captivate 4,actions,hide/show

Adobe Captivate 4 has added a number of new actions. This blog entry will deal with two of them - Hide and Show.

In this post we had seen how to add footers to slides in Adobe Captivate 4. The post ended with a promise of providing an action twist. In this post, we will try to create two sets of footers in a captivate project. And we will achieve that end using the new actions - Hide and Show.

Before we start off, we need to think of "name". What's in a name? - some people will say. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - they will add. Others will point to King James Bible saying - "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favour rather than silver and gold". As for me - I just wanted to tell you that in Adobe Captivate 4, objects can have names. You can now assign your favorite names to your favorite objects. If you don't want to assign names to (unfavorable) objects - no problem, captivate will assign default names to them. Names are to be found in the "Options" tab of an items' property dialog, under "Name" group box, beside "Item Name" label. Names of objects need to be unique throughout a project. Here's a little SWF where you see how to view and change item names.

What is the relevance of "names" in creating two sets of footers? Hang on a little. We will get there.

Here's the project that we will start off from. Some important features of the project are:

• It contains 6 slides.
• The first slide contains a text caption with the following text : Slide $$cpInfoCurrentSlide$$ of $$rdinfoSlideCount$$.
• The name of this text caption is Footer1 and its duration is "rest of project".

Our aim is to have a different footer from slide 4 to slide 6. So, we will copy the caption (Footer1) from 1st slide and paste it on 4th slide. Now, Footer1 will be visible from slide 1 to slide 6. And our new caption will be visible from slide 4 to slide 6. We need to hide Footer1, from slide 4 onwards.

Herein lies the relevance of "names". Since text caption on first slide has a name - namely Footer1, we can hide it referring to that name. Indicentally, in Adobe Captivate 4, slides can have navigation actions at both on-slide-enter and on-slide-exit (previously it was only slide-exit). We will use on-slide-enter and the action Hide, to hide Footer1 at slide 4. Enough talk. Here's a demo showing how to do all that:

Here's the resultant SWF, the one that is "supposed" to show a different footer from slide 4 to slide 6.

Ooh-la-la.... Did you see that? The new footer was visible alone in 4th slide. But from 5th, the old footer made a comeback. IT JUST REFUSES TO BE HIDDEN FOR LONG!!!

It turns out that, for objects with duration "rest of project", you can hide/show them for only one slide at a time !!! Is it a bug? Is it a feature? Well, one man's bug is another man's feature. But the bottomline is - We need to keep Footer1 (see, with a name I can keep referring to it easily !!), hidden from slide 4 to slide 6. What do we do? We turn to our man friday - "Apply to All". We select slide 4,5 & 6, open up, slide 4 and try to apply it properties to all selected slides. Alas !! IT DOES NOT WORK. Sigh.

Now, Is that a bug? Is that a feature? :-)  Sometimes life is just so unfair and cruel.

Don't lose heart. If life decided to throw lemons at us, we will make a lemonade out of it. We will manually hide Footer1 in slide 5 and slide 6 in the same way as we did for slide 4. Once we do that, we have the desired result. Here's the final project. And here's a demo of the final behavior.

This blog started with a promise of exploring "Show" and "Hide". We have seen "Hide" in action. But where's the "Show". Well, not all promises are to be kept. Use of show is left as an exercise. You may think of using it to revert back to Footer1 in from slide 7 onwards (by the way - in that case Footer2 needs to be hidden).

Now, think of the case, where you have many slides (around 50) and footers are always customized for 3-4 slide each. Because 'Apply to All' does not behave in a way we want, can you imagine the pain you have to go through - you need to create multiple actions (showing one and hiding all other footers) for each slides. In the next post, we will try to use scripting to alleviate this problem to some extent. Till then - Adios !!!

Posted by Chandranath Bhattacharya at 12:27 PM | Permalink

Captivate,eLearning,Conferences,rapid eLearning,Lectora,Flash

Learning Technologies 2009 was held in London, from 28th to 29th of January, 2009. The conference was well attended by around 3000 learning professionals primarily from UK. I was interested to see how the learning and development world was coping with the struggling economic environment and if any trends were emerging in coping with the same. It was heartening to see that the industry was well represented through participation by Adobe, SumTotal, Trivantis, TechSmith, OutStart, NIIT, Tata Interactive, Atlantic Link, KINEO along with a host of new players in authoring, conferencing and content creation.

The conference kicked off with the keynote from Tony Buzan, the pioneer behind mindmaps. Tony, though did not dwell on mindmaps, but talked about the need for a paradigm shift in how the L&D departments look at their customers (knowledge workers within their organizations) and their content. The brain according to him is heavily under-utilized, and we need to find out ways and means to unlock its power. While Tony did not explicitly state it, he did indicate that effectively designed learning initiatives can help in developing and challenging new "intelligences" within a workforce. He strongly urged organizations to rethink before downsizing learning departments in a knee-jerk manner to respond to the current economic crisis; instead look at those leaders in the industry who have effectively used learning organizations to work out of similar troubles in the past. "Become an intellectual capitalist".

Spend some time at the session titled "Social Media and Marketing".It was cool to see how and independent consultant like Jane Hart uses Web 2.0/eL 2.0 technologies to keep themselves abreast with the information explosion that is going on around her, as well as keep in touch with people who are relevant to her life. For people who read her posts regularly, we had seen a lot of it in her blog posts. But, to a lot of folks who are still look at Web 2.0 from outside looking in, this was great stuff. Andy Tedd, spoke about his consultancy project with BBC and the impact prudent usage of web 2.0 technologies had on his audience.

The other interesting session I attended was on "Rapid Development in the Real World" chaired by Clive Shepherd, Nick Shackleton-Jones from BBC, Gareth Wellings, Deloitte and Dr. Anthony 'Skip' Basiel from Middlesex University were the panel members and addressed the various aspects to rapid development and deployment. But the discussions turned lively, once Clive turned over the floor to the audience with the question "What do you mean by rapid eleaning"? Everyone associated "rapid" with some form of "speed". However, as discussions progressed, it appeared that "rapid/speed" has 3 axis viz. authoring, review and deployment.

So what is rapid authoring? It cannot ONLY refer to the speed of development, as that is so subjective. Someone with years of experience in Adobe Flash could possibly develop a course in Adobe Flash faster than he can do in a a rapid tool like Adobe Captivate or Lectora. It was believed that rapid tools generally help reduce authoring time frames for most people. My suggestion that rapid tools democratize the authoring space by allowing knowledge workers without scripting background to create engaging courses found a lot of backers. A suggestion was made that as organizations move to maintain more of the courses themselves (is that another impact of the economy ?), they will need to look at rapid tools as maintaining high-end authoring skills within an organization may prove too expensive. I think it was Skip who mentioned that the new feature in Adobe Captivate 4 to expedite the review process is very interesting. Skip bought discussions to a close by saying that as of now eLearning professionals will use a basket tools in their work, and will continue to do do in the foreseeable future - so rapid tools and traditional tools will coexists with each other and authors will use rapid and traditional methodologies as their project demands. Though I came away with the feeling that more people will be looking to do more with rapid tools in the coming years.

Adobe had a large stall with demonstrations on Connect and eLearning Suite held every alternate hour. The sessions were well received and it was great to see that the sessions on eLearning Suite and Adobe Captivate had crowds standing rows deep spilling into the common area. Most of the people that we talked to were surprised at the sophistication of the projects that you could author with a rapid authoring tool like Captivate, and the workflows that have been put in place between the products in the suite.  While most expressed their happiness with the suite pricing, some expressed disappointment that Adobe did not announce the suite earlier, so that they could have purchased this suite instead of some in the Creative Suite4 family.

Jayashree and I conducted a open session on "Create and Manage Visually-Rich and Engaging eLearning content" which was attended 120-150 people. We spoke about the importance of interaction and rich media in eLearning content to keep the learners engaged, and how organizations can move up the engagement ladder one step at a time at their own pace. The presentation takes simple PowerPoint content and using Captivate gradually enriches the content incrementally through the use of audio, interactivity and video. We also demonstrated how project templates can extend the authoring activity beyond the L&D department to the knowledge workers and SMEs, and the use the Review Application to improve the efficiency of communication between the two groups.

Posted by Tridib Roy Chowdhury at 10:07 AM | Permalink

Captivate 3 (and now 4) supports importing a Microsoft Power Point file.

Captivate slide dimensions are defined in pixels, while Power Point defines slide size in inches. Many of you might have faced problems with stretched / shrunken objects because of a mismatch in the dimensions of the imported Power Point slides and your Captivate project. Below are a couple of tips that will help you avoid this issue in future.

You can create a new project “From MS Power Point” – Here you don’t have to worry about the dimensions, as Captivate creates a project of same dimension as your Power Point (yes it calculates correctly!). You can see this dimension while importing.

You might need to just consider whether this is the required dimension for your target audience.

No problems so far !

You might also want to Import a Power Point presentation to an existing project. Captivate’s behavior in such a scenario is to resize the Power Point presentation to the dimension of your project. In many cases this resizing is undesirable due to (possible but not always) loss of quality. So, Captivate gives a warning (which you can of course ignore).

One option is to resize the original Power Point presentation, so that it matches your existing Captivate project dimensions.

Now, how you do it ...

Firstly, you need to convert pixels to inches. You might consider using some of the free tools available on the web and avoid the number crunching. I used this tool with the DPI value of 96. I will list down some popular values as well here:

Second, you need to change your Power Point presentation to this dimension. For Power Point 2003, this is possible in “File > Page Setup” and in 2007, you can do this in “Design > Page Setup”. Key in your custom values here. It would be a good idea to check whether your font sizes, objects etc are appropriate for the new dimension.

Now, you can Import this into your Captivate project without any dimension warning.

OK... Go ahead and Captivate your Power Points !

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lot of you who have used Captivate 3 or lesser version would know how much rework was required in case you re-scaled your project. Some of the top concerns were:-

1. When re-sizing a project to small size and opt for rescale, the caption text don't resize
2. Inserting question slides in a resized project does not re-size the captions available on the question slide.
3. Objects on a question slide are of fixed size irrespective of the project size  

Here’s the good news – all the issues mentioned above and many more related to project resize have been fixed in Captivate 4.

Check out the Captivate movie to see some of these improvements.

I will be posting more of these lesser known improvements in Captivate 4; so keep watching!

Posted by Jayashree Pandeya at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Large eLearning projects are always difficult to maintain and the authoring process is inefficient because of lack of parallelism and collaboration.

Adobe Captivate 4 allows you to break up project into bite-sized modules which can be authored and maintained by multiple people.

Modular development has the following advantages:

• Allows parallel development - many people working on the same project at same time
• Delivers scalability – manages performance at authoring as well as delivery time as the project size grows.
• Maintainability

I shall be discussing these three points in this blog.

Aggregator is an application which accepts the content SWF files (files which are published by Adobe Captivate 4) and creates a container SWF file which plays the content SWF files one after another sequentially*.

Image 1 - Launch Aggregator

Image 2 - Aggregator – Starting window

Now let’s see how it solves the different problems that I mentioned earlier.

Parallel Development: Let’s assume you want to develop a content which has multiple modules. The modules can be different subjects, chapters etc. and that you have multiple developers to work on it. Just assign a module to each developer and let her start developing the Adobe Captivate Content. Once all the modules are ready, publish them. Now launch the aggregator, add all the Adobe Captivate published SWF files to aggregator and publish the aggregator project. And you are ready to go live with the whole content.

Scalability: Let’s assume that your content has 5 modules. After developing publishing it, you found that one of the modules needs to be changed. If you didn’t have Aggregator, you might have had all the modules in the same .CP file. And then after changing the cp file you would have ended up publishing the whole .CP file that is all the modules. With aggregator, you just need to change the .CP file of the corresponding module, and the aggregator.

At run time (while playing the SWF file), aggregator makes sure that only current module is loaded at any time. Thus an “aggregated” SWF can deliver highly scalable performance at playback time.

Also let’s assume the complete content in aggregator is say 100 mb, and first module is say of 5mb. Aggregator does not wait for all the modules to be downloaded before starting to play the movie. Aggregator starts playing the movie as soon as the first content movie is loaded delivering a good learner experience.

Maintainability: With modular decomposition of the content, it becomes easy to develop and maintain the content compared to a monolithic one.

* - Aggregator plays the content sequentially from start to end unless user clicks on the Aggregator Table of Content.

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

SilentInstall

Just a quick note about installing Captivate 4 in silent mode (or from command line)

Captivate 4 uses a different installer technology than Captivate 3 and hence the way silent installation is done has changed from previous version. Please go through http://www.adobe.com/go/kb405451 to know how you can do silent installation for Captivate 4.

I understand that this page does not mention Captivate explicitly, but it will work as the technology is same as CS. We are working on getting Captivate 4 added to this page.

Posted by Ashish Garg at 9:03 AM | Permalink

adobe captivate,elearning,flash,widgets

Captivate users – do you sometimes feel that we were cramping your style and limiting your creativity?

In simple terms, why could not Captivate allow you:

• To use your creativity to define new buttons, charts, graphs and other display objects.
• To explore with new quizzing experience to engage different user segments.
• Take full advantage of the media revolution happening on YouTube/Flickr etc. and elsewhere on the net.

Sure, Captivate has a great set of quizzing options, interactions and support for rich media. But, as great as these are, how often have you felt that you could be better off by tweaking something, adding something – of course you could not.

What you had to do was an frustrating cycle of:

1. Go to this page containing wish list form
2. Fill up your feature request
3. Someone from Adobe accepts this as a actionable feature request.
4. Wait for next release of Captivate.
5. Hopefully, you have finished your project by then and ready with another request! Go back to step 1!

Of course, if you were friendly with the in-house Flash developer, you could some of this and then add these as Flash animations through Captivate. But, of course if you wanted to make minor modifications later on in the authoring workflow or in the maintenance cycle, you needed to depend on the continuing goodwill of your Flash friend.

But, that was till Captivate 3. With Captivate 4 we enter the bold world of “Widgets” which allows you to extend Captivate authoring platform. Limited only by your creativity – well almost!

“Widgets” still need you to access a Flash Developer, but provides you with complete independence to make changes to the “widget” later on without you having any knowledge of ActionScript or Flash.

And keep watching this space for series of posts on this topic. This will include tutorials on creating widgets, sample widgets which you can use and finer details.

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Captivate 4,Variables

One of the new features added in Adobe Captivate 4 was Variables and Scripting. In this blog post we will try to understand some simple usages of Variables. In later posts we can deal will the scripting portion.

OK. Let’s start off with the simple question – What is a variable in Adobe Captivate? Well, it is a placeholder for data. This data portion generally varies but may be constant in some cases. Example of a constant variable (nice oxymoron :-)) is author name. While an example of a varying variable (the normal case) is slide number.

In Adobe Captivate 4, there are two types of variables:

• System Variables.
• User-Defined Variables.

System variables are pre-defined variables. Generally these are read only, e.g., time-of-day (But you can also change them using scripting). User-defined variables can be created and updated by users. For current discussion, we will only consider system variables.

Adobe Captivate 4 groups system variables into the following groups:

• MovieControl – These are variables which control playback of Adobe Captivate generated SWF movie. User can use these to pause/resume movie, go-to-next slide, go-to-previous slide, etc.
• MovieInformation – These are variables which list information about an Adobe Captivate generated SWF movie. E.g. variables for current slide number, current frame number, etc.
• SystemInformation – These are variables which are picked from the user’s computer. E.g. current date, current time, etc.
• MovieMetaData – These variables provide information about project namely, project name, author name, company name, etc.
• Quizzing – These are variables which contain quizzing related information. E.g. number of attempts, percentage of questions answered correctly, etc.

Good news is that, you don’t need to remember these. You can browse through the variables and their description using Actions Dialog. Actions dialog can be accessed through the project menu (Project->Actions…). Here’s a little SWF about Actions Dialog. It shows how to select the various variables and get a little description of each.

Variables can be used to do a multitude of things like:

1. Showing dynamic text in captions.
2. Accepting user input and storing it in a movie.
3. Advanced branching depending upon variable values.
4. Getting quiz data, etc.

This post deals only with “Showing dynamic text in captions”.

Let's try to put variables to use. We have all seen footers in Microsoft Word and other applications. Let us try to create footers for each slide in Adobe Captivate.

Suppose the Adobe Captivate project contains 3 slides. In the published SWF, footer on the first slide should read: Slide 1 of 3, footer for second slide should read: Slide 2 of 3, and so on.

So, in order to create footers of this type we need two pieces of information:

• Current slide.
• Number of slides in the SWF.

These are provided to us by two system variables.

• Current Slide – cpInfoCurrentSlide
• Number of Slides in SWF – rdinfoSlideCount

Both these variables are in category MovieInformation. In order to use these variables, we need to create a text caption and add the variables to it. The text caption string will contain the following string: Slide $$cpInfoCurrentSlide$$ of $$rdinfoSlideCount$$. This SWF demonstrates how to do that.

 

Now, that we have created the footer text caption, we need to do the following:

• Move this text caption to a suitable location in slide (bottom-left or whatever is “suitable” for you).
• Change the duration of text caption to “rest of project” using the following steps:
  1. Right Click on Text Caption.
  2. Context menu opens up.
  3. Select Properties… menu item.
  4. In text caption properties dialog select “Options” tab.
  5. Go to “Display for” in “Timing” group box.
  6. Change the combo box item from “specific time” to “rest of project”.

That’s it. Were done!!! Publish the Adobe Captivate project to a SWF and see the footer in action. Here’s an example SWF.

 

Here’s the Adobe Captivate project for the above SWF.

 That’s all for this post. Your comments are most welcome. Next time, we will try to add a little “action twist” to this footer!!! :-) Till then, Adios.

 

Posted by Arif Ali Saiyed at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

ASTD,TechKnowledge,Rapid eLearning,eLearning suite

I’m just back after attending the first two days of ASTD TechKnowledge 2009. We had good traffic at the Adobe booth on both days. The new Adobe eLearning Suite trial DVDs disappeared like hot cakes.

I thought there were a much higher percentage of people who were just starting to adopt eLearning, compared to eLearning veterans at TK 2009. This is very unlike the eLearning Guild conference, where most of the people I meet are folks who’ve been using Captivate or some other eLearning authoring tool for multiple releases. The people I met were moving from 'Classroom based training' to eLearning-- as a means to adjust to budget cuts in their training departments. This seems to be in line with the just concluded Learning Technologies experience Clive Shepherd blogged about. Another new survey report by ‘Towards Maturity’ also indicates that while the total training budgets will be cut, the e-Learning spend as a percentage of this budget will increase significantly. But this is contrary to the latest Bersin report- which talks about a growth in the share of training that is delivered via Classroom based training (Instructor led training in their terminology), compared to a falling share in eLearning... I’ll do a separate post on this.

TK-2009 focused on Web2.0 and it’s implications on Learning. The keynotes and many sessions talked about all the new Web2.0 technologies and trends. Most of this was basic 101 on web2.0 technologies and firms, with some new interesting anecdotes weaved in.

Yes, I understand that web2.0 tools help users obtain up-to-date information on a subject in a format that is easier to access than sifting thru library cards, and finding the specific encyclopedia entry. They also streamline the process in which a student can reach out to his teacher or peers for further information.

But will the sole responsibility of future training departments be to point their employees to the latest tools that can be used to dig up information (either from a DB or from their peers)? The keynotes or the sessions I attended did not expand beyond this; nor did they provide a context on how web2.0 can be used potentially to supplement other training—as a means of ongoing learning.

Also, in today’s day and age, do corporates conduct classroom training for the sole purpose of disseminating information? Bersin’s ‘High Impact Programs’ (areas where most of the training investment will be focused on) lists: Business Critical Skills, Competencies, and Processes for your organization. If there is a way to move from Classroom training to Learning2.0 to support these high impact programs—I did not hear this in any of the sessions.

So, in summary, I believe a new majority is now adopting eLearning, and they were at the conference to try and obtain some help with this adoption; but our thought leaders have moved on to Learning 2.0. In times of an economic crisis, do organizations bet on proven methodologies like rapid eLearning, or do they try their hands at as-yet unproven technologies-- like those in the Learning 2.0 basket?

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 2:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)