Developing in Captivate
The previous section should help you understand how to set up Captivate. Now I am going to switch the focus to getting things done in Captivate. As I have worked in Captivate, I have encountered various little issues that I hope to help you avoid. The discussion will include using the multiple simulation formats, importing content into Captivate, using templates, creating and using question pools, and using the notes section in Captivate.
Simulations
One of Captivate’s primary functions is the ability to record simulations, typically software simulations. This is especially useful when training people to use a new software system like SAP, Oracle, or PeopleSoft. Software based on complex transactions and the need to process heavy amounts of information often uses simulations to close the learning gap and increase new-user adoption rates.
The typical paradigm is, “Show me, let me try, and test me.” Begin by providing a simulation that allows the learner to watch the transaction occur. Provide a second simulation that allows the learner to perform the transaction in a simulated environment for practice without fear of being in a production system. Finally, use a simulation format to assess the learner’s ability to perform the transaction.
When you create a new recording project in Captivate, you can choose to produce output in as many formats as you would like. Captivate will capture the recording, and save the output of the simulation to individual files. If you choose to have Demonstration, Training, and Assessment outputs, Captivate will create three files when you finish capturing the simulation. The flag I would raise here is the time and effort required to edit simulations. By their nature, simulation tools often require the developers to do significant amounts of editing after the initial recording, in order to produce a final training object. The click regions, text captions, positioning of objects, highlights, and so on often require editing. This is especially important in Captivate, because if you output multiple formats you must then repeat the editing steps two or more times. While some other simulation tools use a single source file with multiple output options, Captivate seems to use multiple source files to support each output type.
Tip: Carefully consider your schedule when determining your mix. While it may add some value to have all three simulations, the editing may destroy your budget, your project schedule, or both. I often see clients focus on the Training simulation (“let me try”) because it engages the learner and still allows the developer to include key lessons learned for the learner to review as they are working.
So how does the assessment simulation factor into this equation? In my experience, learners using assessment simulations often meet with frustration. Generally, these types of simulations require learners to click, type, and perform the steps of the simulation flawlessly. You may not be measuring a learner’s knowledge, but their ability to point and click. The majority of client engagements I have supported have not used assessment simulations, opting rather to use a more standard assessment strategy that includes textual questions.
Importing content
Maybe the most popular feature of Captivate is the ability to import content. Most people would associate this with the PowerPoint conversion phenomenon that has really become popular in the past few years. This is a real and valuable capability of Captivate. You can bring in your existing PowerPoint content, add interactivity, and lay audio on the slide. Most importantly, you can take what was a slide deck, and make it a LMS-conformant training object. This is, in my estimation, the true value-added component. With increasing regularity, companies are stressing the importance of tracking learning engagements. Not only for the tracking of compliance objects, but also for the intrinsic value companies provide employees beyond the typical salary considerations.
From a more tool-centric perspective, Captivate offers easy ways to import slides, question pools, preferences, and/or external object libraries from previously developed Captivate projects. While we could debate the reusability topic here, I would like to stress the value this feature adds from a formatting perspective. You may want to recreate a one-off slide you created elsewhere. Rather than build it, you simply import it. As was discussed at length previously, the concept of importing preferences is intriguing; however, you can easily do this using a template. In the next few sections, I will discuss templates and question pools, which in many ways can eliminate the need for importing.
Templates
Captivate offers a simple way to create a template file. As Captivate Help points out, “Templates are particularly effective if you have specific project preferences you want to use repeatedly.” I would note generally, when building e-Learning modules there is a significant amount of formatting and structure that is repeatable from module to module and lesson to lesson.
The template creation process can begin any way that you choose, but the inevitable outcome is to build a Captivate file that fundamentally represents the structure and formatting to use. Best practice includes the positioning of objects, font settings, all of the many Captivate settings, and any introductions or summaries for modules, lessons, and other units of instruction. Once you believe you have completed the template, you can select File → Save As… and when the Save As window opens make sure the Save as type is changed from Adobe Captivate Projects (*.CP) to Adobe Captivate Templates (*.CPTL). Once saved, you can then use this file as the base file for creating new Adobe Captivate Project (*.CP) files.
Tip: The addition of assessment questions in the template may not make sense, but creating a sample of each type you plan to use is very valuable. There are customizations that are required with each question that can save significant time if done in the template. There is also an assessment summary slide, which can be time consuming to edit each time.
Question pools
There are two simple ways to look at question slides in Captivate. Either you can embed questions into the content of the project, or they can exist as objects within a Question Pool. You can have questions graded or not graded (survey). When inserting questions directly into the content, you are determining exactly where that content exists and when it to present it. It is the same every time the project opens.
The unique value of question pools is the ability to draw questions from them at random. You can link multiple question pools to a project. If you put 50 questions into a question pool, and draw a specific number of questions from the pool at random, it can provide a more complex assessment strategy that helps avoid people memorizing the questions and answers, thus thwarting efforts to cheat.
Captivate offers a Question Pool Manager tool that allows you to quickly and easily manage question pools. (See Figure 7.) While in the Question Pool Manager, you can add or remove questions from a pool, or add or remove pools of questions from a project. Like project templates, you can give each question pool a unique name that identifies when to use it. Question pools are great for random assessment and for reusing existing content.
Captivate allows you to import question pools from existing Captivate files. If you have already created a project with an attached question pool, any new project can add the entire pool to the new project by selecting File → Import → Question Pools… from the project that you would like the question pool added to. Captivate will prompt you to identify the Captivate project file from which you would like to import a question pool.
Tip: If this is “one-use” content, or if the questions are more to get people thinking than to truly assess knowledge transfer, a question pool may be overkill. However, it is easy to move questions from a question pool to a project, if needed, so there really is no loss in creating a question pool if it helps you organize content and knowledge checks.
Audio
Captivate has some very easy-to-use audio tools that allow even the most inexperienced person to add audio to a project. One of the nice features is the Advanced Audio Management window available from the Audio menu that allows you to review the audio attached to every slide in a project. From this screen, you can edit, remove, review, and export audio, as well as add closed captioning text. You add closed captioning in rows, and each row is synched to a portion of the audio for a slide. The obvious value of this is synchronizing the text to the spoken word, so persons with disabilities have an equally interactive experience, and verbal and textual details can be synched with other object interactions on a slide.
Notes section
For a designer, the Notes section could serve a multitude of purposes. It is a nice feature of Captivate, because it is always visible for the currently selected slide. A more common use of the Notes section in my experience is for audio transcript development. The space makes it possible for designers to draft audio transcripts that can then be used later to record the final audio files for a project. This area is not ideal for use when you want to capture formatting of text.
Tip: The Notes section is similar to PowerPoint in the sense that it does not support formatting. Captivate will force whatever you put in the Notes section to the same font size, typeface, and so on. It formats all text in this section as Tahoma, 8 point, with no decoration (bold, italic, or underline).
Some final tips and work practices
As I stressed at the beginning of this article, it is important to emphasize the role of solid instructional design and analysis, or preparation. The more I work with instructional design teams on Captivate projects, the more valuable I find the checklists for developing and reviewing content. One of the tips I would recommend is to make a comprehensive list of your Captivate-specific design standards. Specifically, include things like how to refer to objects, is it “Click OK” or “Click the OK button”? At the very least, address each object type, button, checkbox, drop down menu, field, text box, and so forth. Provide examples of how you should write textual captions. Do you want passive or active voice, personal or impersonal, and how do you want to standardize capitalization and hyphenation?
Think about how you have built your template. Expect the addition of buttons, click areas, captions and the like as you add content to the template. Provide your design team with access to the documents you utilized to build your Captivate templates. These provide insights that will assist them as they work.
A couple of other things that I have come across are nice to know as you begin working. Oftentimes, when you record simulations in Captivate, it adds captions that although properly positioned, lack valuable textual content, and are not properly oriented within the timeline. Always make sure you review and edit the position of the captions within the timeline. This timeline conversation also extends to click objects placed on a slide. Often times developers use a click object to move the project from slide to slide. Generally, when you are asking the learner to click something to advance, you will force the timeline to pause until they perform that click. Make sure that all of the objects for a slide have appeared before this pause happens. In addition, when the learner clicks as directed, you need to determine the action to take. Make sure you choose the appropriate action.
Tip: Captivate has two actions that would seem to do the same thing, but the subtle nuance makes a difference. If you want to move linearly through a course, you would generally use the Continue or Go to next slide click action. The difference is minimal, but important. The Continue option simply restarts the timeline from the paused point. The Go to next slide option immediately moves the project to the next slide in the sequence. If you fail to properly manage your timelines, the Continue option could cause unplanned delays for the learner in getting to the next slide. I advise using the Go to next slide option for linear slide movement.
Another common timeline issue involves visibility of slide objects. Assume you have a slide with multiple objects. For this slide, the learner is not clicking anywhere, or typing, to advance the course. Click-and type-objects have an option to pause the timeline until the learner acts. If there is not a click or typing object on a slide, and the learner is simply listening to audio or watching an animation, it is possible for objects to seem to disappear before the linear transition. Be sure in these cases to manage each object’s timing and transition settings. Timing refers to how long an object appears on a screen, and if you delay the object’s appearance, versus the transition which determines if an object fades in or out. There is a PowerPoint gene, that makes you want to fade from slide to slide, but I have found that, in practice, transitions add little value.
A useful navigational control is the slide label. The slide properties allow you to define a label for each slide. These are very helpful for linking within a project. Each team will determine how strictly to apply this, whether labels are used on every slide or just on key slides. In my most current experiences, I have found it most valuable to call out lesson introductions, lesson summaries, and specific important slides. Especially within simulations, it can be cumbersome to label every step.
Finally, the project sizing can be a nuisance if not managed properly. One of the most common issues I see when Instructional Design principles are not put in place is the recording of simulations using different resolutions. These days I see people using two or three different standard resolutions, depending on desktop vs. laptop, old equipment vs. new equipment, and other such issues. The organization should determine what the standard resolution is to be for the intended audience. If the decision is to use an 800x600 resolution, then you need to record the simulations in that resolution, and the project should be built with that as the project size.
Having given that background, Captivate does have a Project Resize function that allows you to take any size project and resize it. For the most part, I would say this works, but it is not ideal. To give an example, assume you recorded your simulation of a system with a 1024x768 resolution, but the resolution in your project is 800x600. Either you can tell Captivate to take the original file and make it a customized resolution (754x546), or you can use one of many predefined settings, such as the 800x600 Full Screen option. Depending on whether the new size is smaller or larger, you have decisions to make. If the new project size is larger, you have options to rescale, or to keep the original size and add a background color. In the second instance, you can position the original project as desired in the new larger space. In this case, the new project is going to be smaller than recorded. You can re-scale or crop to deal with this. If you crop, you select the portion of each screen you want cut out, similar to cropping a photo. In both cases you can choose whether to rescale the captions, highlight boxes, and other objects. This process is not the best, but it works and is relatively easy.
Summary
Captivate, in combination with solid Instructional Design principles, can effectively produce level one type e-Learning content. It can be enhanced in many ways to approach a level two type content, but in my experience it may be harder than it is worth to try and make Captivate extend this far. I hope that these ideas and tips can help to minimize your learning curve, and improve the outcome of your work.
