Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

Can’t get your Text-to-speech installed?…Having issues previewing Captivate 3 content?..Rick Stone, one of the most active and longest serving members on our Captivate Forum has created a list of Frequently Encountered Issues in Captivate that addresses these questions and more. It is a great asset for anyone new to Captivate- definitely the place I would turn to before calling support, or the local Captivate expert. I’m certain these are collated based on the key issues he has encountered over the many years spent manning the Captivate forums. The solutions for these Frequently Encountered Issues are supplemented by Captivate movies or blog posts explaining the same.

captivate forum,frequently encountered issues in Captivate,rick stone

Early last month, Patti Shank did a detailed review of Captivate 4 on TrainingMediaReview. She highlights something that we’ve been hearing from a lot of the forward looking learning departments- ‘The workflow process for learning content creation is changing.’ Patti writes…
“Much of the content that we previously needed developers to produce can now be produced by our instructional designers or clients’ training staff and SMEs. Storyboards (if used) are no longer cumbersome Word or Excel tables describing screen content, interactions, and media, and the process from design through development is cheaper, easier, and shorter.
Problems can be fixed on the fly, without having to wait for rounds of bug tracking. No need for endless debates about what the storyboards really meant. Clients see results quickly and iteration (which increases time and cost) is greatly reduced.
The game changer is authoring tools that have become known as "rapid authoring tools," although they can be used to build all kinds of instructional content.
Captivate is a rapid development tool (that can easily be used for less rapid development projects as well)…”

Many Captivate users have shrunk the storyboarding phase considerably – by replacing storyboards in Word and Excel with quick prototypes created in Captivate directly. Captivate then serves as the aggregator- allowing users to easily reach out to the asset creation tools in the Adobe eLearning Suite to flesh out the content.
Patti goes on to review Captivate 4 and gives it the 4 star rating (outstanding).
“The bottom line is that Captivate 4 is an incredibly valuable tool that can be used for a wide variety of purposes.
In my view, Captivate is one of the "power tools" that most instructional developers will want to have in their toolbox, along with graphics and media manipulation tools and other instructional authoring tools that meet their needs.
You might think that Captivate is only for folks who develop instructional materials, but its potential use is actually broader. Tech support folks can quickly build and email short "how-to" demos to users. Marketing can provide visual demonstrations of how their product works. Tech writers can link short demos to documentation files (as Adobe has done with their Captivate help files).”

These observations, coming from Patti, who co-authored the ‘Essential Articulate Studio’ book, is especially pleasing.

Captivate went on to win the honors for the best product of the year 2009 from Training Media Review.

captivate 4,tmr,training media review,patti shank

Let me first take this opportunity to introduce the latest addition to our eLearning team- our new eLearning evangelist Dr. Allen Partridge. Allen will be actively participating in this forum going forward. Allen was previously the Director/ Shockwave evangelist and has built up a great reputation there. He also serves as the Director of the Applied Media and Simulation Games Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. One of Allen’s first initiatives is the webinar series being rolled out. In his words…

“Adobe will be hosting a series of eLearning eSeminars beginning next week, for both beginners and more advanced users of Captivate and the eLearning Suite.
These sessions will generally be held every two weeks (on alternating Wednesdays, skipping the winter shutdown at the end of December) and will aim to provide basic information about eLearning and Captivate in the basic session, and to provide a forum and resource to advanced users through the advanced eSeminars. The advanced sessions specifically will focus on a wide variety of relevant topics, with the ambition of providing a sound resource worthy of recurring attendance.

I hope many of you will be able to join me as we launch this new series, and I hope you as a community find the seminars a valuable resource. I will generally mix theory and practical demonstration in these events. Though generally speaking the emphasis will be on use of the tools to achieve sound professional results. If you would like to join us, click the pertinent link below, and then register for the event to get the connection details. “

BASIC: Meeting Educational Objectives with 21st Century E-Learning Development & Management Tools >> http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=1566499&loc=en_us

ADVANCED: 21st Century Digital Literacy Skills; Tools for the next generation >> http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=1566510&loc=en_us

Correction: While Allen has joined the eLearning team, he will also continue to serve as the evangelist for Director/ Shockwave.

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I’ve finally managed make a decent recording of my session at the Adobe Learning Summit. The session was titled ‘Collaborative learning using Captivate and Twitter’- and showcases a new idea around how we believe Captivate courses of the future can help bridge the gap between ‘Classroom based training’ and eLearning. Follow this link to view the demo (runs 18 mins).

This makes use of a Captivate widget that we will be sharing with you in the near future. So, post viewing this session, if you find the idea interesting and would like a copy of the widget, please drop me a note. I would also like to hear your views on whether this will be useful in your ecosystem; or of any challenges you see in adopting the same.

captivate,twitter,collaborative learning,adobe learning summit,devlearn

Many of you have approached me regarding Adobe eLearning Suite training. The need for good training and possibly a certification that adequately covers the suite specific workflows and shared tools (like the SCORM packager, LMS adapter, Flash learning interactions, etc.) continues to be the single biggest request I hear from the eLS user base.  

Recently a couple of vendors have started offering training on eLearning Suite. One is Element K (and we should have this available on the Adobe store at some point); the other is Lodestone. Lodestone offers an instructor-led 5 day intensive course on eLearning Suite. The course is designed for ‘beginning users of the Adobe eLearning Suite who have no previous multimedia content creation experience.’ In this course, the participants will learn the following:

• Understand the eLearning Suite workflow process and storyboarding.
• Record software demonstrations and simulations.
• Use Captivate to build soft skill, scenario and quiz based training.
• Learn the foundations of Adobe Flash.
• Build animations that support learning concepts in Flash.
• Understand the relationship between Captivate and Flash.
• Convert PowerPoint files into Flash media with Adobe Presenter.
• Use Photoshop to build layouts in Captivate.
• Edit artwork in Photoshop for use in Captivate and Flash.
• Use Dreamweaver for simple HTML editing and CourseBuilder interactions.
• Edit audio in SoundBooth.
• Learn publishing strategies for eLearning.

 You can find more details and sign up for the course here.

elearning suite training,lodestone,elementk

Wow, November has been hectic and I’m glad I have some breathing room now. We had the Adobe Learning Summit and DevLearn- both of which saw a large involvement from Captivate and eLearning Suite teams. We had some great sessions at ALS that showcased the use of Captivate and eLS. My favorites included the sessions by Josh Cavalier and Joe Ganci on ‘Captivate for beginners’ and ‘Captivate for power users’ respectively; the session by Fran Keefe on eLearning Suite integration in a Flash (she provides a unique perspective of Flash as used by IDs and Trainers in an eLearning context- which is very different and much simpler compared to how web designers or other creatives use Flash. The recording of that session will be available soon). And by far the most talked about session – RJ’s sneak peek of Adobe Captivate on Mac. By the way, we are accepting new members to the pre-release- so do email me if you would like to participate.

Also, I hosted a session on ‘Collaborative learning using Captivate and Twitter’. I will be posting a link to the recording in the next few days (I’m not as good as RJ and the others with Connect recordings- hence I need to figure out a few things on getting the recording right).

captivate for mac,captivate 4,elearning suite,josh cavalier,joe ganci