First Look at Social Learning in Adobe Captivate Prime

In this video, I walk you through my first impression of social learning in Adobe Captivate Prime.

Adding New Users in Adobe Captivate Prime

In this video tutorial, I show you how to create new users in Adobe Captivate Prime.

How to Make eLearning More Effective

Here is an update on my previous presentation on making eLearning more effective. I live streamed this last week and I hope you enjoy it.

What Is The True Cost of Training?

Jean Ventose was doing some shopping at his local Walmart store in Calgary and had picked up a set of headphones from the electronics department. As he continued shopping he noticed that a store employee was following him and not at a discrete distance like you might expect, but rather in a manner that could be construed as a way to harass him. The employee wore a security uniform. It was at this point that Ventose decided to take out his smartphone and begin recording the incident. Here is his video directly from his Facebook page.

Jean Ventose's video from his Facebook page

My guess is that Walmart Canada is now in crisis mode, scrambling to come up with solutions to the public relations nightmare that has already begun. Hundreds of thousands have already viewed and commented on this video from across the country. All the major news agencies have covered this story and it has brought the kind of attention on Walmart Canada that I'm sure they didn't want. I suspect that many regular Walmart customers may end up buying their merchandise elsewhere this week. The cost to Walmart Canada could easily be in the millions of dollars. 

It would be easy to suggest a training program that would include learning in the areas of preventing discrimination, harassment, creating a respectful workplace, customer service and so on. This would certainly be the week to propose to the higher ups that more and better training is required. Unfortunately, your proposal for such training typically happens when things are going well for your company and there isn't a crisis that needs to be addressed. My advice is to share this story now with the persons in your organization responsible for approving the additional budget for training so that you can remind them what the true cost of training really is. 

And don't forget, I have designed training for large corporations that would address all the issues that this video has demonstrated and I am available to hire to design similar learning solutions for your organization as well.

Choosing an LMS for Your Organization

There are many reasons why you might be in the market for a Learning Management System (LMS). You might be new to the role of Learning Design and Development Manager, or you might be due to replace an ageing LMS that no longer suits your organization’s needs. In any case, you shouldn’t simply purchase the first LMS that fits your budget. It needs to meet your needs, as well as the needs of your entire organization. The trick is that you might not know what those needs are. Hopefully, this article can help.

What Do Learners Need?

Learners need an LMS that is easy and intuitive. It needs to be able to provide them with the answers they are looking for. Getting your organization to complete the required training is challenging enough. The last thing you want is for your LMS to be a barrier to that training. It should contribute to the motivation to learn.

Think about what competes with the LMS in your organization. Some examples are Google Search, YouTube, other training sites like Lynda.com and so on. All of these have one thing in common. They are all easy to use and there are no barriers to finding what a learner needs and launching it. Your LMS should be the same. Learners should be able to find the training that they want in the same way they Google something. If there is an elaborate login and enrollment process, learners will look for training elsewhere.  

What Do Managers Need?

Managers are busy people. They don't have time to look at complicated reports and chase after their employees for not completing their training. Your LMS should demand minimal amounts of their time. I once worked for an organization that was capable of producing completion reports for all the learners who completed training. This report was sent to managers so they could follow up on their employees who hadn't completed training. The irony was that the report only showed a list of employees who had completed the training. This was the exact opposite of the information managers needed. Needless to say, Managers want reporting that helps them do their job, not add additional work for them.

Managers also need to be part of the evaluation process. When learners complete training, at some point in the future we need to hear from managers if their employees have shown improvement in the areas related to the training. This should be an automated process and shouldn't be complicated for the manager to complete. A lengthy survey isn't necessary. You usually only need to ask one or maybe two questions relating to the improvement of employee performance.

What Do You Need?

The number one thing a learning design manager needs from an LMS is the ability to report on employee results. Think about it. What does the CEO, or the VP of Human Resources want to know when they come calling. I would say there are four things your LMS needs to tell you through reporting in the following order:

1. Employees ability to perform their job

2. Employee compliance with regulatory training

3. Employee immediate reaction to training

4. Test results

You might be thinking that this order is incorrect but I assure you that items like test results or smile sheets, while important, are at the bottom of my list. The reason is that an employee's ability to pass a written exam in an eLearning or classroom setting is not an indicator of an employee's ability to perform their job. The best way to measure employees ability to perform their job is to information from their manager some time after employees have completed training (Level 3). As for compliance, while this may not be the priority for an organization, not being fined by regulatory bodies, or sued for safety violations is a priority.

At your next meeting with potential LMS vendors, you will be better equipped to address what your potential next LMS can do for you.

Everything I Want In an LMS

Last month I attended the Adobe eLearning conference in Washington D.C. as a presenter. My topic was about testing and tracking. Adobe asked me to include some details around reporting in their new LMS tool Adobe Captivate Prime. I did an initial preview when this LMS was first launched but I didn't think much more about it until this week.

You see Adobe reactivated my trial and I've had to actually do some things in the LMS in preparation for my presentation. After playing around with it for three days I thought I should document my experience. 

Integration with Adobe Captivate

First of all, I had to publish my Captivate project to the LMS and for this process you can't imagine a more seamless process. In fact until I completed the process I wasn't even aware that I had not selected a reporting options in Captivate. Regardless though, this just works. It seemed to be taking my course as HTML5 rather than the original SWF format that this course was originally designed for. I know this because there were several flash based movies embedded that got converted to MP4 during the process. It accepted my Captivate project with no hassles and even began the configuring process for me by scraping the information from the preferences window. My title and description were populated for me.

Once your module was uploaded, the next step was to put that module, along with any other modules, into a course. This was easy and intuitive as Prime walks you though the process and warns you if you have missed anything.

Testing & Tracking

Watch the following video to see a shorter version of what I presented in Washington. I think you'll agree the reporting capabilities are exactly what a designer needs to see to determine the effectiveness of their eLearning.

4 Ways to Distribute eLearning

I recently had the opportunity to coach a colleague on the technical aspects of creating a sample eLearning course for a perspective employer. One of the challenges with eLearning is providing a work sample when you don’t personally have your own LMS. I came up with some suggestions that could help my colleague and I decided that I would share them with you as well.

One option that I frequently use is my Dropbox account. When I signed up for my Dropbox account it included a special folder called a public folder. This folder was open to the whole World Wide Web and anything I put in this folder was available for anyone to view. Essentially this is my own little web server. Unfortunately this type of free account is no longer available but you can sign up for a Dropbox Pro account for about $10 per month if you want the same functionality. It’s far less expensive than maintaining your own personal LMS. Below is a video where I instruct users with such an account on how to setup their eLearning work sample for access on the web.

Another way you can share your eLearning work sample is by publishing it as a standalone application. When you publish an eLearning course it normally packages a whole bunch of files into a ZIP package commonly known as a SCORM file. You can unpack these and sort of get your eLearning to work. You could also publish to a folder and then provide instructions to the end user on how to launch the course but this is messy and not always simple for the end user. Adobe Captivate maintains the ability to publish to either a Windows EXE file or an Apple App file. This allows you to publish a course as a standalone application that anyone with a Windows Machine or a Mac could then run. You can then simply copy the one file to a thumb drive and share with the person asking for the work submission. Incidentally you do not need a Mac to publish the Mac version or a Windows PC to publish the Windows version. Captivate can do both formats on either platform. Here is a video that explains how to do this for the Windows situation:

This next one is not my favourite solution but if either of the first two options are not open to you, you could publish to a PDF. There are some specific requirements that would be difficult to confirm before submitting a work sample this way, specifically this does require a certain version or higher of Adobe Reader. Of course there is no guarantee that the person you are giving the work submission to is using the correct version. In fact they may be using any number of third party PDF readers that won’t work with this solution. If you would like to try this out here is my video on that process:

As a final thought, if none of these solutions are a viable option for you, consider signing up for a trial account of Adobe Captivate Prime. Captivate Prime is Adobe’s cloud-based LMS solution. It’s fairly intuitive and in a pinch could be used as a temporary LMS for these purposes.

I hope that one of these solutions works for you and of course good luck in getting that new position in eLearning design and development:

Adding Links to the End of Your Adobe Captivate Course - More Powerful Than You Think

In this video, I show you how you can add a link at the end of your course that automatically launches if the user successfully completes the training. Ok, you might be thinking 'so what?' Well the benefit is that depending on what you link to, you can add a level of interactivity to your training. This is espesially true if you are housing your eLearning course on something other than an LMS. For example, I house samples of my work on my Dropbox account. This way I can share my eLearning designs with stakeholders and subject matter experts without having an expensive LMS. Without an LMS though, you lose the ability to track your training results. Watch the video to see several examples of how I use this to overcome this problem.