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Demo Screencasts for BI Courses
Demo Screencasts for BI Courses

For BI SMEs: Learn about BI demo screencasts, how to create them, and how to deliver them to the DataCamp team.

Maarten Van den Broeck avatar
Written by Maarten Van den Broeck
Updated over 8 months ago

Overview

  • In live business intelligence courses, the final demo screencast should be 3 to 4 minutes with a hard limit of 5 minutes for more complex tasks. It’s recommended for the demo screencast script to be 400-500 words, with a maximum of 550 words for more complex tasks.

  • The demos should start with a goal or a WHY. You should explain the benefit of what you are going to cover. From there, it should have a logical and concise flow where your actions build upon the previous steps.

  • Demo screencasts demonstrate how to achieve tasks on the user interface and are essentially short tutorials for the actions, formulas, or steps needed for completing the exercises that follow. They should not be step-by-step tutorials for the exercises themselves: ideally, a different dataset is used for the demo screencast.

  • Make sure there is an equal balance between your explanation and your actions. Avoid situations that take 5 seconds to explain but 30 seconds of implementation in Power BI. However, DataCamp will record and edit the final video, so we can sync small delays between audio and video, including speeding up loading times of files.

Process for creating and reviewing demo screencasts

First submission

Whether it’s during course specs or chapter development, your first submission of any demo screencast will be text and images only. This is to avoid having to re-record a screencast multiple times after receiving feedback.

What we expect:

  • A Google document with your script (remember aim for 400-500 words!). Within your script, add screenshots or short gifs of your screen. As a rule of thumb, we should be able to recreate the demo from the script and the corresponding screenshots. Usually, you add a screenshot where something major is happening in the BI tool. This includes, but is not limited to, opening or changing a menu, filtering or slicing, adding a visual, editing the data model, and writing a function.

  • Add a Video exercise to the lesson you are working on and within the script of the first slide, add the link to the Google document.

  • Make sure to set the appropriate editing permissions on the Google document. The Content Developer and Curriculum Manager should have “Editor” access to add suggestions and comments to your script. Feedback will be given directly on the Google document.

Second submission after DataCamp reviews

Once your DataCamp contacts have reviewed your script, you will implement the feedback, record the screencast demo, and upload it to Teach. This is to give us a sense of the final product and ensure that its content will effectively prepare learners for the exercises. Remember, DataCamp will re-record and edit the final screencast demos professionally, so you don’t have to worry too much about audio quality (as long as we can understand it) or gaps in the screencast whether from reading the script or waiting for things to load.

For most people, it’s easier to record the audio first and then to listen to it while recording your screen. However, this will require you to combine the audio and screencast video files into one final video file.

How to upload your demo screencast:

  • Record your demo screencast and save it as an MP4. For screen recording, you can use

    • Google Chrome users: Loom

  • In the Video exercise in Teach, select the “Add Audio/Video” button in the top right corner.

  • In the dialogue box, select “Choose file” and select your demo screencast MP4 file. Afterward, select “Upload to Amazon S3”.

  • Wait while the screencast uploads. Don’t close the dialogue box while it's progressing!

  • Once it's done uploading, the MP4 and HLS fields will be automatically filled. From there, select “Save”.

  • It may take a while for it to show up on Teach, so don’t worry if you get a blank video after uploading. What’s important is that DataCamp can access the MP4 link that automatically gets generated in the dialogue box. From there, we can download the video and view it outside of Teach.

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