Split Audio Files Across Many Slides in Adobe Captivate

I ran into this recently when a client sent over some audio narration files to be imported into an eLearning course I was developing for them. They send the audio as one single long file. Your instinct might be to either ask them to resend them separated out or edit them yourself in an application like Adobe Audition. In this video tutorial, I show you a secret feature in Adobe Captivate that allows you to do that editing while importing the file. This will save you time and you will not need an extra application for this purpose.

What I Learned Going Freelance

I got a request from another professional on LinkedIn to provide some advice to someone considering going freelance in the learning industry. I don't know if I have any secret formula for making it on my own, but I can share my personal experience.

I was working at the Toronto International Airport as an eLearning Designer, Developer, and after five years, my contract concluded. Rather than looking for the next company to work for, I decided to start my own consulting business. I knew that my employment was ending about three or four months beforehand, so my wife and I had time to save up some extra money. You won't always have the foresight that I did, but if you think you might want to go freelance, this is something you need to consider. The day you start your freelance business will be the scariest of all. Your bank balance will likely not increase, and it will probably get sizably smaller.

Here are some of the expenses I had upfront that I can recall. I'm sure I forget some of them, but these were the main ones.

• new laptop

• software for a new laptop

• office furniture

• equipment to make YouTube videos (more on that later)

• website

• domain name registration

• government sales tax registration

• master business license (differs depending on your location)

• business cards

Of course, I still had all the various household expenses that a typical family has to continue to pay.

My first problem was that I didn't know where I would find potential clients. I had worked for precisely two companies in learning and design, but the rest of the world didn't know who I was. I figured I needed to become well known to be successful in this industry. I started making YouTube videos about Adobe Captivate, the eLearning authoring tool that I use. I intended to clearly show that I knew the software well enough to have expert tutorials on YouTube. I hoped that someone looking for an eLearning developer would find my videos and reach out to hire me to have me build their eLearning for them.

This strategy did work, and I started to get clients to reach out to me for eLearning design and development jobs. There were two problems upfront. The first was that while I was working for the first client, I wasn't looking for client number two or three and so on. When it's just you, momentum can be a problem. The second problem was that my YouTube videos were generating questions from all these viewers. They had every conceivable question about the software you could imagine. I tried my best to help each person, but it was getting in the way of getting more paying clients. What I didn't realize right away was there was an opportunity to pivot my business model, if only slightly. I realized that some of these people asking questions might be willing to pay me to provide one-on-one instruction. I changed my website from https://paulwilsonlearning.com to https://CaptivateTeacher.com and started promoting that I offered both design and development services as well as the one-on-one instruction.

As I approach the fifth year of my freelance eLearning business, I feel comfortable enough to not worry too much about where my next client will come from. A couple of things of note is that while I was not the first person on YouTube to teach people about Adobe Captivate, I am the most consistent. I have posted at least one video per week for five years, and my audience has grown from just a few views to over 1.5 million views. Each year that I have been freelance, Adobe themselves have invited me to attend and speak at the Adobe eLearning Conferences in Washington DC as well as Las Vegas. For the last several live events, I have been an instructor for their Adobe Captivate Specialist certification class.

So I guess my main message to anyone starting their own business is that some of your opportunities might be disguised as something else. Please don't ignore these other opportunities. I quickly learned that ignoring these other opportunities could be overlooking a potential new revenue stream. It might seem at first that these other opportunities would get in the way of your main goals, but I can attest that your primary goals will still be there. My main goals might not be my main goals anymore. I now have revenue streams from teaching classroom courses, one-on-one classes, design and development work, and the YouTube channel has become very profitable as well. I used to say that the ad revenue from YouTube was enough to buy a pizza every couple of weeks, but I can no longer say that. Today I now measure it in vacations to Mexico for my wife and me to enjoy.

How to Update Your Legacy Flash Captivate eLearning Projects

In this Adobe Captivate tutorial, I show you how you can update your legacy eLearning courses by identifying and replacing components that are not compatible with HTML5. In this example, I take a course that included SWF based animations and use the HTML5 Tracker to quickly find those unsupported items and eliminate them.

eLearning Livestream – Build Your Own Custom Playback Controls | January 13th, 16:00 UTC

Join me on Monday at 16:00 UTC for this week’s eLearning Livestream. I will show you how you can create your own custom playback controls for your Adobe Captivate eLearning project.

If you wish to participate in the live stream and ask questions join me on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/9Y2M3H89fSQ

Happy Last Year of SWF (Actually Probably Even Less Time)

Over five years ago, I was asked by my employer to make versions of my Adobe Captivate courses to be made available to non-employees such as volunteers and contractors. The problem was that non-employees, due to policy, did not have access to the organization's learning management system. At the time, I published all my eLearning courses using SWF technology, and while there was the availability to publish for HTML5, I didn't do it. I learned that while SWF based courses were okay for our LMS, the IT department had a policy not to allow Flash-based material to reside on their web servers. I had to publish these courses for HTML5. It was clear that the end of posting my Adobe Captivate projects as SWF was in sight.

Adobe will end support of Flash Player on December 31st, 2020. That said, each browser maker will be taking (or already has taken) steps to disable and eventually prevent Flash Player from being installed. When learners go to launch your eLearning courses, they will begin to see different results. In the case of Firefox, today, I get a black screen and a warning that my connection to the site isn't secure. With Chrome, I get a small puzzle piece icon with the message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked. On Microsoft Edge, I get a message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked, but I'm able to enable it to continue to the content. Lastly, with Internet Explorer 11, it runs without incident. 

Google's blog mentions that it will entirely remove Flash Player from Chromium-based browsers by the end of 2020. With the announcement that Microsoft is migrating its Edge browser to Chromium technology, that means Edge will also not be able to run Flash content either. So, what do you do?

Well, If you haven't already started a plan to migrate your Flash-based eLearning content, you need to start right now. A year sounds like a long time, but depending on how much material you have still running on Flash Player, a year may not be very long. Look at the content you have that is presently Flash-based and consider these three scenarios.

It’s an older course but nobody takes it anymore

Sometimes an old course may be on your LMS that is only there for record-keeping purposes. For example, the LMS course exists to maintain the transcript that Robert from the accounting department took that Microsoft Excel 2003 course a decade ago. In this case, I would say that there is nothing for you to do. Nobody in your organization should be enrolling and launching an Excel 2003 eLearning course today in 2020.

It’s a currently used course and you have the project file

Good news. Adobe has built a great tool into Captivate that will help you migrate your content from SWF based to HTML5. It's called the HTML5 Tracker. To access the tool...

• Click on the Project drop-down menu

• Click the HTML5 Tracker option, which will open a small window that will list all the items in your eLearning project that are not compatible with publishing to HTML5.

• One by one, click on each item listed in the Unsupported Slide/Object column. When you do click on an unsupported object or slide, it will instantly jump to the slide and select the object in question.

• Decide what to do with that object. You can choose to delete the object or replace it with something compatible with HTML5 publishing.

For the example course, I used for the screenshots above; the items in question were animated arrows that I used for emphasis. I merely replaced them with smart shape arrows with a motion path to create attention. I was able to republish the course within minutes to be fully compatible with current and future web browsers.

It’s a currently used course but you don’t have the project file

Perhaps you purchased this course pre-published or perhaps you hired a contractor to build the course for you from scratch. Perhaps the former L&D department in your organization wasn’t very good at holding on to source files. In any case, compile a list of these courses and thus begins the year-long project of recreating these courses from scratch. The good news is that your LMS has published versions of these courses for your developers to review. If you have lots of these courses and little time to redevelop them, rebuilding these courses could mean capturing a series of image captures. If you have less of these types of courses to rebuild, it might mean a full development workflow. Much of this will depend on how much regular work you have to complete in 2020 in addition to the migration project. If your in-house staff are not up to the task or don't have enough bandwidth to take on such a project, you can hire an external agency to assist with this project. For recommendations, feel free to reach out to me, and I can either consult with you on smaller projects or bring on additional resources to get the bigger jobs done before it's too late. Use the CONTACT PAUL link on the upper right-hand corner of the page and we can schedule a brief call to discuss your needs.

Resize your Software Simulation to Fit Within Your Design

In this Adobe Captivate Tutorial, I show you how you could resize your software simulations to fit inside a user interface design. This is ideal if you wish to add space for navigational controls, custom table of contents or want to include your organization's branding elements.

Drag and Drop with Unique Feedback in Your Adobe Captivate eLearning

If you've built a few drag and drops with immediate captions you know that by default you don't get unique or specific feedback when items have been dragged to a drop target. In this video tutorial, I'll show you a method to provide unique or specific feedback for each drag and drop for both correct and incorrect captions.

Patreon subscribers get the exercise file that goes with this video. https://patreon.com/paulwilsonlearning

eLearning Livestream: What Would You Like to See in Captivate 2020?

Join me on December 30th at 12:00 EST / 17:00 UTC to discuss what you would like to see in the next major release of Adobe Captivate. I will also be sharing my thoughts as well. You can view the live stream right here or if you would like to participate in the live chat visit https://youtu.be/O06C-RUgrQA at the time of the broadcast.

Secret Timeline Inside Adobe Captivate Advanced Actions

In this Adobe Captivate 2019 tutorial, I show you how you can create a timeline with animation and effects inside your advanced actions. Thanks to Alexa Franklin for this great idea for a YouTube tutorial. If you would like me to make an Adobe Captivate tutorial based on your idea, let me know in the comments below any of my videos. I can't guarantee I'll make your video but I'm always looking for new ideas to share with all of you.

Customize Adobe Captivate Certificate Widget

In this video tutorial, I show you how you can customize the certificate widget (learning interaction) in your Adobe Captivate eLearning project.