Adobe Captivate is a great tool to develop eLearning program with powerful simulations and interactive course content. However, every now and then, it keeps challenging us with roadblocks and we work towards overcoming them.

I would like to share with you how we tried to find solution to a problem that we were facing while developing course content. For purpose of easy comprehension, I will take an example of a course-content with 5 slides. In slide one I have bulleted text which appears bullet by bullet with audio synchronization. The learner moves on to slide 2 and then to slide 3. In slide 3 there is a button which the learner can click and navigate to slide 1. All he needs is to take a quick look at the content of the slide 1 and does not have to wait for the animation to complete.

Is there any way the learner can just skip the animation to navigate to respective slide?  Yes, it is possible in Captivate.

Here is the step by step process:

1. We need to give action to the next button in the slide as – On success: Execute advanced action.

2. In order to do that, open the Actions Dialog box and click on Advanced Options and go to Create New Action from the drop down menu.

3. Click on Statement and select standard option.

4. Select show from the drop down menu to make it automatically jump to respective slide frame.

5. From the drop down menu choose the appropriate button as shown below.

6. Double-click on the next statement and choose Assignment from the drop down menu and select rdcmndGotoFrame.

7. Select value from the variable. Give the frame number in the place of <click_to_type>. This would be the frame where the animation ends.

8. Note: You can also hide the buttons if you don’t want to be seen on the screen. You can do it by going to the next statement, select hide and click on the item you wish to hide.

I hope that you find this tip useful. Do share your feedback if you have other solutions.

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By integrating ILTs into eLearning, you can develop a comprehensive curriculum approach to learning rather than dispensing discrete bits and pieces of instruction. You need to whip up the best blend for each training requirement so that your organization can stay on the cutting edge. And to do that you have to take decisions after a great deal of thought. Here are a few guidelines and recommendations for designing your perfect blend.

• Move as much of your content online as you can. Depending on your available time for the ILT component, optimize the classroom time by making sure that only critical content or learning activities are included in the ILT component. Use eLearning to provide fundamental concepts and pre-training preparation. Later get learners together into classroom learning for advanced concepts, practice and hands-on exercises.
• Check the organizational culture. If you are very enthusiastic about ILTs but your CLO is keen on moving to eLearning in a massive way, see what components cannot be met by eLearning and have a separate plan for them in your overall blended solution.
• Do not pre-select your learning delivery format without doing a thorough content, audience and task analysis. Maximize the potential of each delivery format.
• Cost is not always the best deciding criteria. Organizations are increasingly moving towards blended solutions – not in a bid to minimize costs but in a bid to provide the best possible learning solution.
• Get ready for converting most of your existing ILTs into eLearning. Your organization has a wealth of existing resources that can be utilized for your transition to eLearning. Check out a few rapid development tools such as Lectora, Adobe Presenter and Engage, and Captivate to help you convert your existing materials into eLearning. If this skill set is not available, consider hiring experts who can cut down on development time dramatically, leaving you to focus on critical components such as needs analysis and evaluation of training solutions. However a word of caution here, convert ILT into eLearning only is you see a real value addition and not for the sake of doing it. While you are designing your blended solution, you might also want to re-haul those ILT components you plan to retain.
• Long courses are likely to have more dropout rates. Go with the trend of keeping courses short. Nuggets of information are easier to handle than huge mountains of content.
• Be prepared to alter your course of action. Maybe you had decided on certain content being best delivered by a particular delivery format, but on closer study of the materials you decided it was not worthwhile. At this point don’t write it off as a wasted exercise- your learners will thank you for keeping them from an ineffective solution.
• Be realistic. You know intuitively what works with various audiences. Be realistic in your expectations from various groups. For instance, don’t expect your sales engineers to take hours of eLearning courses before they come in to attend classroom training. Knowing their preference, you might want to keep the eLearning component very short so that they can take them on their mobile phones even while travelling and then use the classroom component for advanced discussions. While we are not encouraging that you stereotype your learner groups, we do encourage you to identify core learning preferences that will in turn help you to decide on the best delivery format.
• Use assessments well. Whether you are using ILTs or eLearning, ensure that your learners are assessed at relevant points. The feedback on these assessments might just help them revisit basics that ideally should be available to them at all times. Assessments will also help them see where they stand and which bits require more focus. Their feedback to you will also prove to be valuable in further improving your learning solutions. An increasing trend especially in the case of standard trainings such as compliance trainings is to move all assessments online.
• Don’t camp around past victories. In an attempt to arrive at the right formula, we might be tempted to repeat the exact strategy we followed in the past that was successful. Do remember that your audience, content, learning goals vary, so your solution cannot be blindly applied.

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Here are a few typical scenarios for training and let’s see which authoring tool would be most appropriate for eLearning development in such situations.

Scenario 1: A Product Manager says “I want product training for my sales team. And NOW!”

Scenario 2: A Compliance Manager says “We need compliance training rolled out globally in 13 languages in a month. Is it even possible?”

Scenario 3: A Director of HR says “My team has lots of content in PPTs. We need to convert this to online courses immediately. But HOW?”

Scenario 4: A Training Manager says “I need to get my in-house developer team trained on course development as a huge and complicated requirement is coming up. Any suggestions?”

Here is a quick look at when to use which tool:

Before selecting the tool for your elearning content development needs, think about what you have at your disposal in terms of the composition of the team and available skill sets. Think about your constraints in terms of nature of content, multilingual requirements and available development time. It’s important to think about what you’re trying to accomplish – your training requirement.

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Let’s look at some of the important criteria for the selection of your tools to get the best results.

Training Requirement: Your training requirement is the most important factor. Do you need to rollout a quick demo of the latest features of your product for your sales force? Or do you have a requirement to train your global workforce on some mandatory or compliance issues within a very short time? OR do you have a need for training your employees on a new application that is critical to your processes, say a performance appraisal tool that will be implemented organization-wide before the next review cycle? The nature of your training requirement will determine the selection of your tool. Based on your immediate and long term requirements, you can select a tool that lets you quickly roll out courses without complex interactivity that don’t have too much of complex interactivity or a tool that lets you capture software simulations and so on. The functionality and intended use is another important factor. Different tools have powerful capabilities for different functionalities. For instance captivate is ideal for simulations and application training. For soft skills training, Captivate wouldn’t be the best choice.

Composition of the Team: The team composition and available skill sets is another key factor affecting tool selection. You might have a full-fledged team of instructional designers who can be taught to use rapid authoring tools, or you might have trainers who are comfortable only with PowerPoint, or you might have a few developers on the team along with the instructional designers, in which case, you can do a blend of rapid tools and more traditional programming to get the best of both worlds. So, do keep in mind the technical capability of your authors. Some of them are SMEs and would have no experience in building custom interactivities that require some kind of action sequences, in which case an entry-level PowerPoint-based tool would be ideal. If you have developers on your team, you might want a tool that taps their expertise. Whatever be your training requirement, keep the limitations of your possible authors in mind when short-listing the tool.

Nature of Content: Another aspect that will affect your tool selection is how simple or complex your courseware requirements are. For simple pages with not too much of complex interactivity, you might want to consider tools that have certain in-built features such as pre-built templates that cover certain common types of trainings, such as process trainings, compliance trainings etc. If you want to develop full-fledged branching scenarios to support role plays and so on for scenario-based trainings such as is required in courses on decision making, then tools with more powerful capabilities will be your best bet. So before you buy any tool, keep in mind the intended use and the nature of the courseware. Your broad instructional design strategies should be supported by the tool.

Multilingual Requirements: In today’s global context, the need for translations is almost a given fact. Check to see if your tool allows this feature easily. Imagine if you had to rollout a process training to 10,000 employees in 13 languages within a month! Some tools make translations easy to handle.

Available Development Time: One of the biggest deciding factors is the development time. If you have very tight time-to-market for your product launches or new feature information say for your sales people, you need to consider rapid authoring tools. Any of the rapid development tools will help you cut down on development time by as much as 40% than it would through traditional programming-based course development. When you have an impending timeline and extensive rollout requirements, rapid authoring tools can help, not just by giving you the functionality to repurpose existing content in the form of PPTs or PDFs but by also helping you develop quick courses using the pre-built functionality available for assessments and content pages.

Thus, don’t be in a hurry to go and buy all tools. A mish-mash of tools could create confusion if your team is not very clear about ideal usage. Remember that even the best of tool is no substitute for good design skills. Allow consulting experts to guide your decision on what tool works best in the immediate and long run, given your unique requirements.

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Most rapid authoring tools have a mixed range of functionality when it comes to creating interactive and appealing training content. Let’s look at the pros and cons of some authoring tools that eLearning industries are using extensively for converting ILT materials to eLearning courses.

Articulate Studio ‘09

• Excellent Quiz maker.
• Easy, intuitive navigation.
• Pages load fast as there is background loading.

On the flip side, the navigation and interactivity is highly restricted, which can hinder learning.

Lectora

• Can develop multiple HTML pages simultaneously.
• Can develop simple interactive elements without the knowledge of either Flash or JavaScript.
• Can develop multi-lingual courses easily.

The flip side is that the screens load rather slowly as Lectora does not have the facility of background loading.

Adobe Captivate

• Very good for capturing screen-based simulations.
• Easy to develop interactive simulations without using Flash.
• Good collection of assessments.

On the flip side – each screen is considered an image. So, the file size is relatively high, leading to loading issues.

I would be pleased if you can share your experience with using these authoring tools to make eLearning courses better and interesting. Do also share your favorite tips on overcoming the limitations of each of these tools.

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The world is changing real fast, complex information is all over the place and software technologies are developing at warp speed. All businesses are successfully implementing the use of software applications for their work to the fullest extent possible. They are willing to shell out a significant amount of money to implement software solutions, and an equal amount simultaneously on the required software training for their employees. To achieve this, companies are increasingly using eLearning.

Among various trainings, software training through eLearning is one of the most challenging jobs as everything has to be as realistic as possible. The end users of the software/ application should understand concepts by using the developed interface. To meet these challenges, many simulations (through tools) are extensively used. Simulations enable end users to perform an action in a virtual environment, which simulates the live environment. The use of these simulations makes it very easy to understand the actual applications and build the required end-user competency.

There are specific authoring tools for developing simulations for software training such as Articulate, Captivate, Camtasia, Viewlet and many more. Each of these tools has a specific purpose and serves a specific need.

A few tips to keep in mind for the development of simulations:

• It is important to keep the interactivity for the user as real as possible.
• Each step in the process should follow the watch-try-do approach.
• A rich graphic interface has to be used for the user to be engaged.
• High-end applications require detailed steps on how to open, modify and close the files (formats).
• The simulation should give the learner the opportunity to experiment and observe the corresponding result.
• The course should include demonstrations that are close to real scenarios.
• Simulations should be repeatable so that user can replay any step.
• Embedding simulations in role-plays is a strategy that can be used for scenario-based simulations.
• High-skilled professionals are required for developing simulations as the effort and money that goes for it are valuable.
• Practice sessions should be in-built into the course for the learner to gain confidence on using the application.

The ability to develop simulations is an advanced feature of eLearning development tools. Simulations must be presented in such a way that they can be integrated and interacted with at the level of each course module. The objectives of simulations are to help end-users avoid serious mistakes while handling the applications and thereby avoiding losses for the business. Apart from this, they provide a great learning experience and hence they are gaining increasing demand.

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The traditional development process of an e-learning course needs a team of professionals that comprise Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Content Developers, Flash and Multimedia designers and programmers. In addition, it is a long process requiring around 10-15 weeks to complete. These professionals have their own roles to play with little scope for content authors to take up a designer’s or a programmer’s job. As a result, more investment and time goes into creating an e-learning course. However, with the advent of Rapid e-Learning, things have changed.

Rapid e-learning helps share expertise faster. In the traditional e-learning development process, corporate trainers have to depend on designers and programmers while building an ad hoc training program. This means higher investment, time and personnel for companies. It helps corporate trainers in this regard who can share their expertise with trainees fast by developing a training course at remarkable speed and at an unbelievably low cost without compromising on quality. Through Rapid e-learning, information can be shared much faster.

Rapid e-learning tools are easy to work with. Rapid e-learning tools like Adobe Captivate, Lectora, Articulate Presenter, etc. come with instructionally-rich templates where authors can directly write the content. They can also present interactivity exercises with the help of simulated templates. These tools are easy to learn and use. Some software allows authors to present stunning flash presentations.

Rapid e-learning helps present content to a large audience with minimal resources. In fact, Rapid e-learning is suited to projects which require to present learning content to a large number of learners. However, the resources to develop such courses are meager. It is easy to maintain the content generated through Rapid e-learning tools.

The other advantage of Rapid e-learning is that the content generated can easily be maintained, replaced or modified.

Nonetheless, Rapid e-learning too has its disadvantages. It lacks the services of an expert designer or a programmer. The critics of this concept say that Rapid e-learning misses the value which a professional designer can add. At times, authors have to compromise by using available template models. They cannot unleash their imagination to get the kind of design they want, which becomes an obstacle to their creative presentation.

In spite of these limitations, Rapid e-learning is still a buzzword among e-learning developers. This is because of its ability to contain resource utilization and help build high quality learning content.

Do share your thoughts on the same.

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Software product training using authoring tools like Captivate or Adobe Flash is an effective mode of eLearning.

Screenshots of the software acts as a raw content for developing an online course. The learner is taught on how to use the software by creating a simulated environment. The effectiveness of learning can be enhanced by using audio. Both Captivate and Flash can impart training. Let’s see, which one is more suitable.

If the software has an intuitive interface and navigation, the learner can easily learn the software by simple demonstration using Captivate, a rapid elearning tool.

If the software is complex and has multiple users and tasks, it becomes difficult for the user to learn the software, hence Adobe Flash is recommended. Some of the examples of complex software are SAP, Call Center software, Customer portals etc.

For complex software products, the effective instructional strategy is using Watch-Try-Do (WTD) approach. The strategy is to first show the operations, and then invite the learner to try and perform the required operations with some guidance and finally, allow him/her to try the operations all by themselves. This approach provides a smooth transition in learning – from watching, to trying and finally, doing the operations.

The raw content for the complex software products will be Captivate screen, describing the flow of the software, its navigation and its uses. Based on the Captivate screens, a detailed storyboard is developed to incorporate Watch-Try-Do. Using Adobe Flash, we can create WTD simulations with ease.

For both simple and complex software products, Captivate plays an important role in developing eLearning content. It helps to record screens and navigational flow of the product effectively. It also integrates audio and offers a customized interface for the learner to navigate and explore the simulation.

Share your views on using Flash and Captivate software for imparting product training.

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One of our Fortune client based in USA raised an issue regarding compatibility of AICC courses on their LMS. The courses were published using Captivate Authoring tool. The client proposed CommLab to fix this issue in the courses. Nearly 100 courses were in queue and the client was not able to launch them because of this issue.

When we took up this assignment, we were a little confused on where to start our research and how to solve this issue. On the other hand it was a very challenging task because we have to work on the coding of an authoring tool to make the courses function properly on the LMS. Earlier, we had the experience of working on coding side of another authoring tool. It was proprietary tool and the courses published by the tool ran on a particular portal. It was really a tough time to work on that tool.

To solve the Captivate issue; we planned a strategy which consists of three stages:

1. We will search for the solution in search engines with similar issues
2. We will go through the coding of Captivate course and try to fix the issue
3. We will implement our own AICC wrapper in-between the coding generated by Captivate

In our first stage, we were able to find out some information regarding AICC compatibility issue with regards to Captivate. Then in the second stage we went through the coding of the course to understand the flow of AICC and we could successfully figure out the reason for this issue.

The actual issue in the course was the AICC URL. The course was not able to get the correct AICC URL. Finally the courses worked fine on the Client LMS.

We worked on this assignment for around 8-10 hours and at the end of the project we were little happy and little disappointed. Happy because the project is closed successfully and disappointed because at the end, what we changed in the coding was just one line!!!

Actual code:
strURLParams = (strURLParams==unescape(strURLParams)?escape(strURLParams):strURLParams);

Modified code:
//strURLParams = (strURLParams==unescape(strURLParams)?escape(strURLParams):strURLParams);

On the other hand, I think we should really cheer for the success because even though it is only one line, the client was not able to launch their courses. And we helped the client to solve his problem and launch his courses.

Hope this article is helpful to you!

Cheers!

Syed Amjad Ali
Manager – Technology

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