Adobe is about to release Captivate 5 and eLearning Suite 2, in which Captivate plays a central part. I’ll be reviewing eLearning Suite 2 in my next article, but today I offer you what I’ve learned about Captivate 5.
In the last few months, I have written articles about a few different authoring tools for Learning Solutions. In each case, I believe I was impartial and talked through both strengths and weaknesses. In writing now about Captivate 5, I have to confess that I have been a big fan of Captivate for years, since back when they called it RoboDemo. I have used it, taught it, and written about it many times. Consider this while I discuss Captivate 5 here, but know that while I love the new features, I will also have a thing or two to say about what I still consider weaknesses in the product.
When Captivate first appeared, as RoboDemo, it was primarily a software simulation capture tool. As such, it proved easy to use and very effective. To this day, many think of Captivate as a software simulation tool and it continues to do this very well, with new features and improvements added over the years. However, Captivate is also a very effective tool for creating soft-skill simulations and other types of e-Learning applications as well. You can also create quizzes with the built in quiz questions and Captivate’s built-in progress tracking.
I often teach classes on Captivate, and while I can teach the ins and outs of capturing software simulation in a day or less, it does take a couple of days or longer to cover every other feature in Captivate. It is not so simple a tool that you can pick up all its important features in an hour on your own. Although it is not as powerful as working in Adobe Flash Professional, it is a very well planned balance of power and ease of use.
Rewritten from the ground up – big features
Rather than update the Captivate 4 code base to create version 5, Adobe rewrote the Captivate application from scratch. There hardly seems to be an area that hasn’t received a makeover or been improved in another way. There is even a new extension, CPTX. Rewriting the code has made some important new features much easier:
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Develop in Windows or in Mac OS X. For the first time, you can develop lessons in Captivate on a Mac. In fact, the product works the same on both platforms and you can open the files you create on either platform on the other. Obviously, this means you can now create software simulations of Mac applications.
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Multiple Captivate Files Open. Now you can start Captivate and open multiple Captivate files at the same time. This makes copying and pasting assets from one file to another much faster. This leads to the new feature, workspaces, in which you can determine multiple screen layouts and save each one as a separate named workspace. A few workspaces are included with Captivate. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. These workspaces are included with Captivate.
If you choose to create each type of simulation file at the same time, for instance, Demonstration, Training, and Assessment, all three will open in Captivate when you have finished recording the simulation. That’s a nice timesaver.
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They vastly improved the interface. If you’ve used prior versions of Captivate, you might do a double take when you start version 5 and wonder if perhaps you’ve mistakenly opened Flash or another Adobe product. (See Figure 2.) Yes, Captivate 5’s interface now matches that of other Adobe products much more, allowing you to more seamlessly move between apps. I’ll discuss more about some of the interface improvements throughout this review.
Figure 2. The new interface of Captivate 5 now looks much more like other Adobe products.
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Integration with other Adobe products is now more of a reality. In the past, you could associate applications with media elements, so that you could open and edit using those applications when needed. For instance, you could associate images with Adobe Photoshop. However, now integration is much tighter — for example, Captivate has a simple audio editor built in. It’s great for simple tasks, such as deleting portions of audio or inserting silence. If you have Adobe Soundbooth CS5 on your system (part of the eLearning Suite), you can link directly to it from Captivate’s audio editor for more advanced audio needs. Edit the sound in Soundbooth and save it; return to Captivate and the updated sound will be imported — automatically. That’s the difference.
In addition, you can use Captivate from within Flash to record simulations and import them directly into your Flash file. That is a sweet feature!
Properties, audio, video and actions
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Properties. A significant improvement in Captivate 5 is the elimination of most dialog boxes. No longer do you have to double-click an object to open and change its properties. A properties panel on the right (that you can move if you wish) will update instantly to reflect the properties of the object clicked as soon as you click on a different object. For instance, in Figure 3, the first properties panel shows the slide properties. When you click a text caption on the slide, it changes right away to the properties for the text caption. Clicking an image changes the properties to those of the image. This is a huge time-saver and allows you to both see and make changes more rapidly, allowing for fewer bugs and inconsistencies in your project.
Figure 3. Adobe has removed most dialog boxes. (Image sequence is left to right — see text above.)
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Audio. Attaching audio to a slide or an object is now easier as well because you can access the audio properties immediately under the timing panel. As noted earlier, having direct access to Soundbooth also will make audio editing that much easier and quicker. In addition, you can now add closed captioning where it makes the most sense — directly in the audio properties for any audio selection.
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Video. There are lots of enhancements regarding video.
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New Import Options. You can now import several video format files, including FLV, F4V, AVI, MOV, MP4 and 3GP. Importing most of these will get you a prompt to convert the movie using the Adobe Media Encoder, which will launch for you. In prior versions, you would have to convert such movies outside of Captivate, so this is a nice timesaver.
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Divide Your Videos. An especially important brand new feature regarding video is the ability to divide an imported video over several slides. (See Figure 4.) Prior to this version, you could import a video only to the current slide. If the video was longer than the slide’s timeline, you would still see the whole video on the slide. On the other hand, when you imported an audio file, you had choices as to whether you wanted to place the imported audio completely on the current slide or divide it up among several slides. You can now do the same with a video file, dividing it between slides so that you can more easily time other events during video playback. The Video Timing feature is brand new and will allow you to more accurately time events to video frames.
Figure 4. The new Video Timing feature means you can divide an imported video over several slides.
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Play Video in Slide Preview. Video will now play correctly when you preview the current slide. Earlier, the only way to see video playing properly was to preview larger segments or the whole Captivate file, which in essence publishes the file in the background.
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Use the New Video Management Tool. This new tool lets you see all the videos in your file and manage them all in one place, much like the Audio Management and Advanced Interaction tools do.
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Place Video in Table of Contents. Lastly, you now also have the option to include a video in the Table of Contents, giving a video preview of what a menu option contains.
Master Slides, Object Styles and PowerPoint import improvements
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Master Slides. Anyone who has ever used PowerPoint (and who hasn’t?) knows the usefulness of master slides. Create a layout and standard screen objects, such as a logo, and you can use them as a starting point to create new slides or apply them to slides already built. Adobe has now introduced this long-requested concept as well. You can create multiple master slides and apply them, as you need. If you make a change to a master slide, any slides based on that master slide will reflect the changes you made.
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Object Styles. One of the coolest new features in Captivate 5 is the Object Styles Manager (Figure 5). With it, you can set up attributes and properties for text, buttons, highlights and rollover areas, text entry, zoom areas, and standard quizzing objects. You can clone styles and change them as you wish, propagating the change to all objects currently using the style you modified. Apply the styles to existing objects, set a style as a default, and adjust as needed. This replaces the Design Templates used prior to this version.
Figure 5. The Object Style Manager enables setting up set up attributes and properties for standard objects.
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PowerPoint Import. Adobe improved Captivate’s PowerPoint import capability in version 4, but now comes a major enhancement with the ability to import interactive elements and audio from PowerPoint slides. In addition, by using the link option when importing, you can make changes to the PowerPoint slides in either PowerPoint or Captivate and have the changes reflected in both places.
Elegant animations, effects and many more assets
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Animations and Effects. Captivate 5 now provides for many different types of effects and animations for objects. You can mix and match animation effects and they will play back in the order you indicate and overlap as you wish. For instance, the effects in Figure 6 show that the object will first fly in from the bottom. Shortly thereafter, while it is still flying in from the bottom, it will display a rippling water effect, and finally before the rippling water effect ends, it will become 50% transparent.
Figure 6. You can mix, match, and overlap effects (see text for description).
A quick glance at the effects menu (Figure 7) will show the many categories and effects you can apply, in any order you wish.
Figure 7. The effects menu offers many choices.
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Flash Animations. Now when you create an animation effect in Flash, you can export the Motion XML file and then use it in Captivate for a new effect. This is a great way of extending Captivate’s built-in capabilities.
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More Assets. As would be expected, you now have more choices regarding playback controls, such as the Sunray play bar Figure 8 shows.
Figure 8. There are new options for playback controls, such as this Sunray play bar.
There are also new skins, global elements that apply to the published version of your file such as the navigation bar and color scheme.
Now related widgets tie to applicable objects. For instance, if you are viewing images for buttons, of which there are some new ones, the button widgets are just one click away. This is another example of the more intuitive interface that Captivate now possesses.
You also have access now to additional animations, stock images, and many more widgets. Many of them are much more pleasing to the eye than what we’ve had until now.
Among the new widgets is a new one that allows you to use Twitter to communicate with learners and let them communicate with you and with each other.
Quiz improvements
A very nice new feature in quizzes is the ability to generate all your quiz question slides at the same time and then fill in their content later. In the past, you could insert only one question at a time. Now you can indicate how many of each question type you would like to insert into your file (Figure 9).
Figure 9. You can now generate all your questions at the same time, and add the content later.
Tracking and reporting – even without a LMS
This new feature will delight many and make them happy to have upgraded to Captivate 5. Included in now is the ability to track and report through acrobat.com (Figure 10). You can post your e-Learning to acrobat.com and invite others to take your courses, typically for a pilot or quality assurance test. Then, and this is the best part, you can analyze individual and aggregate results without the need for a Learning Management System (LMS). Of course, a SCORM- or AICC-compliant LMS is still essential for large-scale offerings with thousands of learners, but people will certainly welcome using this new feature.
Figure 10. You can now track and report quizzes through Acrobat.com, which may eliminate the need for a LMS.
Once you have uploaded the results, you can use the new Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer (Figure 11), an AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application to see and even customize the tracked-learner results (Figure 12). You can also save the results file to your hard drive as a standard CSV file, which you can then open in Excel and other applications.
Figure 11. Captivate now includes a Quiz Results Analyzer.
Figure 12. You can customize the tracked-learner results.
Reviews and collaboration
Being able to send your Captivate files for review to acrobat.com has additional advantages. Adobe gives each licensed user five gigabytes of storage space at no additional cost. Use that space to upload your files and send an e-mail to as many reviewers as you wish, all from within Captivate. (Figure 13.) You can then track all comments, and reviewers can even reply to the comments of others.
Figure 13. Using acrobat.com provides additional convenience when working with reviewers.
Collaborate with fellow team members by using the space to share files with them as well, or simply upload your files as a secure back up.
Sounds good. So what’s missing?
I’ve always said that no authoring tool can satisfy every instructional design need. Captivate version 5 is a truly great update, so what more do we need?
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There is no drag-and-drop question type or interaction. I see this as a big omission that they must address in the next version. Drag-and-drop is a given need. While you can always build this interaction in Flash, Adobe should build it into Captivate.
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For those of us who love to program, access to more than the handful of system variables would be most welcome along with more robust scripting ability.
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Captivate still does not include any interaction wizards, apart from the quiz questions. It would be a bonus if you could find in Captivate some of the types of interactions found in other products like Raptivity. It would make the product more attractive to those who are not comfortable creating interactions from scratch.
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If you want to save a file in an application, you usually have more than one option. You can press Ctrl-S (or Cmnd-S on a Mac) or you can choose File → Save. Currently, there is no easy way to set up multiple correct paths for an interaction. In some cases, you can do it, but Adobe should make it easier in the next version.
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For many reasons, including multiple language support, it would be very beneficial if you could externalize content. For instance, you could set up different folders for different languages so that in each folder you could find the equivalent text, images, audio, and video translated to a different language. Then you could publish one Captivate file and have the learner pick a language, at which point Captivate will retrieve all the content it needs from the proper language folder. While multiple language support in Captivate is currently possible, this would make it much easier. In addition, it would be simple to update an image or text caption’s contents without the need to republish the file.
Conclusion
As you can see from the extensive number of new features in Captivate 5, this is no lightweight update. Completely making Captivate over, Adobe has kept the best features of prior versions while at the same time making them easier to access and update. In addition, new features, such as collaboration and tracking via acrobat.com, master slides and object styles, integration with other Adobe applications and improved video features, along with added assets in almost every area of Captivate, makes this a must-have update in my view. No worries Adobe, you have more to do for the next version, but kudos on a very impressive update.
