In the recent past, there have been increasing incidences of dissatisfaction with Adobe’s customer support. I’ve personally tracked and escalated some of this chatter from forums like Twitter and Facebook (Ellen, we heard you 
). Below is an open letter, from Adobe’s VP for Tech Support- Lambert Walsh, on what is being done to address this situation.
In old computer terminology we used the phrase "garbage in and garbage out". Our school and learning systems have unwittingly added a third element – "garbage tracked".
Calvin in another strip comments, that it is no point going to school as he never learns anything there that he wants to learn. As I reflect back to my schooling days, I can hardly recollect a class in a new semester (or terms as we call them in India) starting off where the teacher explained why spending my quality time with him over the next 3 months is worthwhile to ME.
There was the false assumption that I somehow knew why I was appearing for a class. Sure in college that was sometimes the case, but there was often a realization in the middle of the semester that there is a mismatch in expectation and reality.
So without a clear understanding of why the year 1620 (in the above cartoon) was important, how many students are simply going through the system manipulating the system?
You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.
This was the use-case I had thrown in my last post. In my last post you learnt how to create an advanced action and add assignment & standard action statments to an advanced action. If you are still wondering as in how to implement above use-case using assignment and standard actions only, then well let me tell you that you would not be alone. You cannot implement the above use-case by just using assignment and standard actions. You would need something more. You need conditional statements in your advanced action. And this post aims to help you with that.
In this post I would show you as to how the above use-case can be achieved comprehensively using advanced actions.
Follow the following steps to achieve this use-case;
After storing the relevant values in appropriate variables, calculate the percentage of marks scored by the student. That would look like : (Scored/Total) X 100.
So your ‘Result’ variable stores the percentage of marks scored by a student. Now you need to assign different grades based on the percentage of marks scored by the student. Say:
Grade A – %age > 80
Grade B – 60< %age <=80
Grade C – %age <=60.
After adding condition to check if the percentage is greater than 80, you need to add new conditions to assign Grade B and Grade C. Remember that you cannot include a condition statement inside a condition statement.
Now in order to assign Grade B, you need to check whether the percentage lies between 60% and 80%. For this we would need an ‘AND’ operation.
After you have your advanced action in place, you could execute this advanced action on the Slide enter action of any slide(after the quiz results slide) which displays the variable grade(say in a text caption).
Hope by now, you would have got a good understanding of variables and advanced actions. All the ground work for variables and advanced actions is done by this post…..so you should be ready to fly now. If you have any queries do drop me a line… Cheers!!
Adobe Presenter, one of the key rapid authoring tools in the Adobe eLearning suite, will be releasing an important product update in the next few weeks. Paresh Kharya, the PM for Adobe Presenter, has covered some of the key highlights of this release in his post on the Connect User Forum.
Couple of key feature enhancements that I’m very excited about in this update are:
Here’s another way of sharing your expertise with other Captivate and eLearning Suite users! The Adobe Community Publishing 1.1 beta is live. This new AIR app lets anyone with an Adobe ID publish content on Adobe products and technology directly to Adobe.com. You can contribute tips, movies, code snippets and more with easy-to-use templates. Plus, everyone in the community can rate and comment on contributions. This will help get you featured on our community pages and with enough contributions be on your way to becoming an Adobe Community Expert.
Contributing is easy
1. Download the Community Publishing app: http://www.adobe.com/community/publishing/download.html
2. Author your tip using a simple template
3. Publish it to adobe.com
Contributions are moderated by community experts. Content goes live within minutes and is automatically added to community help search. Exceptional contributions will be promoted in Help & Support pages, Developer Connection, Design Center, and considered for inclusion in Adobe partner publications. Also, if you are currently active on the adobe.com forums, and are interested in becoming a moderator for the Adobe Captivate Help and Support pages, do drop me a line.
Is Brandon Flowers and KILLERS thinking of eLearning, when he sings this song? Nah! too much to expect. But, listening to this song yesterday for the nth time got me thinking.
So I downloaded the lyrics and tried to look at them this time through the learning eyes. Are we creating eLearning content which is meant for human learning, or are we creating instructional content which is meant to disseminate instructions and hope to provoke expected actions? Maybe we need to “cut the chord” of control and allow a lot of constructivism to take place.
Are we focussed on tactical performance support instead of building on the cognitive infrastructure of learning ? Will our learners sing “
my signs are vital, my hands are cold, And I’m on my knees looking for the answer ” whenever they faced with a problem with a twist? Or, do we expect application of PSS in real life will lead to internalization of learning?
I do see some elements of constructivism and cognitivism in instrcutional design, but most of the content that we encounter today unfortunately does reinformces what Jones, Li, and Merrill [1990] said : “Instruction, in large measure, communicates accepted meaning. The
developer of instruction explicitly desires that the learner adopt themeaning intended by the developer, and not reach a separate and personal
interpretation of that meaning. . . . [M]ost instruction . . . concerns
transferring, as effectively and efficiently as possible, determined
interpretations.”
[1] Jones M.K., Li Z., Merill M.D. Domain Knowledge representation of Instructional Analysis, Educational technology, October 1990, 30(10).
You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.
How will you do it?? Well, Advanced Actions can help you.
Adobe Captivate allows to execute actions i.e. “Execute advanced action” on various events that happen within a captivate movie while the movie is playing. These events include On slide enter/exit, On interactive object’s success/failure condition, When a text entry box loses focus, when user rollovers/clicks the rollover area of rollover slidelet object, question slide’s success/failure condition etc.
This post intends to teach you create an advanced action and add statements to it. So without wasting any time let’s get down to the business…
How to create an Advanced Action:
So now you know how to create an Advanced Action. Pretty easy! Right??
Now we would learn how to actually add statements to this Advanced Action. When I say statements to the advanced action it means the various activities this advanced action is supposed to do. But before that a small pill of basics about Advanced Action:
Using Advanced Actions you can use the following options to define actions in Captivate:
Now in order to understand how to add statements to your actions, let us first define a problem:
Say in your e-learning project, upon a button click the following should happen:
Solution:
So your advanced action is ready. This advanced action gets executed when a user clicks on the button. In my next post I would explain how to use conditional statements in advanced actions. Till then I would advise you all to get your hands dirty with advanced actions.
Yesterday, I wanted to look up the equation for an ellipse. And I wanted to find this information quickly. So I went to wikipedia typed ellipse and frantically (skimming paragraphs) went over the page, found the information and exited the page. Last week a visit to wikipedia on a related topic on Lithium saw me diving deep into this mazing mineral on whose availability a lot of green movement in based upon. By the way, I learnt that Chile and Bolivia control almost 90% of world’s reserves!
So what is it about ellipse that got be so agitated and frantic? And what in lithium caused me to engage in deeper learning? If you look at the pages, nothing specifically jumps out as being the driver behind this disparate behavior to knowledge.
So was the issue lying with me? Did the dual pressure of a deadline and picking up my daughter from skating had anything to do with the frantic behavior, as opposed to a more relaxed post-prandial online walk on the information highway searching for lithium? I am inclined to believe yes.
This is not something we have not experienced with respect to other digital content around us. This is not surprising because the consumer experience with the content is the ultimate barometer of content quality.
In an instructor-lead training (ILT), a good instructor is able to gauge the feedback from the learners in front of her and is able to tailor the instruction (whether they do or not is another matter). The learner does provide verbal/non-verbal feedback but the responsibility of acting on it remains the instructors.
However, in eLearning the instructor/learner feedback mechanism is broken. And with it the ability of the instruction to tailor itself to my moods.
But, does it have to be that way? It is possible that the instructor can anticipate eLearning scenarios based on her experience in the ILT world. Attaching FAQ to various sections of the courses could facilitate rapid information aquisition, while facilitating a learner to take a deep dive. Intelligent usage of branching functionality in various authoring tools like Adobe captivate allow instructors to create a course which is essentially 2-dimensional.
The instructor can also create courses that track user’s responses and use those trackings to navigate users in the optimum manner. For example, if the user is making wrong choices it is possible to take the user to parts of the course which explains the problematic concept in greater detail. For learners who understood the concept straightaway, this detour is not visible.
Self-paced learning is often promoted as a huge win for eLearning over ILT. Unfortunately for most of eLearning content, it is actually self-paced completion of a course/content. What we are talking about here is to refocus on the learning.
The two most important questions that a learner needs to ask is the "who" and "what" question. In the globalized world, the who question seldom returns a set of learner who are homogenous. The set of potential learner for a course could be from different geography, having different cultural backgrounds and language preferences. Indeed some maybe operating in somewhat different business environments.
The easy and potentially expensive solution would be to reduce this diversity into smaller homogenous groups and then create a course for each and every of these groups. Course maintenance to take care of updates could become tricky, as changes in the common parts of the course needs to be updated across the variants. Embracing the reuse mantra in SCORM through creation of reusable modules (called SCO in SCORM-talk) and then packaging them through tools like the Adobe SCORM Packager (part of the Adobe eLearning Suite), or Adobe Captivate Aggregator functionalily. This will allow you to reduce maintenance efforts and ensure that changes made to common modules have been deployed across all variants uniformly.
Localization of content is a significant challenge in our rapidly globalized workplace. IT training on new software from Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle etc. are localized in tens (indeed hundreds in some cases) of languages as business is no longer restricted in Americas or EMEA. Soft-skills training need to be localized as also globalized to take into account cultural sensitivities. The traditional SLA between client and content creator required that all content be externalized, so that they can be changed by the client without the engagement of the vendor. Content as in audio, video, graphics, text.
While this does work in theory, often it creates a situation where we are trying to fit a round nail through a square hole! Trying to ensure that the German text fits into the space vacated by the English space can require more iterations than we think. In software development, we can create a dialog box which may have some strings ending with "…". Or get strings truncated. Can we afford the same in eLearning? Now try doing the same with audio and video! Customers having paid for the externalisation framework, often enough find themselves back to the vendors to make changes that they thought they would be making internally.
An alternate methodology maximizes the usage of rapid tools like Adobe Captivate in content creation and content integration. This would allow you to maintain the content and effect small changes to the content internally (and in cases in local offices) using resources who are icon-draggers with no scripting skills. And all this without any reduction in learnability of the content.
While major changes will still require a call to the vendor, we save significantly overall if we use rapid tools and reuse.
This month’s Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog asks ‘What new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?’
I suspect a lot of the X 2.0 discussions have within themselves elements of Web 2.0. Instantiating Learning for X, we also notice the same shades.
Where things get skewed is the tendency to look at learning 2.0 through the narrow lenses of Web 2.0 technologies. Tim O’Reilly’s "What is Web 2.0?" talks about the "customers are building your businesses for you" – it is important to harness user generated content to extract business value.
If we look beyond Web 2.0 technologies and focus on learning , let us see how learners are participating in creating content FOR L&D, and what skills are required to focus on to facilitate that? I purposely talk about focus, and not learn as these are not necessarily new skills – Clive Shephard mentions that in his post on this topic.
Fundamentals Have not Changed
Dr. Gart Woodill in an article written in 2004, titled "Where is the learning in eLearning?…" write about the need to address the two fundamental questions of who and what. That has not changed. Jay Cross mentions in his post of the need to be able to sit with your sponsors within your organizations and understand these questions.
In these "who" meetings it is important to be able to understand what is the profile of the target audience not simply in terms of demographics, but also in terms of how the training is going to be a win for the learner. For example, lot of the compliance training is primarily looked upon as a check box item in an organization. Would it not be a lot more engaging if the learner was educated on the relevancy of the compliance in their work, and not asked to take because some senator-congressman pair called Sarbanes and Oxley has mandated them to do so. Part of the "who" questionnaire needs to consider the "when" question – when will the training be accessed (office, on the road, customer site etc.).
The when and the who will define how the learning will be delivered. It is here I liked the post by Karyn Romeis, where she makes a good case for not biting ones tongue in meetings with the stakeholders, but be able to weigh in with suggestions on the pros and cons of possible designs and modes of deployment.
Recession Driven Opportunity
When i meet folks, a lot of the talk of late has been around doing how do we stretch the learning dollar. On the expense side there has been talk around doing more eLearning, and then more rapid eLearning. This seems to be the discussion having more traction – because it gives the L&D something to do all by themselves.
Feedback – Insist on It
The more difficult one is to be able to make an impact on the revenue side of things. While difficult , this has a better chance of creating "learning culture" the lack of which we often lament.
So how do we do it? Insist that once we have created the training (to the best of our ability and based on the information gathered), we need to put in place practices which will track whether it actually worked in real life and delivered the benefits it was supposed to deliver.
The involvement of the L&D does not stop at the delivery/deployment of training. L&D departments must educate and insist that line managers provide proper feedback on the training efficacy, so that future projects (or sometime current projects) can be created keeping these learnings in mind. A SOX training in an Accounts department does not reduce the number of SOX audit queries is not delivering the goods. Similarly, if the number of meetings ending without decisions continue to rise then the training on "Having difficult discussions" possibly did not have the necessary impact.
Too often courses are deployed in one department to another without taking due advantage of feedback from the earlier departments. So boxes get checked without any impact on business. And we know what happens to budgets that do not have any benefits associated with it.
Do not expect the line managers to always come with the feedback metrics (audit reports, indecisive meeting count etc.). The learning professional may have to discover this in conjunction with the line managers. If there is none, the training is possibly not worth anyone’s time. So be ready to walk away!
If you are not harnessing customer feedback, you are not letting then them build your business. And that is simply not Learning 2.0.
Context – Self-service success is at an all-time low with an industry average of 40%. Self-service Knowledgebases today are mostly based on text based formats – PDF, Doc and HTML.
In this webinar, we will talk about how Captivate has helped create rich media content/videos in knowledgebases to deliver great results on self-service metrics and improving training efficiencies – with no special skills required. The webinar will also show ‘how-to movies’ can help in increasing resolution rates and agent productivity.
John Ragsdale, VP – Technology Research, SSPA and I will be speaking in this webinar.
If you work in the Operations/Quality/Training department in support organizations, you should attend this webinar.
When: Thursday, August 13th, 2009, 9 AM US/Pacific
You can register for the webinar by clicking here.
Attend a free eSeminar to learn how to create engaging eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5.
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