is surprisingly good. In fact, over the regular telephone network, voice is carried at 8-bits per second. Over Skype it’s 16-bits per second. That’s right, Skype audio (with a good connection) is twice as good as a regular telephone. Now make no mistake, a CD recording might be 192-bits per second so we’re not talking high-fidelity here. But trust me, it’s good enough.

Skype also allows us to have video chats. I like this because video is so much more effective than just audio. When recording PowerPoint & Keynote presentations, I like bringing in video of the speaker. Skype allows us to have that video conference and when using a screencasting tool like ScreenFlow, I capture both the presentation deck (PPT or Keynote) along with the delivery from the speaker.

Take a look at the Skype overview to get familiar with Skype. Think about how this could be leveraged when collaborating on training creation and I think you’ll see, Skype is one heck of a powerful tool.