Adobe Captivate 8 - Multiple Interactions in One
In this video, I show you how you can use the built-in features of Adobe Captivate to create a truly unique interaction. In this example, I combine three multiple choice questions to appear as if they are part of a single slide with pop-up characters.
Provide Feedback For Each Answer in Adobe Captivate 8
I thought of this idea this morning to produce a video on how to create a multiple choice, single answer question with unique feedback messages for each answer selected by the learner. I started to put this together and I was convinced I had done a video on this before. I was surprised that I haven't because while this is a relatively unknown feature in Adobe Captivate, it's something that I try to use whenever possible. The reason is that it not only simulates a facilitator answering a question much in the way you would expect them to do so during instructor led training, but it also provides for the opportunity to create a foundations for scenario based learning with branching.
Anyway, take a look at the process and hopefully you can use this technique to improve your eLearning knowledge checks and quiz questions.
Creating Your Own Smart Objects in Captivate 8
In this video, I show you how you can create your own smart objects by essentially tracing any image that you want to make into a smart object.
Exporting and Importing Project Captions and Closed Captions in Adobe Captivate
In my latest video on YouTube, I explain how you can export all your captions and closed captions from your Adobe Captivate project file into a MS Word document. This is a great way to get your hands on all your text, narration (with a little extra work), and closed captioning text for various reasons. Here are the reasons you may want to do this:
To have your text, narration, and closed captions translated into another language - Most people don't have Adobe Captivate on their desktop so sending them the Captivate project file is out of the question, however almost everyone uses MS Word.
To have someone else edit your captions - sometimes you may need to have someone else edit your work. Again, if they don't have Captivate software on their desktop, this isn't going to happen. Exporting to Word just makes sense.
An easy way to ensure that you have consistent use of fonts, colour, font size, and so on - I've run into this where your title is 25 point on one slide, but it's 28 on another. You could edit this in Captivate but you could also use the Format Painter in MS Word for an easy edit to all your content.
Send all text of course content to subject matter experts - This is an easy way for your subject matter experts to follow along with the course and provide suggestions or edits for your consideration. It's not a storyboard, but it's the next best thing.
What the video to learn how to export project captions and closed captions and how to import them back in as well. The video includes a few additional pointers on working with these files.
Google Honours Sally Ride
I opened up Google's search page today and found myself faced with the latest in Google Doodles, a montage of animated images honouring famed astronaut Sally Ride. Sally Ride was the first female American in space and later started her own organization to foster education in children with an emphasis on girls and minority students. She wanted to overcome the issue of kids being turned off by science, technology, engineering and math because society sends a false message about who you have to be to be an astronaut or a physicist like Sally Ride.
Today would have Sally’s 64th birthday. She passed away on July 23rd, 2012 from pancreatic cancer. Check out this video from the animator explaining her process for making the Google Doodle.
How to Import a Photoshop File into Captivate 8
In this video, I show you how you can import a Photoshop file (PSD) directly onto your stage in Adobe Captivate 8. I don't use this feature very often but I can see when it may be advantageous to import images this way. Being able to turn on or off the various layers can add flexibility that you wouldn't have in a merged or flattened image.
Password Protecting a Section of an Adobe Captivate 8 Project
I got a request from one of my YouTube channel viewers. She asked if I could show her a way to password protect a branch of an Adobe Captivate 8 Project. In this video I use a text entry box to store the password into a variable. I then used advanced actions to validate that password and send the user to the appropriate page within the course.
Watch the video below if you want to see how this was done in a little more detail.
Practical Dale's Cone of Learning
Edgar Dale came up with the concept of the Cone of Experience, or the Cone of Learning. The idea is that you can use the cone of experience to figure out what are the best ways for your learners to learn. Here is what it essentially says:
As adults, we generally learn…
- 10% of what we read,
- 20% of what we hear,
- 30% of what we see,
- 50% of what we see and hear,
- 70% of what they say and write, and
- 90% of what we do.
Now it kind of goes without saying that we want to try and get our learners to do something in our eLearning courses. If we simply had them read page after page of content, they are only going to remember a very small percentage of that material.
What this video to see how we can get learners doing something related to a policy document. I could have simply showed them how to get the document from the website, but instead, I have them do it themselves.
Do One Small Thing Really Well At a Time
As an instructional designer, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the amount of work that I need to accomplish in a project. If you look at a project holistically, you may get that feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff. In a typical eLearning project, there might be hundreds or even thousands of objects, multimedia, narration, job aids, and so on. In most cases all of these objects are designed and developed by a very small group of people, sometimes just yourself.
As an instructional designer, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the amount of work that I need to accomplish in a project. If you look at a project holistically, you may get that feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff. In a typical eLearning project, there might be hundreds or even thousands of objects, multimedia, narration, job aids, and so on. In most cases all of these objects are designed and developed by a very small group of people, sometimes just yourself. This can cause a great deal of anxiety that will prevent you from moving forward, and that’s just one project at a time. Imagine having two or three projects with competing timelines or deadlines.
I don’t do well under these circumstances so I have devised a method to deal with it. I say ‘I’ but I didn’t invent something new. It’s really just project management, but here is what I do. I break a project down to the smallest of tasks possible. Sure that seems obvious, but I mean really break it down. For example, one of the very first tasks in designing and developing a course is to meet with the stakeholder and discuss the business objectives of training. That seems like a small enough chunk, but how does that event happen? Well you have to break it down further. Perhaps just that one item is actually the following items:
- Identify who the stakeholders for a project are (it may not always be obvious, and it may not be the person requesting the training).
- Write an agenda for the initial meeting so that the stakeholder can come prepared to answer your questions.
- Consider or ask stakeholders if subject matter experts should be invited to the initial meeting (can be dictated by the complexity of the proposed training).
- Find available meeting space.
- Send a meeting invite that includes the agenda to the stakeholder and any identified subject matter experts.
As you can see, turning the one item into five or more items can be beneficial. It can take the stress away of looking at a project from a thousand miles up, but also make it very clear what you need to do next. Before I used this method, I would often run idle, in that I wasn't sure what to do next. I would waste time and not progress as rapidly as I could have. If you look at any one of these tasks above, you can see they are really easy, most of them could be accomplished in as short a time as a few minutes or less. For example, step one could be a phone call or two; step two is a few minutes using a Microsoft agenda template and considering the questions you would have to begin an analysis; step three could probably be piggy-backed on one of the phone calls you might make for step one; and steps four and five again are just a few minutes in Microsoft Outlook.
I look at all of this and consider that even if you save yourself only a day over the course of a month or so, imagine what you can do to improve your design if you had an extra day to improve your course. I know I've been in situations where an extra day is all it would take to meet or exceed my customer’s expectation of me, or to go from good eLearning to really great eLearning.
I hope you find my thoughts on this topic useful. If you find that this method makes sense, or you have tried it and have a way to improve it, I would love to know. Feel free to leave a comment below so we can all benefit by your ideas.
Making Adobe Captivate 8 Drag and Drop Behave the Way Other Questions Do
In this video I show you how you can make drag and drop questions behave the way that other question slides do. I do this by simply adding a caption after the pause point and a slide sized button to bring you to the next slide. Let me know what you think.