Adobe Learning Summit

The Adobe Learning Summit at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas Nevada is fast approaching and I’m really looking forward to it. The Adobe Learning Summit is held at the MGM Grand Conference Center, part of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. The Adobe Learning Summit is a concurrent event held alongside the eLearning Guilds DevLearn conference, which is also held at the MGM Grand hotel. If you want to go and haven’t already signed up you can do so here.

This is my first Adobe Learning Summit and only my second Adobe sponsored conference. The first was the Adobe eLearning Conference held in the spring of this year, in Washington D.C. At this conference, I will be conducting a session entitled Create mLearning in 60 Minutes where I will review the techniques for integrating location-based technology into your Adobe Captivate eLearning and specifically mLearning projects. I will be sharing many of my secrets for not only preparing for rapid development but also how to design with mobile in mind.

One of the advantages of being asked to conduct a session at Adobe Learning Summit is that I will get to enjoy all the event has to offer as well. There are four tracks that are occurring simultaneously throughout the day. There is the Design & Authoring track, which my session is a part of; the eLearning Strategy track, which focuses on strategies that make your eLearning projects effective; the Hands-on track, where participants get hands-on experience with the applications from Adobe; and lastly the Future of eLearning, which addresses more of the bleeding edge of where the technology is taking us. My session is only an hour long so I have to decide what to participate in for the remainder of the day. Of course, I would love to have the time to see everything, however, that would require that I clone myself or get everyone to agree to come to my house and present their sessions all over again.

In the morning there will be the usual stuff like registration, a little continental breakfast and a kickoff with some opening notes, however right after all that will be the Keynote from Dan Lyons who will speak about his learning from a year in start-up hell. This will be in the grand ballroom and I’m looking forward to learning from him. I myself am around the year and a half mark with my freelance business and I still have many questions that are presently unanswered. Perhaps I’ll get some insight.

After Dan Lyons will be a thirty-minute session on what’s new from Adobe. There are some rumours that we will learn about the next release of Adobe Captivate. I’m not sure if this is when we will learn those details but I will be there to gather as much information as I can.

From 10:00 AM until 11:00 I have a choice between Storyboarding Essentials for Better Course Design with Sarah Gilbert, Gamify the Learner Experience with Lucas Blair, or the Modern LMS: Smart, Simple, Self-service with Jesse Novak. Alternatively, if I’m willing to dedicate my whole morning to it, I could also join my friends Anita Horsley and Pooja Jaisingh for their hands-on session Get the Best out of Adobe Captivate. I can’t decide but you can bet you will see me in one of these sessions.

From 11:15 AM until lunch time I can also choose between Make the Best Use of Multimedia Assets with Andrew Scivally, Foster a Learning Culture with Allen Partridge, or Interactive Video Learning: The Next Big Thing with Steve Haskin. I have to admit that I’m most interested in how to foster a learning culture. I know this is something one of my previous employers struggled with and I know that Allen is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to this sort of thing, however, I’m very interested in the use of multi-media in learning so Andrew and Steve are giving Allen some stiff competition. I’m just not sure.

After lunch, I will obviously be in my own session on the previously mentioned techniques on mLearning but if this doesn’t interest you, I totally understand if you want to check out Learner Evaluation Strategies with Jane Bozarth, Microlearning: Small Bytes, Big Returns with Ray Jimenez. In addition, fellow Canadian Phil Cowcill, and one of my eLearning heroes Joe Ganci will be conducting a hands-on session called Build Custom Interactions Using Advanced Actions, Variables, and JavaScript, which promises to allow you to get your hands dirty (in a good way).

In the last set of sessions, you can also pick up some great skills from my friend Damien Bruyndonckx who will be conducting a session called Ten Design Hacks with Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Captivate. In addition, there will be a session called Putting Mobile at the Center of Your Learning Strategy with Robert Gadd, and once again my friend Pooja Jaisingh will be addressing shrinking attention spans in her session.

We will all regroup in the Grand Ballroom at the Conference Center and hear once again from Allen Partridge with a tech sneak peek. It’s my guess that this is when we might learn something about the next version of Adobe Captivate. Followed by a closing session, likely with more people from the Adobe eLearning team. My guess is this is where you may get some time for questions and answers.

I’m really looking forward to getting together with all my Adobe Captivate friends and making some new friends. I hope to see you all there.

The Adobe Learning Summit / DevLearn

I must be drunk. I've known about the fact that I'm conducting a session at the Adobe Learning Summit, for some time now, and I haven't posted anything about my attendance there. The Adobe Learning Summit is co-located with DevLearn.

Anyway, here are the details of this event.

Devlearn is from from November 16 until the 18 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. To attend the Adobe Learning Summit you require a separate fee, however the good news is that right now the price has been reduced from $395 to $249. You will have an opportunity to not only attend my session, but you'll also get to attend up to three other hour long events. Alternative you attend one of two Hands-on events which will have some true industry experts teaching you how to get the best out of Adobe Captivate.

Here is a link to the event

https://www.elearningguild.com/DevLearn

and a specific link to information about my session on mLearning in 60 minutes. You should show up just to see if I make it.

103 Create mLearning in Less than 60 Minutes

I hope to see you all there.

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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View fullsize

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.