Convert Your PNG to SVG Images

Sometimes even the best PNG images don't look so great in your Adobe Captivate eLearning projects. Here's a procedure for converting your high-quality PNG files to SVG images. The advantage of SVGs is that they are relatively small in file size but they are also vector graphics. What that means is that SVGs look great at any size and they are completely compatible with Adobe Captivate.

Shuffle Answers with All of the Above in Adobe Captivate

In this video tutorial, I show you my solution for a multiple-choice question that not only uses an All of the Above Answer but shuffles the other answers as well.

Photography For Your Shoe String Budget eLearning

One of the biggest challenges in developing e-Learning is to create visually appealing work with little or no money. There are millions of sources online that you can draw from for your visual images. However, the legal use of these images is something you need to consider before you publish it to your audience. Using a photographer's work without their permission and without paying the appropriate license fee is copyright infringement.

Some of my colleagues have tried to claim that using a photo from the Internet in an e-learning course can fall under fair use laws. Claiming fair use is only sometimes valid. If you were teaching your audience about a company, you can use their company logo and call it fair use. You could not use a photograph of their CEO taken by a photojournalist, nor could you use a funny comic strip about that company without paying the appropriate license fees to the original creators of those materials. There are balance tests that a court would use to determine if fair use applies to each case. However, you don't want it to get that far.

Here are some great resources for multimedia that may be helpful for those with little or no budget to spend:

Pikwizard is an excellent free stock photo site with over 100,000 high-quality images. One thing that makes Pikwizard unique in the category of free image websites is the number of high-quality photos of people. Often you can only find pictures of people on the pay-per-use or subscription stock photo sites. Be aware that each image has it's own license restrictions, and you must follow those restrictions. For example, you could not use an image marked for editorial use in your eLearning. One feature handy for eLearning developers with little or no budget is that Pikward gives you the ability to edit the photos right inside your browser with their Designwizard software. 

Wikimedia is a collection of multimedia that, for the most part, is open and free to use without an individual permission. The particular creators retain the ownership of all these resources. Check for the licensing terms for each item to ensure that your planned use is acceptable.

MorgueFile is a site dedicated to free photography. In most cases, you can reuse their material within your work. However, you cannot use it on its own. You may be able to modify much of the work, so cropping out parts of the photo that you do not need can be considered acceptable.

Turbophoto maintains a small repository of free stock images that you can download and reuse. The selection isn't vast. However, you can add this as a source in case you are designing material that happens to fit one of the ten or so topics they cover.

4FreePhotos is an excellent site that is maintained by photographers who love taking pictures and getting them out there. The website seems to be funded by lots of ads, but I don't mind this as the photos are all free.

Stock.XCHNG is another excellent resource with a vast number of photos. They do require an account set up with a login and password, and you will need to read their license agreement for the images you download as there are some restrictions.

Of course, last but not least, almost everyone owns a digital camera. If everyone in your training department took a dozen or so pictures each week to contribute to a team multimedia database, you would find that you would have a massive stockpile of free to use images or videos in reasonably short order. Take pictures of your companies building, your competition, the products that you sell, and more. Since you own the images, you will never have to pay royalties or license fees to anyone or worry about infringing on anyone's intellectual property.

Replace Audio Narration in your Adobe Captivate Video Demo

In this video tutorial, I show you how you can replace or re-record the audio narration in your Adobe Captivate Video Demo projects.

Publishing for Your LMS - Monday, February 3, 10:00 EST | 15:00 UTC

In this Livestream, I will review all the options that you should be using and the ones you should avoid when publishing your Adobe Captivate eLearning course.

Using Adobe Captivate Shared Actions

In this Adobe Captivate video tutorial, I show you a way you can use Shared Actions to save yourself some time writing Advanced Actions by reusing the Shared Action for different objects and multistate objects.

Fake Text Popups in Adobe Captivate Fluid Box Design

In this video tutorial, I show you how I would manage a simulated text popup in my fluid box responsive design eLearning project in Adobe Captivate.

Can You Still Upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10?

Microsoft has now officially ended support for Windows 7. Continuing to run Windows 7 on your computer means that you are vulnerable to security risks, viruses and you will no longer receive updates for your operating system. Microsoft wants Windows 7 users to either purchase a full license of Windows 10 or purchase a new computer with Windows 10 already installed on it. According to rumours, the activation server is still running that would allow Windows 7 users to upgrade to Windows 10 for free for one year after the launch of Windows 10. In this video tutorial, I test that theory out and see if I can upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and complete product activation. Disclaimer: I'm going through this process for purely educational and entertainment purposes only. The main laptop that I use day to day runs an entirely legitimate copy of Windows 10 that came with my PC. If you decide to follow these steps in the video on your own Windows 7 PC, you do so at your own risk.

Download the Windows 10 Installation Media Tool:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Windows 7 Support Announcement:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4057281/windows-7-support-ended-on-january-14-2020

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.