The effort to create engaging Web-based content begins significantly before the developer creates the actual content with the selected authoring tool. In many cases, producers seek and create e-Learning content with little thought as to the standards and procedures that govern that creation.
The result of such frantic development can lead to the creation of content that may have essential data, but that in no way meets the needs of the learner. More importantly, the created content tends to suffer from inconsistencies that at times are subtle, or obstructively obvious. In spite of the best intentions, short-cutting the proper instructional design process in order to produce content in a “rapid” fashion often does not produce the results that conceptual rapid development processes portend.
This lack of preparation gives rapid development a bad name, and may cause such methods to appear more cumbersome than productive. Lack of preparation also leads to tangible costs that diminish the speed of the development. Since the appearance of rapid development approaches, the standard argument against them has been the lack of cost efficiency and the lack of quality. In the past five years, we have consistently seen examples of content created by intelligent and capable Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who lacked instructional design skills. Although creation of this content leveraged the most advanced software, the results fell short due to lack of preparation. The net result is rework, scope creep, and significant cost and time deficiencies that lead companies to wonder why they tried to do rapidly what could have been done strategically at the same cost.
I have written this article to assist project managers and lead instructional designers to prepare standards and design metrics for using Captivate 3.0. I include in this group current Captivate users and individuals considering using Captivate. These design notes and concepts will certainly go a long way to helping you prepare to create content with Captivate. However, there are other considerations involved, so I also discuss challenges and best practices for using Captivate with a standards-based approach for design and development.
Obviously, the things that you can do in Captivate are countless. To make this process a bit easier, and to keep the article length down to 10 pages or so, I am going to focus on a common instructional task. Assume that my objective is to train learners on how to use a software system. The users will receive some foundational training, but the important part of the instruction will be via simulations that I recorded in Captivate.
Preparing to prepare
I know that title seems foolish, but it is something I believe in. You can prepare too little, but how often do we think to ourselves, “I wish I were more prepared.” In contrast, how often are we upset with ourselves that we were too prepared, and that we did so well. In any case, my purpose here is to accentuate the need to align as a business. Training professionals often fail to engage their colleagues or the end-user population until after they have made important decisions. To ensure alignment, take the time to sit with the stakeholders within the business units that the training is targeting. Discuss look and feel, course navigation, assessment strategies, et cetera.
By the time you are ready to open Captivate and start to work, you should have some details settled. For example, what types of navigation will the course offer to the learner (linear only, or both linear and non-linear)? What color schemes will it use? Other important details include the interface controls, whether there will be audio in the course, how learners will access the course, the kind of learner assessment strategy you will use, and so on. All of these details come out of the analysis phase of a sound instructional design process, outside of Captivate. I will not address this phase in this article, but that doesn't mean I think it isn't important.
