eLearning through comic strips,fun in eLearning

Very few of us would deny that cartoons played an important role in initial days of our life. Mostly it was for fun.  But did we ever realize that many of them were trying to make us learn something. They were interspersed in between our favourite comic strips and came in the form of "did you know" strips.

In the present web 2.0 context we all know Wikipedia is a great soure of information to us. But did we ever want it to be a bit more interesting. Look at this. It contains few Wikipedia articles converted to comic strip and compare the difference it makes in our understanding of the subject. For example - an entry for “apples and oranges” in Wikipedia will look like this. Same entry converted to a comic strip will look like this.

And look at what I created using Adobe Captivate 4. Click here or at the image below to view the file.

How this was created –

We’ve used the new Drawing tool bar, different type of text captions and image resizing features of Adobe Captivate 4. The strip boxes with different background colors were created using the new drawing tool bar. It’s feature of polygon and the ability of to add text helped us create the effects which have been used. It’s ellipse feature was used to create the thinking box. Adobe Captivate has many types of text captions which seems so natural to be used in this scenario. The main character was created using a simple bitmap editor. But we can use Adobe Photoshop CS4 (a part of the new Adobe eLearning Suite) for creating better ones. And then we used image resize feature to break the monotony of single character in the strip. We resized the character in every box so that it looks different and can be reused to create different effect.We also used perpetual button widget for cleaner navigation.

Files discussed in this post -

Adobe Captivate project(.cp) file - Download

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

captivate podcasts,captivate tutorial

Some good Captivate podcasts and webinars have been posted on the net recently.

1. Rick Zanotti, who's been involved with Captivate since the Robodemo days has a very popular podcast series titled 'Captivating'. He's just posted two new episodes on audio import and branching menus.
2. RJ Jacquez, our eLearning evangelist, has also posted a 'Captivate 4- getting started with new features' eLearning session. This is a great tutorial on the new features in Captivate 4 with simulations that learners can walk thru at their own pace. Feel free to reach out to me or RJ if you have any questions on the features discussed in this eLearning session.

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Captivate 4,widgets,google map

During our school days how many times we have been given quizzes around identifying places on maps. I was a good student of geography but still wondered if there could be better way than seeing few black lines on white papers. I was wondering if this has changed in this world of rich learning content. Then I thought can I use Adobe Captivate 4 to make the learning better. How would the experience be if I could add a living map application to eLearning courses. Learner can still go to any map site but the difference here is that the eLearning course would control the flow of learning. Please click here or on the image to see what I achieved. It will open a content created in Adobe Captivate 4.

Many other interactions can be thought of around this making learning really interesting.

How this was created -
We used widgets functionality of Adobe Captivate 4. The download link for this widget is given at the bottom of this post. You could download and use the widget file in your Adobe Captivate 4 projects.. You could specify the type of map and the latitude and longitude.

Please refer to previous post on youtube widget. Apart from using youtube apis we learnt to show and hide the controls depending on the movie state. We will use some more functionality to use it to create a google map widget. Read this blog post to get more information about setting up the development environment and creating a animation file using google maps API for Flash Action Script 3.We have created the user interface elements for latitude, longitude and map type which can be used to take input from users. We have written a function to set up visibility of these controls. The name of function is setControlsVisibility(). We will call this function with arguments true or false to make these controls. Most of the core functionality handling map is in function showMap().

Source files discussed in this post -

1. Source file for widget(.FLA file) - Download
2. Widget file which can be used in Adobe Captivate 4(.swf file) - Download

It could have been done in better way and there could be few bugs with the widget but would like to hear from you how you solved that.

Update 1 - You can use this widget as it is if you are not hosting it on any website or blog. But in order to put it on any website you have to change the API key in FLA file and republish the content. You can get google maps API key here.It will ask you the website url you would be putting the content.

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

text to speech,pronunciations,Adobe Captivate 4

Adobe Captivate 4 has come up with a new feature "Text To Speech" which is really a key feature for any rapid authoring tool. It includes a male voice and a female voice which provides a nice natural speech. But have you ever encountered a situation where, your Speech Agent does not pronounce the word as you want it to? We have a solution.

'Text To Speech Dictionary' is the functionality you should look for. Today we provide you a basic demo of how to make Text to Speech alter the pronunciations.

Actually its very simple. If you have installed Text to Speech Utility and Captivate 4, then a tool called 'Text to Speech Dictionary' is available at \Program Files\adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\\M16\bin. Reach the location and look for "UserDicEng.exe"

Double click the EXE and it will launch 'English User Dictionary Editor". Now follow the below steps in order to change the pronunciation of any particular word.

1. Click File Open and point it to the dictionary file. It is located at -
\Program Files\adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\\M16\data-common\userdict\
2. This directory will store the word you enter along with its new pronunciation
3. Click "Add word" and enter the 'original word'. e.g 'Jimmy'
4. Now enter the 'target word', i.e. the corrected pronunciation using the alphabets or the Pronunciation Symbol.
5. At any point of time, you can click 'Read Word' and listen to your pronunciation of the new word (target word). If not satisfied, you can edit the target word and listen to it once again.
6. Once the word is ready with the new pronunciation, just click 'File Save' and the new word along with its pronunciation is saved. It will be used by the particular speech Agent inside Captivate.

To use the the new pronunciation inside Captivate, just use the 'original word' and convert 'text to speech'. The newly created pronunciation will be used and audio file will be created. A captivate movie describing these steps is attached below (turn up your speaker volume).

Do try this functionality which allows you to create much more personalized and natural speeches. Please share your experiences and observations with us.

 

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

PowerPoint and Captivate,PowerPoint and Flash,PowerPoint edit

Captivate 4 supports editing Powerpoint presentations once imported into Captivate. Captivate achieves this by maintaining the original powerpoint presentation within the Captivate project. Whenever you need to edit, this original presentation is edited and then the new powerpoint slides are used to replace the existing backgrounds in Captivate.  Captivate maintains this original presentation in two possible ways:

Embedded – User’s original presentation is copied into the captivate project (and visible in the library).

This increases the project size, but you no longer have to bother about any outside files when sending the project to someone. Note that, from here on, when you edit the slides from Captivate, it is Captivate’s copy being edited (not your original PowerPoint copy on the disk). If by any chance you need the edited PowerPoint version from Captivate, you can export the same from library

Linked – Here, Captivate just maintains the path to the original (See the 1kb size in library). Whenever you edit from Captivate, the original is also changed.  Unless you have a need to send your Captivate project to someone, this is the recommended mode (as project size is under control).

But this opens another possibility - you can edit the presentation outside captivate using Powerpoint. Here again, Captivate allows you to get the changes into your captivate project – Choose Update from the library – Yes, you need to explicitly tell Captivate to Update (we don’t do it automatically).

Captivate also allows you to change between these embedded and linked modes from the library – Change to embedded and Change to linked options are available.

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

PowerPoint Animations,On-Click Animations,Powerpoint and Captivate

On-Click animations can be added in Powerpoint - animations start when users click the mouse. These clicks were totally ignored in Captivate 3 - The animation used to start automatically and the click part was ignored. Now, Captivate 4 honours these on-click behaviour. Movies pause for user click when it encounters the on-click animations.

In this context, I noticed some confusion faced by users (reported on user forum). When importing PowerPoint presentations, there is an “Advance Slide” option - Automatically or on mouse click. This option is a way to tell Captivate how to proceed on completion of one powerpoint slide.The behaviour remains same as in Captivate 3 - Advance Slide "Automatically" tells Captivate to proceed to next slide without waiting for the user click, while the other one waits for  the user click.

Many users thought, once you select “Automatically”, it even disables the on-click behaviour of the click animations. I would like to clarify here that this option is *not* related to the above on-click animation support and neither of the options affect the click behavior of the animations. If you have on-click animations in powerpoint, they are always honoured by Captivate. The only way to get them out is to remove from PowerPoint. Since We allow editing Powerpoint slides from within Captivate, you can easily do it.

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

publish to avi,captivate 4,codec,youtube

With Adobe Captivate 4, you can publish your Captivate project directly as an AVI file. This enables you to create demos using Captivate and upload them as AVI files on media sharing websites like YouTube etc. There are a few points which you need to keep in mind before proceeding with publishing your projects as AVI. 

1. Any media encoding process requires a considerable amount of processing power. Publishing to AVI is no different, because it converts the project SWF to AVI using some encoder (more on this in the next point). So, the best result would be seen on a decently powerful machine. I would recommend to close other heavy processes running on the machine before publishing to AVI.
2. While the speed of conversion partly depends on the available processing power as well, the quality of output and compression are completely Encoder dependent. Captivate uses DirectShow technology to get encoder from the system. On WinXP, we have a default encoder ‘Indeo Video 5.10 Compression Filter’ works pretty well. On WinVista, we have only one default encoder which works and that is Cinepak Codec by Radius. However, it is not a good option as it takes longer and produces a bigger file. The recommendation would be to use a good encoder, such as XviD. XviD is freely available and can be downloaded and installed easily. Klite Mega Codec pack contains XviD, and some other encoders like DivX which can also be used. We have seen good results with XviD. A point to note here is that a few encoders like ‘Uncompressed’ and ‘MJPEG converter’ are not recommended because they do not do any compression and the resulting file can take up huge amount of disk space(can go up to a few GBs).
3. The size of the project in terms of runtime, as well as the size in terms of disk space used also determines how much time will it take to publish a project to AVI. For a normal demo project it roughly takes 1.5 to 2 times the runtime of the project if the above two points are followed. By normal project, I mean a project demo project which contains some audio in the form of narration, fmr slides, mouse etc. A heavy project which contains a lot of animations, text animations etc will convert a bit slower than normal.
4. It is not recommended to convert projects which are greater than 800x600 in resolution. As the resolution increases, the conversion process will slow down because it will requires more processing power.
5. Most of the encoders do not accept odd numbers as project width or height in terms of resolution. This means that if your project resolution is something like 455x450 or 640x479 or 425x315 etc, you’ll get an error message as ‘Error Occurred’ and the publish will abort. A quick solution would be to resize your project to have even numbers as the project dimensions.

 

If you keep the above points in mind, publishing your project to AVI can be as easy as publishing to SWF.  Just that it takes more time. Hope this helps all who wanted to share their captivate demos on YouTube. Happy publishing!!

Posted by Ashish Garg at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Some Adobe Captivate 4 users on XP have problems installing the product. It might be because the Windows registry is corrupt or has incorrect permissions.

You could see following problems in such a case -
1)Captivate fails to install properly.
2)While doing audio import/record you get "Unable to decode / import the selected wav/mp3 file" as error message.
3)Audio recording , calibration or editing does not work.
4)Fullmotion recording does not start .

Solution:
You can use SubInAcl tool from Microsoft to try fixing the permission issues in the Windows Registry.
Close all instances of Adobe Captivate and do the following steps -
1)Download the SubInAcl tool from Microsoft Download Center and install it.
2)Download this zip file
3)Extract the zip file in a temporary folder. You will get two files - restoreRegPermCP4.bat, restoreCP4regentries.bat
4)Copy the restoreRegPermCP4.bat to the folder which has SubInAcl.exe installed. Typically this would be at C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\.
5)Double click to run the restoreRegPermCP4.bat file.
6)Copy the restoreCP4regentries.bat to the folder in which Captivate 4 is installed. Typically it is at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4
7)Open command prompt and navigate to that folder.
8)type restoreCP4regentries.bat and press enter.
9)Make sure that all the messages that popup say "DllRegisterServer in 'some dll name' Succeeded"

This should have fixed the registry issues and things should work fine.

Keep Captivating :)

Posted by Arif Ali Saiyed at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Captivate 4 Book,Kevin Siegel

Here comes first book on Adobe Captivate 4 - Essentials of Adobe Captivate 4 which is a part of series of two books, second being Adobe Captivate 4: Beyond the Essentials. Read the announcement here.

It starts with a bird's eye view of planning eLearning projects, the process involved in it and time/ budgetary considerations and prepares you for what to expect from your authoring tool- all in simple and jargon free terms. It further deals with how to use the tool for recording, editing and distributing the project. These are well explained using actual screen shots. It also has few practical tips like how to reuse your demonstration projects to create assessment projects. This takes you through all the basic aspects of creating a good course. Once done with this you are ready to explore more advanced features. The second book covers exactly this.

The author Kevin A. Siegel is also into Adobe Captivate online training.

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

LMS reporting,captivate 4,sumtotal

In Captivate 4 several changes have been made to Quiz preferences so that content developers can choose the right option for their LMS. Captivate content has been tested against some of the popular LMS along with ADL Test suite to ensure standard compliance.

Here I would like to highlight some of the Quiz Reporting options one has to choose for tracking Captivate 4 SCORM compliant content.

• Report Status  -
• Complete/Incomplete – cmi.lesson_status will be set to Complete/Incomplete based on condition specified in Report Score.
• Pass/Fail - cmi.lesson_status will be set to Pass/Fail based on condition specified in Report Score.

Note – For SumTotal LMS use Complete/Incomplete status only.

• Report to LMS as -  

• Score – If a raw score has to be sent. Please note that the LMS you use should have the ability to understand raw score
• Percent – Choose this option to send the normalized score between 0 - 100. This is most preferred reporting option.
• Report Score –
• Quiz results only – In case the course needs to be evaluated based on Quiz results only. As soon as the user achieves the min required score set in Preferences -> Quiz -> Pass/Fail, cmi.lesson_status is set to Completed. Please note that even if there are few slides left, learner will still get the course completion message.
• Quiz results and slide views - Select this option if the course has to be evaluated based on the score and the slide view percentage.  Completion status is set only when both the conditions are met otherwise it will be set as Incomplete.

This solves the issue of completion message popping up even when some slides are still to be viewed.

• Slide views only - Completion status is set based on slide views percentage. This option is better suited for courses that contain Demo and training content, where the user is required to view the necessary content.
• Template – this is a new option added in Captivate 4. You can choose either a Default template or a Custom template incase you are customizing the template. The templates can be found at <Installed directory> \Adobe Captivate 4\Template\ Publish\SCORM folder.

Incase you have a new template, just copy it to the above mentioned location and you can see template name appearing in Template dropdown in Quiz Preferences -> Reporting.

 

Below is the Quiz preferences dialog -

 

Now let’s look at other new features in Cp4 for Quizzing/LMS –

• Publishing Course structure files for AICC – When publishing content for AICC standard, captivate creates the course structure files i.e. captivate.au, captivate.crs, captivate.cst, captivate.des.
• Optimize suspend_data – SCORM 1.2 has a limit of 4000 characters for suspend_data. There were instances of resume not working properly in case of large projects containing more Multiple Choice questions. We have optimized suspend_data and reduced the frequency of this resume issue.
•  Retake Button – Incase of multiple attempts for the Quiz, you can now choose to show a ‘Retake’ button in the Results slide. Incase the user fails the Quiz, this button will be shown that will allow students to take the Quiz again. To set this option, choose Quiz -> Preferences -> Pass/Fail
• Passing user variables as part of suspend_data – A nice feature that allows you to customize your Quiz for the learner. You can accept the name of the user in a text entry box and store it in a user variable. The user variable automatically along with its value will be sent as part of cmi.suspend_data  to the LMS. On resuming the Quiz, the variable and its value will be persistent.  No special setting is required for this.

<post by N. Ravi Kiran>

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

We found that in some of Vista machines with Real tek or Sigma tel sound card audio inside captivate doesn't play back. Some customers who use USB mic for recording narration also observed that device is not getting detected by Captivate. These  issues were reported more on Vista and we have one solution to address both the problems. - replacing the audio dll's , Steps

1. Close Captivate 4 if it is open.
2. Download the file kept at https://share.acrobat.com/adc/document.do?docid=a14e1bd9-dc10-4456-9cd2-44489809b78e
3. Go to your Captivate 4 install folder (ex: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Cativate 4)
4. Rename nsaudio.dll as nsaudio.dll.bak or anything which doesn't have a dll extension
5. Copy the file from step 2 to Captivate 4 install folder
6. rename it as nsaudio.dll
7. Start Captivate 4
8. Try to play the audio /use USB - it should go fine

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Suresh Jayaraman at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Adobe Captivate,Rapid e-learning authoring,Captivate Preferences,eLearning

Have you ever found yourself manually changing the ‘Timing’ and ‘Transition’ properties for every Adobe Captivate object in your e-learning project? Have you torn out your hair everytime you had to change the ‘Timing’ & ‘Transition’ properties of Captivate objects for each e-learning project you made in Captivate? Did you know that Captivate allows you to share/re-use these object default values across slides, projects and sessions?

In Adobe Captivate 4, we have added a facility to configure “Object defaults” which includes Timing properties(Display for & Appear after) and Transition(Effect, In & Out timings). You could set these values once and Adobe Captivate would remember these values forever i.e. throughout the project and even across projects. Incase, you want a different value for these properties for any Captivate object then you could always go ahead and change them in the properties dialog( under the ‘Options’ tab). And the best part is that when you insert that object the next time, Captivate would still pick up the default values. So you need not worry about the timing and transition properties of Captivate object once you have set them as Object defaults.

Now lets see how actually can we set the object Defaults:

Whenever you want to fall back to the factory settings for these properties, you could use “Restore Selected” and “Restore All” buttons. “Restore Selected” re-stores the values for the object selected in the ‘Select:’ dropdown. “Restore All” re-stores the values for all the objects in the ‘Select:’ dropdown. Here you could change other properties at well such as Slide duration, Background color etc. I would like to re-emphasize that the changes made here are remembered across  projects.

Once you are done with setting the values, you could also re-use/share them. Adobe Captivate gives you an option where-in you could export these values, which get saved in a .cpr file. Now you can easily re-use/share this .cpr file. You just need to import this .cpr file into your Adobe Captivate project and you have your object defaults in place.

Follow  these simple steps to export the .cpr file:

• Launch Captivate and press Shift + F8. This would launch the preferences dialog.
• Make your settings at Global -> Defaults. Press Ok.
• Create a blank project.
• Go to File menu -> Export -> Preferences…
• Save the file as .cpr file.

Similarly inside a Captivate project,  from File menu ->Import ->Preferences…, you could bring in values stored in a .cpr file.

Posted by Manish Anand at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

customizing captivate playbar,localizing captivate playbar,captivate 4

Consider a scenario where you want to create content in some different language, say German or Hindi. You created the content properly, but then you discover that the play-bar shows its tool-tips in English. Did you know that you can localize the play-bar tooltips to match your content? This post shows you how…

Img 1. English tool-tips

Img 2. Italian tool-tips

For Localizing play-bar you will need to have Adobe Flash.

Adobe captivate 4 comes with fla files for the play-bars. Typically installation folder for captivate 4 is “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4”.

 

Locating tool-tip strings in AS2

Fla files for AS2 are located at “installation folder\Templates\PlaybackFLA\AS2”.

Open the play-bar fla file which for which you want to change the tool-tips and open the actions window for the main time line.

 

Locating tool-tip strings in AS3

Fla files for AS3 are located at “installation folder\Templates\PlaybackFLA\AS3”.

Notice a movie clip with name as “Localization” in the library window. Double click on the Localization movie clip in library to open it and open the actions window.

 

Changing play-bar tool-tips

You will notice few array definitions on the time line of the fla file. Name of those arrays are pbcBtnTips_ENU (English), pbcBtnTips_CHT (Chinese Traditional), pbcBtnTips_FRA (French), pbcBtnTips_DEU (German), pbcBtnTips_ITA (Italian), pbcBtnTips_JPN (Japanese), pbcBtnTips_ESP (Spanish) and pbcBtnTips_KOR (Korean). And then you will find the last line as

var pbcBtnTips:Array = pbcBtnTips_ENU;

 

If you want to have German tool-tips, you will just have to change the last line to

var pbcBtnTips:Array = pbcBtnTips_DEU;

 

But if you want to have tool-tip for a different language say Hindi, you’ll have to create a new array say pbcBtnTips_HIN before the last line as

 

var pbcBtnTips_HIN:Array = new

Array("Rewind ", //rewind button Tool-tip

       "Back ", //back button tool-tip

       "Play ", //play button Tool-tip

       "Pause ", //pause button Tool-tip

       "Forward ", //forward button Tool-tip

       "Closed Captioning ", //CC button Tool-tip

       "Audio On ", //Audio on button Tool-tip

       "Audio Off ", //audio off button Tool-tip

       "Exit ", //exit button Tool-tip

       "Information ", //info button Tool-tip

       "dummy for scratch bar ", //this is a dummy entry

       "Table of Contents ", //TOC button Tool-tip

       "2x Fast Forward Speed ", //2xFF button Tool-tip

       "4x Fast Forward Speed ", //4xFF button Tool-tip

       "Normal Speed ", //1x button Tool-tip

       "Print"); //print button Tool-tip

 

And change the last line to

var pbcBtnTips:Array = pbcBtnTips_HIN;

Here you will have to make sure that the order of the elements in the array remains the same.

 

Save these changes and publish the swf file to “installation Folder\gallery\playbackControls\swfBars\as2” folder for as2 play-bar and to “installation Folder\gallery\playbackControls\swfBars\as3” for As3 playbar.

After doing this, start the captivate

Go to skin dialog, you should see name of the swf file, which was published, in the play-bar dropdown box. When this entry is selected, the tool-tip text s/he entered in the array will be shown.

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Captivate,cp files disappearing,e-learning

Some Captivate 3 users have faced a strange and unfortunate problem of .cp file suddenly disappearing after saving and closing the captivate. A possible reason for this has been analyzed and fixed in Captivate 4.

However for the Captivate 3 users I can suggest a possible workaround to recover the project. If this problem happens, immediately look for a .tmp file (after closing Captivate) in the same folder where your .cp file was supposed to be. If you are able to find this then you are lucky - Rename this file to .cp and you can continue working then on. You might also notice in certain cases, that this .tmp file is much larger size than the original .cp file. This is but nothing to worry - next save on the renamed file will reduce this size back to normal.

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

Adobe Captivate,Captivate webinar,Adobe eLearning suite

RJ, our eLearning evangelist, will be conducting a live eLearning session on 'Getting started with the new features in Adobe Captivate 4'. The session will provide you good working knowledge on the new features in Captivate 4 like Templates, Text-to-Speech, SWF Reviewer, Variables and Scripting, Widgets, TOC, Aggregator, new publish options, PSD import and more. RJ's sessions are always packed with information and very interactive; hence they also tend to get filled very early. So if you've just purchased Captivate 4 or the Adobe eLearning Suite, or are testing out the trial, you should plan to attend this session.

To quote RJ: "... no registration is required, but please keep in mind that my Connect Pro room only handles 400 people, so please log in as early as 30 minutes before the start time and the Virtual Classroom doors will close promptly at 10am PST to avoid distractions."

When: Friday, March 6, 2009 at 10:00am - 12.00 Noon Pacific Time

Where: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/adobelearningsolutions/

Login instructions: Please click the link above as early as 30 minutes before the start time, enter as Guest, type your Full Name and click Enter Room. 

You can find more information on this session here.

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)