Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

Take a moment and think about the eLearning content that was generated last year-
- honestly, did you not create more courses with audio narration last year? My customer interactions definitely indicate that this is the case. And the single biggest reason is Captivate 4 voices. The NeoSpeech text-to-speech (TTS) feature really touched a chord.

Many Captivate customers use TTS as the voice in the final published course. These folks have figured out how to use the dictionary to customize the NeoSpeech voices, and to use VTML tags to add more character to the voices. And many others have figured out that adding the TTS voice to the initial drafts of the course, helps in painting a complete picture during the review cycles, and also in editing and timing of the course.

Now with Captivate 5, text-to-speech goes multi-lingual! We’ve now added a new partner- Loquendo. Loquendo came highly recommended from our European customers, and after having tested it in our labs, I would agree wholeheartedly. Loquendo’s voices are expressive, clear, natural and fluent; and would be a great complement to the current set we have. Captivate 5 will offer 3 new voices from Loquendo:
Stefan (German), Juliette (French), and Simon (British English). You can check them out today on the Loquendo website.

captivate 5,text to speech,loquendo

One of my favorite features this time is the new Video import and synch capability in Captivate. This adds a new paradigm in content authoring. Now you can add video content to your elearning just as easily as you were adding audio previously.

This would be especially useful for talking head videos, that are describing or anchoring the content on the slide. Previously you would have needed a professional video editing tool to synch the Captivate movie and the talking head video.

In a workflow that mimics the ‘audio editing with slide preview’ workflow, now in Captivate 5 you can import any video, and synch the Captivate slides or objects on a slide to be in step with the video. Captivate also bundles the Adobe Media Encoder, allowing you to import video in any popular format, and the same is converted into FLV and placed on your slides.

Worried about published file size? Captivate 5 gives you the option to either embed the video in the project, or to stream it from an external Flash streaming server of your choice. While rendering over low bandwidth connections, Cp has the smarts to ensure that the Cp project and the FLV stay in synch.

A good example of content that leverages the video synch feature can be seen on the Captivate home page. Scroll down to the ‘what you can do’ section and click on ‘Compliance Training’.

captivate 5,video import,video synch

Usecase: Say you need to administer a quiz, where the learner has to answer all the questions in the quiz in sequence (he is not provided the option to skip). Also, at the end of the quiz, he should be provided an option to review the quiz.

To achieve this, you would go to project>skin editor and uncheck ‘show playback control’. But the user is still presented with the ‘skip’ button during the Quiz. Now, if you decide to uncheck the ‘show skip button’, the user will no longer have any means to navigate during review. Also, during review, he is needlessly shown the ‘clear’ and ‘submit’ buttons, adding to the clutter.

For the best experience, you should be able to hide the ‘skip’ button during Quiz presentation, and hide the ‘submit’ and ‘clear’ buttons during review. Now  Vikram has created a couple of Captivate widgets that will help you achieve this.

To use this, copy them to your widgets folder (program files, adobe, adobe captivate, gallery, widgets);  insert the widgets on the first question slide or the first slide of the project and in options set it to display for the rest of project.

Under edit> preferences>quiz>settings: uncheck ‘allow backward movement’. And that’s it- you don’t have to make any changes in the question slide options (leave the clear and skip button checked).

Do remember that these are AS3 widgets and should be used in AS3 projects (go to edit> preferences>project>publish settings>select AS3).

Widget: Hide Skip

Widget: Hide Submit and Clear

captivate quiz,hide skip button,captivate widget

File size could be an important consideration in creating eLearning contents especially in cases when it has to be put on websites or blogs. I was going through few discussions on web about file sizes best practices in Adobe Captivate. There are many things which you could do to reduce the file size. Most of them revolves around the quality of the assets inside the courses. The higher the quality – higher the file size.

If trying out the best practices is too cumbersome for you here is something from under the hood –

Go to “Publish” dialog.

Click on the hyperlink. It will be “custom” by default. You will get following dialog –

Play with the file size slider to get the result you want. This can also be used to create different size/quality content for different audiences. For web it could be of low size – low quality. For others cases it could be high quality – more size.

adobe captivate file size

Adobe Captivate 4 has a feature using which you can access and control captivate movies from external movies. You can find more details here.

Here is how you access Adobe Captivate movie variables from external swf:

Action Script 3:
root.<variable_name>
Ex: root.rdinfoCurrentSlide, root.cpInfoAuthor

Action Script 2:
_root.<variable_name>
Ex: _root.rdinfoCurrentSlide, _root.cpInfoAuthor

Note : Few of the variables in Captivate AS2 movie are defined inside movie class. Hence cannot be accessed directly with _root. In these cases _root.movie.<variable_name> is the correct way to access variables defined inside rdmovie class. As a general rule, for AS2 to access a variable we should first try access it using _root.<variable_name>, if that comes undefined, then access using _root.movie.<variable_name>.

Variables that are defined inside the movie class are: cpInfoCurrentDateString, cpInfoCurrentDate, cpInfoCurrentMonth, cpInfoCurrentYear, cpInfoCurrentDay, cpInfoCurrentTime, cpInfoCurrentHour, cpInfoCurrentMinutes, cpInfoEpochMS, cpCmndVolume, cpInfoElapsedTimeMS, rdcmndGotoSlide, cpCmndGotoFrameAndResume, rdcmndNext, rdcmndPlaybarMoved, rdcmndMute, rdcmndCC, rdisMainMovie, cpInfoCurrentSlide, cpInfoCurrentSlideType

Blog post by – Deepak R, Adobe Captivate

captivate variables,access

Have you ever felt the need of sending an e-mail notification as soon as a course or a captivate demonstration is over. We know about the “Send E-Mail” button in the Results slide but what if there are no question slides or quiz in your project??

Here is how you could do this very easily using the following steps:

1. Add a question slide and then remove the quiz slide so that only the result slide remains. In the result slide delete everything and just have"Continue" and "Send E-mail" butons. Add a caption saying "Click the button blah…blah to send the progress etc."

2. Remove the playbar (scrubber) so that the end user has to go thru each of the slides in the demo project.

3. In the Quiz->Reporting->E-Mail and enter the email id of the person to whom the mail needs to be sent.

4. In this case he shall get an e-mail with the scores showing 0, 0, 0, but he shall get an intimation saying that a particular user has completed the course. But if he wants to make it more readable he needs to change the “email_attach.htm" which can be found at InstallDirectory\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\Templates\Publish and change the parameters for:

function sendMail()

{

      var  konq, saf, moz;

      document.emailForm.action = ‘mailto:’ + gstrEmailTo + ‘?subject=’ + gstrEmailSubject

      document.emailForm.elements["Results"].value = "\r" + gstrEmailBody;

      konq = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( ‘Konqueror’ ) != -1 );

      saf = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( ‘Safari’ ) != -1 );

      moz = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( ‘Gecko’ ) != -1 && !saf && !konq);

      if(moz)

      {

            document.emailForm.enctype = ‘text/plain’;

      }

      document.emailForm.submit();

}

So, try this to see if its helpful.

Easter egg is a hidden feature of Adobe Captivate 4 which is no way related to the functionality of the product.
It is a flash demo which contains photos of a lot of people who worked quite hard to bring this versions of Adobe Captivate to you.

To access the feature go to Help->About Adobe Captivate, The about dialog will pop up.
Now press “End” key. Be patient! and there you go.

Time! Needless to say that it is one thing every one of us is short of….

Captivate 3 introduced multi-mode recording- wherein you could record an application once, and generate 3 different projects from this recording- a demo, a simulation (training) and an assessment. This was a big timesaver. Now I’ll show you a way how you can take this one step further. Many a time, you would end up going into your recorded projects and making further fine grained edits to ensure that the project looks and behaves exactly as you envisioned. These edits will have to be repeated in each project mode (demo, simulation, assessment).

Today I’ll show you how you can create one recorded project, make the edits on this project, and then generate both the Training and Assessment modules in one shot (hence cutting your post production time in half!).

Let’s take an example:

Say you need to create a training and assessment module for “How to delete cookies in Internet Explorer?” The steps involved are:

Step 1: In the internet explorer, click on the ‘tools’ button.

Step 2: Select Internet options

Step 3: Under general tab, click on the ‘Delete’ button.

Step 4: In the Delete browsing history window, check the ‘cookies’ checkbox.

Step 5: Click the ‘Delete’ button.

 First of all let me tell you what is the difference between a training and an assessment module….both of these files are exactly the same with a small difference that in training file you have an extra ‘hint caption’ which assists an end user  as in what he/she is supposed to do next. This ‘hint caption’ is absent in an assessment module.

Now let’s get our hands dirty with the actual procedure… Go to edit> preferences> recording> modes> and ensure that ‘hint captions’ and ‘failure captions’ for both ‘click boxes’ and ‘text entry boxes’ are checked (as shown in the movie below). Record your project in ‘training’ mode. This recorded project can now be edited (post production) and published as your training module. Now to generate the assessment module, you open the project, select any one of the click boxes, and suppress the hint caption for that click box. Now you do an ‘apply all’ to disable all the hint captions across the project. A similar step should be followed when you have a text entry box. Watch this Captivate movie to see the detailed steps involved.

So now you know how you could save your editing hours!! Happy authoring….

Adobe,Captivate,e-learning,assessment,training

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update is already live and many must have already installed it. Some customers faced problems installing the update from the Adobe Updater due to security reasons, firewalls set in their organizations.

Now Adobe Captivate 4 patch update is also available on web and can be downloaded from the following link -

http://www.adobe.com/support/captivate/downloads.html

You just need to download the patch ZIP file, unzip it and run the ‘setup.exe’.

To know more about the issues resolved in patch update, please click here.

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update

Audio narration is an integral part of an eLearning course and till now one needed to hire external resources to do voice overs to their projects. Gone are those days – You can now do it yourself using Adobe Captivate 4’s new text-to-speech feature.

But there is one limitation in this. Only the text in slide notes panel can be converted to speech. Now when recording (capturing) an application, Captivate generates auto captions for all the steps involved. This is a huge time saver.  You might now want to convert these captions to audio narration, as these captions are already telling a story and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You can do it in following way –

• Go to each slide. Find the captions you want to convert. Write the text to notes panel and convert to speech.
• To save time you can copy paste the text of captions to notes panel.

The drawback to above approach is that there is a lot of manual steps needed and finding each caption and pasting it to the notes panel in a large project can be tedious.

Here is a simple tip to enhance your productivity in converting these auto captions to voice over narrations:

• Open the captured project where you want to use this functionality.
• Go to menu – Audio -> Record. You get the following dialog. Though this is audio recording dialog but we will use just a part of its functionality to alter our slide notes –

Continue reading…

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update

Adobe Captivate 4 patch is now LIVE!

Today we released a patch for Adobe Captivate 4 patch. The key driver for this patch was the degradation in audio quality as reported by some of our customers. This update fixes several elements that were causing issues in the audio workflow. It also includes fixes for some other niggling concerns that were reported/ discovered post launch. The full details are below.

Do note that the Captivate 4 patch is not a critical update and hence will not be downloaded automatically on your systems. You will need to follow the menu items ‘Help > Updates’ and download the patch update. Once the update installs, Captivate 4 version number should read 1658.

Let me now run you through the fixes which have been included in this patch:

• Audio Quality improvement –
  • In Captivate 4, some users observed poor audio quality in the published movie. We’ve addressed all the elements that caused this issue. With this patch you will see a noticeable improvement in the audio quality.
•       USB Microphone support for Vista setups  and working well with RealTek and Sigma Tel soundcards –
  

  Captivate failed to recognize USB microphones on the Vista OS. Also, in some instances, specific sound cards were not recognized. Both these issues have now been resolved in the patch.

• Open another project’ now works from any location –
  

  In Captivate 4, the navigation option ‘open another project’ was based on an absolute path. This led to issues when these linked projects were published and moved to a different location. This has now been resolved.

• Inserting objects at playhead position –
  

  We have worked on an important productivity issue. Now it’s possible to insert objects at the exact position the playhead is on. This is helpful for content developers as they can easily play the slide on timeline, pause the slide at a specific time, and insert objects at the playhead position.

• Memory Leak in Image insertion and Editing –
  

  Few customers had reported memory leak issues while inserting and editing images. These have been investigated. The leak was significant only in a specific case and has been resolved now.

• Image quality while resizing is improved -
  

  There was some degradation in the image quality when images were resized inside Captivate 4. This patch will help address this.

• HTML page Title –
  

  Captivate now picks up the title name from Project preferences > Project name section. This name appears as the HTML title when the project is published and viewed in a browser.

• Question Type identification by LMS –
  

  This addresses a specific scenario in LMS reporting. We have worked on the way the question type data is reported to LMS systems.

• PPT slides containing Master Templates work well with Captivate –

Some PPT files containing Master templates were getting corrupted once published from Captivate 4. This has now been resolved.

• Widget Template is modified –

  Widget template had a few undefined variables which created compiling problems. This has been sorted out in this patch update.

We believe this patch will enhance your Captivate 4 experience. We look forward to your feedback on this.

Update: All those who cannot use the auto-updater to install the patch, can now download it from here: http://www.adobe.com/support/captivate/downloads.html

You make a nice captivate movie with all jazz and background audio. And there pops up a hidden glitch – end users of your captivate movie are short on bandwidth. But you, Mr. genious knows it pretty well that you have pre-loaders in Captivate to your rescue. So you go ahead and set the pre-loader percentage to 10%. This would mean that the movie will start playing when 10% of the content has loaded, with the remaining content  loading as the movie plays. Wow!! You punch the air and all that….

Next day you get your users complaining that your preloader ‘rocket science’ is not working at all. The movie content loads 100% before starting regardless of preloader setting. Amused?? What did you do wrong?? Confused??…well this post will help you.

your problem is…

Your movie has background audio across the movie. Ideally, as soon as the movie is loaded(after 10% preloading), the content should start playing. But to play the first slide, the associated audio is needed and since there is only one big audio file, Captivate attempts to load the entire audio file(irrespective of the slides) prior to play the content. And this eats up the bandwidth.

….and the solution is….

Inside Captivate, for each slide start the audio after 0.1 second. This prevents the audio to be stiched as one huge audio file in the final output. Consequently this would prevent the need to load the entire audio when you don’t intend to do so. And your content will start playing flawlessly with audio once 10% of the entire content is loaded (assuming that you set pre-loader=10%). Rest of the content loads in background.

So with this solution you could once again wear that genious hat. WOW!!

captivate,preloader,low bandwidth,audio,background audio