Using Camtasia

A key aspect to this part of the course is for students to have knowledge of Fidelio (a property management/reservation system used in hotels). At present the face to face students have access to the programme on campus and the distance students have had access to the programme at their host institution. With the use of a manual students are able to work their way through the system, however, I wanted to be able to provide students with some visuals of how to make a reservation, add traces, profiles and routing instructions (as a start – more will be added later!).

Camtasia Studio is a screen video capture programme that is published by TechSmith. The programme allows the user to define the area of the screen or window that is to be captured. As well as capturing the visual information you can record instructions that go with the material.

I know that there are different tools available to do this, such as Adobe eLearning Suite, however I had access to Camtasia through my workplace and I had attended an hour workshop on the use of Camtasia a couple of years ago. The brief notes I made back then, plus the easy format of Camtasia have made it a very simple programme to use.

Having seen the results, I have wondered why I have not used it more in my teaching, but certainly see the benefits of using it, especially with more flexible and blended delivery methods in the future.