Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

I’m excited to be bringing you the first sneak peek of Adobe eLearning Suite 6! One of the major enhancements to the suite is the new and improved Multi-SCO packager- where you not only can combine SCOs from multiple products in Adobe eLearning Suite but can now also make it more engaging with Pre-test and Post-test scenarios. Want to know more about it? Watch the video below and let us know your thoughts on this exciting new feature.

Still starving for more information about Adobe eLearningSuite 6? Follow @vish_adobe on twitter and be the first one to know about what’s in store for you in eLearning Suite 6.

You also stand a chance to win a full licensed copy of Adobe Captivate 6. Here’s how:

1. Follow @vish_adobe on twitter. Already following? Just follow step 2.
2. Tweet about this post by clicking the Tweet button on this post.
3. You’re all set!

We’ll be announcing the winner on the 25^th of July.

Adobe Captivate 6 lets you record your screen or applications as High Definition (HD) videos and then add transitions or pan & zoom effects to make the videos more engaging. You can also publish them directly to YouTube or save them as MP4 files.

But what If you want to have questions slides or training slides? What if you require reporting to LMS? This is when you need to combine the videos with a regular Adobe Captivate project (CPTX files).

One way of combining videos and Captivate projects is by recording a Video Demo, doing all the required changes, publishing it, and then inserting the published video in the project as a Slide Video.
The disadvantage in this way, however, is, even if you need slight modifications to the video, you need to rerecord, republish, and then reinsert the modified video in the project…  This can be time-consuming especially if your video is lengthy.

So, the best way to combine video demos with for such cases is to record the demo from within the CPTX file. The video will be inserted on a separate slide and you can start editing the video with a single click.

Here’s how we do that:

1. Start with a regular CPTX project
2. Choose Insert -> Recording Slide or click on the Record Additional Slides button (red button) on the top menu.
   Continue reading…

I love being part of a team. There are few things in life more rewarding than pulling together with a group of like-minded souls in order to accomplish a goal that everyone agrees is important and meaningful. At Adobe our mission is to change the world through digital experiences. In the eLearning team we are deeply committed to the serious work of creating positive change by enabling creativity, educational experiences and making that experience easy and productive. Today our team is thrilled to announce that Adobe Captivate 6 is now available.

Simply put, Adobe Captivate 6 is a sensational tool. Years of innovation, evolution and experience have led to an absolutely amazing tool capable of creating virtually any kind of eLearning content with incredible ease. The hallmarks of Adobe Captivate 6 are genuine, powerful and effortless mobile learning solutions, phenomenal digital video screencasting, and unbelievable out-of-the-box assets including awesome interactions that work in Flash and HTML5, a giant library of hundreds of Actors to add personalization to your projects and jaw-dropping themes that facilitate rapid development so well, you might just call it instant.

iPads and Mobile, Here we come!
The eLearning industry has been aching for a solution that will facilitate robust and reliable delivery of eLearning content to the latest mobile devices. Support for iPads, Tablets, and other mobile devices is just a click away through Adobe Captivate 6′s hot new publish to HTML5 output. Captivate 6 now publishes natively to HTML5 as well as the traditional Flash and other output options. Not only does it output for seamless iPad publishing via HTML5, it also exports MP4 video to facilitate impressive Just-In-Time training.

Just add Content
Have a look at the incredible Themes, Actors and Smart Learning Interactions in Adobe Captivate 6. These phenomenal out-of-the box solutions facilitate a shockingly fast workflow. Better yet, it’s Captivate, so they are all customizable and extensible. No need to stop with the wonderful stuff in the box, you can add your own cutout people, and create your own fully customizable themes to facilitate the branding and template styles that work best for your organization.

The eLearning World’s Favorite Application Simulation Tool Just Got A Serious Upgrade
There’s an incredible surprise waiting inside Adobe Captivate 6 for you. We’ve added High Definition, native video screen / application capture, and we’ve done it with the eLearning savvy you’ve come to expect from Captivate. Captivate has earned a place as industry leader for a long time in the Application Simulation arena, but we didn’t want to rest on any laurels. Why not give a completely awesome video only solution for screen recording? You asked for it, you got it. You won’t believe all the cool features. The mouse remains editable even after the video recording. Output to mp4 or YouTube is lightening fast. A crazy simple editor let’s you zoom and pan with fantastic ease and adding transitions is a breeze too.

These are only a few of the marvelous new features in Adobe Captivate 6. Download a copy now, and let us know what you think. Feel free to join us on Facebook, or reach out to us on Twitter #AdobeCaptivate as well.

After sharing sneak peeks on HTML5 publish option and Themes with you, we still have a lot to share and definitely cannot hide the excitement.

So here’s another peek into an awesome feature of creating high definition screencasts using the brand new Captivate 6. Take a look!

Inquisitive to know more about the new features of Captivate? Follow me on twitter @poojajaisingh and be the first one to know about what’s in store for you in Captivate 6.

You also stand a chance to win a full licensed copy of Adobe Captivate 6. Here’s how:

1. Follow me on twitter @poojajaisingh. Already following me? Just follow the step 2.
2. Tweet about this post by clicking the Tweet button on this post.
3. You’re all set!

I’ll be announcing the winner on 26^th July during my Captivate training session. Stay tuned!

Happy captivating!

Date: Thursday, June 28, 2012 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM US/Pacific

Description:

Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh with Leslie Bivens in this second part of the simulations series to learn the basics of Full Motion Recording, Recording with Narration and Panning in Adobe Captivate 5.5. We will also discuss the best practices while modifying the simulations in Adobe Captivate.

What’s in it for you?

After attending the session, you will be able to:

• Understand the suitable settings to be done before capturing an FMR
• Understand the best practices of doing Narration and editing the narration
• Understand the best practices of using Panning
• Publishing the captured projects to final output

To Register: http://adobe.ly/KT7gUv

Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh with Leslie Bivens to learn the basics of Capture in Adobe Captivate 5.5. We will also discuss the best practices while creating and modifying the simulations in Adobe Captivate.

What’s in it for you?

After attending the session, you will be able to:

1. Understand the suitable settings to be done before capturing
2. Capture any application/screen area as Automatic or Full Motion Recording
3. Understand the best practices while editing the captured project
4. Resize the project for various requirements

Recording: http://adobe.ly/K15PVZ

Learning Management Systems (LMS) help you administer, track monitor, and report users’ interactions with your courses. Adobe Captivate lets you create SCORM-and-AICC-compliant courses that you can deploy on various LMSs.

This blog post summarizes the steps involved in making your Captivate courses work with LMSs.

Step 1. Configure your Captivate projects for your LMS

 Here’s a video tutorial (3:25) that shows how to configure a project for the SCORM cloud LMS:

Continue reading…

As we are aware, Closed Captions makes the content more interesting for the learners. Generally, they are associated with Audio in a Slide but what if we need the Closed Captions but with a Video? We have the perfect solution for that using Slide Video’s Closed Captions Feature. View the following demonstration to know what I’m talking about.

Let’s see how to achieve this using the Slide Video feature. Continue reading…

Topic: Hands-on: Introduction to Capture workflows using Adobe Captivate 5.5

Description: Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh for a hands-on session on capture workflows using Adobe Captivate 5.5.  In this session, you learn to create application recordings in demonstration mode, training mode and assessment mode — all in one go. You will also learn to enhance the recordings with additional objects in Adobe Captivate 5.5, to make the captured content more effective.

What’s in it for you? Continue reading…

Yesterday, we announced the launch of Adobe Captivate 5.5 and Adobe eLearning Suite 2.5. RJ Jaquez, published an insightful post on his blog describing the new features and the subscription model.

We’ll be publishing more posts and videos on the new features in the next few weeks. Till then, let me talk to you about my personal favorite features of Adobe Captivate 5.5.

The first one in the list is Continue reading…

Admittedly bizarre but tons of fun, this week’s eSeminar focused on saving money and still getting high quality images and animations for your eLearning modules by leveraging free animation software to create animations and even stage complex simulations. In a test of my rapidly aging laptop I held the Continue reading…

One of the most important factors to think about while using Videos in learning courses is how the video will be delivered to the learner. There are multiple delivery modes. I will try to elaborate how to decide which delivery mode to use and the configuration for those.

Captivate supports the following types of Video Delivery : Progressive download, RTMP Streaming, Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS).

This below table shows some key differences between these delivery types. More details are available here for a long read. This info should help you decide which delivery mode to use.

Now we come to enabling these in Captivate. As you know, Captivate has two different video features : Slide Video and FLV Object (details here). In both these video features, you can configure any of the above delivery modes.

Default delivery mode :

By default, both video features are configured to use Progressive download. All you need do is upload the publish folder to the web server of your choice and it should just work. This makes it the easiest and most economical (as you can use your existing web server) delivery mode.

Custom Configurations :

More configurations (URL / Delivery type change etc)  can be done after the initial import :

1. For Slide Video, the settings can be changed from Menu: Video > Video Management…
2. For FLV Object, this is available in the property inspector, once you select the object.

Alternate Web server for Video :

Sometimes you need to host video on an alternate web server (other than the one which is hosting your SWF). This is mainly for load sharing. You can do it this way:

1. Upload the flv / f4v  files to your alternate web server. Note the URL for accessing the video, say http://<server>/<dir>/<videoname.flv
2. Use this URL in the settings (as detailed above)
3. Re publish the project and view the SWF either locally or from your server. Now the video is delivered from your alternate server.

NOTE: Once you do this, you no more need to keep the video in the publish folder (in case you need to save some space)

Streaming & FVSS:

If you want your videos to start fast, be more smoother etc, then you need to go for Streaming or FVSS, both of which requires the video to be hosted on FMS. You can do it this way:

1. Upload the flv / f4v  files to FMS / FVSS-provider. Note the URL for accessing the video, say rtmp://<server>/vod/<video>
2. Use this URL in the settings (as detailed above). Change the delivery type accordingly.
3. Re publish the project and view the SWF either locally or from your server. Now the video is delivered from FMS.