Customizing the Playback Controls in Adobe Captivate

I had a viewer ask about the progress bar in an Adobe Captivate project and realized I had never addressed this topic on my YouTube channel. In this video I show how you can customize the playback controls for the Skin Editor in Captivate. Watch the video below...

The Good Old Show / Hide Technique

You know when you work directly with Adobe and are immersed in Adobe's software, you sometimes forget that not everyone has access to the latest version. I recently recorded a video on performing certain functions with multi state objects. I guess I just took it for granted that after a year in the marketplace, Adobe Captivate 9 would just be everywhere. I forget there are still many customers still working with the Captivate 8.

In this video I revisit an old technique that has been mostly supplanted by Adobe Captivate 9 and it's ability to give users direct access to multi state objects. In this video I show users how to take advantage of the good old show / hide technique to change the appearance of an object by substituting that object for another very similar object. I think we should keep these techniques in our back pocket as designers because they may still have some use under certain circumstances.

Create a Progress Indicator for Your eLearning Project

I had a viewer reach out to me to ask how to create a progress indicator. Shirisha wanted a progress bar. Toward the end of the video I explained how this could be done but to keep the video relatively short, I showed Shirisha how to do a nice and simple progress indicator using a couple of system variables.

Let me know if you want something like this in your course. I'm available for consulting if you would like this or the more advanced progress bar I describe at the end of the video. Here is the video for your information and hopefully enjoyment.

Have Pretests Count As Final Score

Sometimes we lose sight of why we do certain things. For example, as eLearning Instructional Designers we do things like present our learners with a final test because we always do that; but here's the thing - If you present someone with a pretest and they get 100%, haven't they already demonstrated proficiency? I think so. 

A few months back I had a viewer of my YouTube channel ask me how I could create a pretest that would count as a final test if the user was successful. I thought about it for a while and came up with kind of a wacky solution. You will see that my solution is a little different than a conventional eLearning solution but it works, so hey why not.

Check out the video below and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you haven’t already. 

Adobe Captivate 9.0.2 is Out

This update to Adobe Captivate 9 introduces three new improvements. At first glance you might overlook this update as a minor update that focuses on access to the new eLearning community and access to the Adobe Stock library directly from the application, I say the real improvement is the improved runtime performance for content output from Captivate.

This is captured best in an article by Allen Partridge. He has chronicled the work that he and the engineering team at Adobe have worked on to improve the content playback, especially for mobile devices. Check out his article here: The Captivate 9.0.2 Update adds insane speed and performance enhancements

The Great Linkedin Purge of 2016

I’ve gone back and forth on this issue several times during my time with Linkedin, but I’ve decided to purge my contacts to just the people that I actually know. I’ll be going through the list and seeing who I recognize and if I come up with no memory of when I may have met this person, I will be removing them from my list. In the past I have accepted connection requests from people who have similar job titles, or people with the word recruitment or recruiter in their job title, but I’ve since changed my mind how Linkedin should be used. I think it’s a great tool to keep track of your business contacts, especially those who have gone on to other careers and organizations. I don’t feel it should be used to cold call or randomly litter the internet with your digital business cards.

Moving forward I will accept requests to connect with people I have actually met or done business with. Originally I thought I would accept requests from people with related job titles, but no. If someone cannot do enough research to actually connect with me through other means first, I will not accept blind requests to connect.  

Iconography for Your eLearning

I’ve discovered a great resource for developing iconography for your eLearning and it’s a font! Yes I know, I’m amazed that something as simple as a font can be used to create hundreds of the icons, navigation controls and user interface elements for your eLearning – Wow!

The font is called Font Awesome and contains iconography for all kinds of elements that you might need to include in your eLearning course. To be clear, the people behind Font Awesome are not paying me to write this article or to tweet about it. I just think this is an amazing resource for eLearning developers and designers. I’ve certainly used wingding and webding fonts to do the same thing in the past, but Font Awesome is completely up to date with the types of iconography it includes. In fact this one single font includes over 600 icons, including popular interface elements like battery bars, Bluetooth symbols and even various web application brands like Google + and Facebook. Because fonts are essentially vector graphics, these icons will scale up to just about any size you need. Also, because it’s  a font it is totally compatible with Adobe Captivate, my eLearning authoring tool of choice, and I imagine many other eLearning authoring tools as well.

Here is the best part about Font Awesome. It is completely free (like the website says “as in free speech free”)! I’ve installed this font and created a whole series of custom navigation controls within Adobe Captivate for my latest round of templating. I’m very happy with the results and so are my clients. 

There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.

Font Awesome will completely work with standard, sometimes called blank projects in Adobe Captivate. Since standard projects will publish either as SWF or HTML5, all blocks of text will be converted into a series of images. The only exception are text fields that are populated at runtime. For example, the empty fields on your quiz results slide. In the case of those fields, just stick with web safe fonts like Arial, or Times New Roman.

For responsive design projects you can still use Font Awesome, but you will need to make your buttons and other navigation elements within something like Photoshop.

Here is an example of the template I recently created with Font Awesome. As I’ve said, all the user interface elements were created using icons from this font. I can’t tell you how many hours this thing has probably saved me.

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Here is the link to check this out for yourself:
fontawesome.io

Breaking eLearning Problems into Small Solutions

I think my greatest strength as an eLearning developer is looking at what others might see as a large problem and breaking it down into small chunks that by themselves are much easier to solve. This video is an example of that. The person who asked the question on YouTube could only see the solution within the confines of the video she commented on. I sat for maybe ten minutes and realized that if I separated the feedback from the knowledge check, the solution would be relatively easy with no advanced actions required. Take a look at the video below. 

Choosing the Right Resolution for your eLearning

In this video I talk about the consideration you should make when choosing a screen resolution. This is not an entirely new concept. I’ve talked about this before when discussing making responsive design part of your needs analysis. Choosing specific resolutions for your break points is useful if you have a large percentage of the employees within your organization that use specific mobile devices, such as company provided smartphones or tablets. Watch the video for more details.

Make Your Own Table of Contents Slide

In this video, I help out Anar who is looking for a table of content slide that users can navigate to from any other slide in the course. This is a simple solution to the problem and as you get more advanced you can add features that allow users to see what modules they have visited and so on. But for right now here is a simple solution to the problem.