Training: Simulations made easy with Adobe Captivate 5.5: Best practices – Part 2

May 25, 2012

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 FMRUnderstand the best practices of doing Narration and editing the narrationUnderstand the best practices of using PanningPublishing the captured projects to final output

To Register: http://adobe.ly/KT7gUv

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Training: Adobe Photoshop basics for Adobe Captivate 5.5 users – Part 1

February 29, 2012

Date and time: Thursday, March 8, 2012 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM US/Pacific

Description: Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh to learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop for creating and editing images/assets for Adobe Captivate 5.5. This is the first part of 2 part series wherein we will discuss different techniques used in creating and managing the image assets.

What’s in it for you?

After attending the session, you will be able to:

Export the Captured images from Adobe Captivate for editing, edit it in Adobe Photoshop, and import it back into Adobe CaptivateUnderstand the image and canvas dimensionsCreate backgrounds using different tools available in Adobe PhotoshopCreate image masks to edit the imagesCreate Transparent PNGs to be used inside Adobe Photoshop

To Register: http://adobe.ly/z3GWyK

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Training: Adobe Photoshop basics for Adobe Captivate 5.5 users – Part 2

February 29, 2012

Date and time: Thursday, March 22, 2012 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM US/Pacific

Description: Join Vish and Dr. Pooja Jaising to learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop for creating and editing images/assets for Adobe Captivate 5.5. This is the second part of 2 part series wherein we will discuss different techniques used in creating and managing the image assets.What’s in it for you?

After attending the session, you will be able to:

Create graphics to be used as buttons in Adobe CaptivateCreate graphics to be used as Text Caption BackgroundsUnderstand and create layer compsUse the layer comps in Adobe Captivate for various layouts

To Register: http://adobe.ly/zjHYlu

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Text-to-Speech in Adobe Captivate 5.5 – Create and Reuse!

April 23, 2012

There are different ways of adding audio to an eLearning project in Adobe Captivate 5.5 and one of the ways is to convert Text to Audio with the powerful functionality of  Text-to-Speech in Adobe Captivate. As I was thinking about it, a thread in LinkedIn drew my attention, that talked about creating Text-to-Speech audio and then reusing that audio in a different project. Leslie Bivens, an Adobe Captivate Expert, has added her comments with a solution and I thought of creating a tutorial based on that… Thank you Leslie

Watch this video to understand more about how to create Text-to-Speech and reuse it in Adobe Captivate.

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Quiz Reports in Course Companion for Adobe Captivate

February 20, 2012

I hope many of you have already tried the course companion by now and have taken a look at the Dashboard. In my previous blog, I explained the concept of Progress Index. In this blog, I will explain the Quiz reports that you can access by clicking the Quiz tab on the Dashboard. Quiz reports provide insight in to how learners are performing in the quiz included in a course.

With the quiz reports you can analyze the learners’ performance in quiz and find out:

The questions which many learners are skipping or answering incorrectly. This metric gives you a hint about the topics in the content which people haven’t really understood well.The average quiz score. This metric is an indicator of overall performance of the course. A high average quiz score generally indicates that the course has been received or understood well by the learners.The ‘differentiator’ questions — the questions that differentiate top performers from average performers.Overall summary of quiz performance such as number of learners who have scored below the average quiz score, number of learners failing the quiz etc

Question details graph

This graph shows how learners have performed in each of the questions. Each question is represented by a bar in the graph. For each question, the graph shows how many learners have answered it correctly (green part of the bar), how many answered it wrongly (red part of the bar) and how many skipped it (black part of the bar). You may hover on each of the question bar to see the exact number of learners who skipped the question or answered it correctly or wrongly.
Just adjacent to the graph,you can see two pie charts on Quiz Status and Question Status. Quiz status graph shows the percentage of learners who have:
• Passed the quiz (green part of the pie),
• Failed the quiz (red part of the pie)
• Not attempted the quiz (black part of the pie).
Question status graph shows the above details for every question that you select in the Question Details graph. i.
Hover on each part of the pie chart to see the exact percentage numbers.

Learner List graph

The learner list shows a list of all the learners who have taken this course. Each learner is represented by a bar, and the learners are sorted in ascending order of their quiz scores. A failed learner is represented by red bar and a passed one by green bar.
You can increase or decrease the number of learners visible in this graph using the “No of Learners” slider above the graph. If you select any learner in this graph, the question details graph will reflect the quiz performance of the selected learner alone. Hover on each bar to get some more information such as quiz score, number of sittings etc.

Quiz Summary

This report shows a summary of the quiz. The summary includes Average quiz score, learners with below average score, question with maximum correct answer etc.

You can download and read more about the Course companion for Adobe Captivate at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_course/

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Adobe eLearning Evangelist Allen Partridge on #eLearnChat: Captivate to HTML5, iPad, iOS, Mobile, facebook, Community & Secret Behind the Scenes Sneaks

February 24, 2012

In case you missed it, below is the video of my eLearnChat interview with Rick Zanotti and Jean Franzblau. Watch it for a number off great surprises, including ‘what I do in my spare time,’ a sneak of the amazing performance and Advanced Action support in the next generation of Captivate to HTML5 output, thoughts about our amazing 21,000 people and growing fast facebook following for Adobe Captivate, and why we’re embracing the stream. It was a great chance to catch up with Rick and Jean and I hope you’ll find some great info and ideas to guide your eLearning journey.

Join Jean and Rick as they host Dr. Allen Partridge, eLearning evangelist at Adobe. Allen shares the latest in HTML5 development for Captivate, reveals the winners of the HTML5 contest and shares all of the resources on eLeanring provided by Adobe. We even see Allen's artistic side as he shares some digital paintings he made.

Here’s a hot list of the links I gave during the show.
Captivate demo projects people can play with:
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/adobe-captivate-presenter-elearning-suite-examples

Captivate facebook community, NOW more than 20K and still growing like gangbusters
http://www.facebook.com/adobecaptivate/

Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/

Introduction to cognitive theory of Multimedia eLearning

http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2011/11/the-principles-of-elearning-cognitive-theory-of-multimedia-design.html

Adobe TV: Elearning Channel
http://tv.adobe.com/channel/e-learning/show/featured/

AdobeElearning on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/adobeelearning/

Rapid eLearning on MemoLane
http://memolane.com/shanhassa/Rapid%20eLearning%20Resources

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Let the image dance for your tunes… Image Slideshows with audio using Adobe Captivate 5.5

February 11, 2012

One of my favorite feature in Audio Editing dialog is, starting the next slide at a specific location at the audio waveform… just have to click ‘Select next slide at the cursor position’ button or simply press Ctrl+S or Cmd+S. Are you wondering what’s the fun? The fun begins when you want to play the pictures of an Image Slideshow according to the beats of an audio. What am I talking about? Watch the video below and see how the images change according to the music.

How did I achieve this?

The logic behind is simple… whenever we press Cmd+S or Ctrl+S when we are in Audio dialog the next slide starts at the cursor position. What you need to do is, play the audio, press the key whenever you feel the next slide needs to appear. Watch the demo below which explains step-by-step how to achieve this.

Hope you enjoyed this… please let me know your thoughts!

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Audition Roundtripping with Adobe Captivate 5.5

June 24, 2011

In my last blog post, we saw a demonstration on how to remove the noise and normalize audio with Adobe Audition 5.5. We also looked how to get the audio from Captivate to Audition, edit it in Audition and then bring the edited audio back to Captivate. Now it’s time to look at all the possibilities of Audition roundtripping… So, sit back and view this short demonstration on Audition roundtripping with Adobe Captivate 5.5!

Please let us know if you have any questions related to Audition roundtripping by leaving a comment on this blog post.

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Adding Multiple Click-based Animations on a Screen with Adobe Captivate 5

May 24, 2011

You are creating a simulation-based course and you need to demonstrate a couple of related workflows which include just about six to eight steps each. You are not convinced to create separate screens for such small demonstrations. So, what should you do?

Looks like you need a screen where you can include all these simulations which play on-demand, one at a time. Let’s learn how to create such a screen.

Here’s an example for you… There is one common animation area and five different buttons that trigger the animation. Notice that the animation plays from the starting frame every time you click the related button.

And here’s how you can create such a screen:

Let me know if you found this post useful or have any questions by leaving a comment on this post.

Happy Captivating!

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eSeminar now on demand: Rapid Animation Generation for Avatar Personalization in Adobe Captivate 5 Projects

April 21, 2011

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 session in Adobe Connect, did Captures with Adobe Captivate Full Motion Recording of Linden Labs Second Life and ran a browser for good measure.

Included below is the slide deck for the presentation, also available here via the link with the embedded text. As i mentioned during the session, the notes regarding the efficacy of personalization via avatar inclusion are on the downloadable slide deck here.

One of the more interesting considerations in this regard is what impact the avatar animation will have on learning. Studies related to this topic show that while the animation adds to the interest the learner may have in the content – the animation alone is not sufficient to lead to improved learning. So we have a couple of natural topics that emerge.

Perception: people will prefer the content with animation and slick graphics – if it is efficient and on topic.Learning: people will learn more when the animation is on topic. The theory behind this has to do with how we engage as conversationalists more than any other element.

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So should you do animation? When should you do animation. I recommend that you consider animation when you are working on creating engaging interactions that facilitate knowledge transfer by creating recognizable mimetic (story / scene) elements for the learner. If you are training workplace safety for an aquarium, having images of events happen in an aquarium will trigger better long term retention for the staff engaged in the training. Same is true for virtually any contextual information. Since most of the critical training we do is context-sensitive – the call for such images are frequent.

One limitation of stock photography and similar resources is that you often cannot find images that perfectly suit the context of the learning – and its conceivable that these limitations can decrease knowledge transfer. The eSeminar this week focused on using free animation / world creation software to build such context rapidly and at very low costs compared to other animation solutions. You’ll find the link to the seminar below.

LINK: Here is the LINK to the on demand version of the eSeminar.

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Workaround for video streaming issues in Captivate

March 31, 2011

Problem: 

Videos do not get streamed in Adobe Captivate projects.

 Reason:

The URIs of the videos are specified incorrectly.

Solution:

The format of the URI depends on how the FLV or F4V file is nested within the ‘App’ folder on the server. The first two sections in this article explain the URI formats when the video files are placed directly under the App folder. The last section explains URI formats in scenarios where the files are placed within subfolders in the App folder.

Streaming FLV videosStreaming F4V videosVariations in the URI formats

Note: The format of the URI depends on how the FLV file is nested within the App folder. See this article for more information.

Example:

rtmp://mydomain.com/vod/spring.flv

 After you insert the video, the Property inspector for the FLV object looks like this:

Important: The stream name for F4V videos should be prefixed with “mp4:”

Example:

rtmp://mydomain.com/vod/mp4:autumn.f4v

 After inserting the video, the Property inspector of the F4V object looks like this:

Sometimes servers can be configured such that the sub folders can be present in the instance directory, in such cases the URI format is as shown below

 

 In such cases, the folder or the file name after the instance name, must be prefixed with “mp4:” .

Example:If “my_fms” is the instance name:

rtmp://mydomain.com/vod/my_fms/mp4:subFolder/F4vName.f4vrtmp://mydomain.com/vod/my_fms/mp4: autumn.f4v

In such cases, the Property Inspector is not populated automatically with the correct data. So, after inserting the video, specify the correct stream name and the server URI in the Property Inspector.

Here is how the Property Inspector should look:

2.   If  no instance names are present, then the default instance name must be used by specifying “_definst_” after the “AppName” as shown below:

Sfolder1 is the name of the sub folder where the FLV is present.

FLVName is the name of the FLV without the extension.

Example:rtmp://mydomain.com/vod/_definst_/testfolder/testFLV

 In such cases, the Property Inspector is not populated automatically with the correct data. So, after inserting the video, specify the correct stream name and the server URI in the Property Inspector.

Here is how the Property Inspector should look:

View the original article here