Captive Thoughts from ASTD eLearning SIG
Last evening, I attended the ASTD (Cascadia) eLearning SIG (special interest group), the topic of which was "What's New With Captivate." Over the last several years with my focus on eLearning, I have endured many a product walkthrough, and while almost all off-the-shelf products offer discreet features that are attractive, I've continued to come back to custom courseware for its overall design flexibility and interactivity. Most tools have limited interactivity and design options are limiting. But I must admit I was wooed by Adobe Captivate. This is the same Captivate that began as a competing product to Camtasia Studio, which is ostensibly a screen capture and product demo software package. That's what Captivate was as well--that is, until Adobe gobbled up Macromedia and said, hmmm, what are the best features of Captivate and Macromedia Breeze, and how can we build on these?
You won't be surprised that Captivate is well-integrated with Flash, and design tools within Captivate will be very familiar to the Flash designer. But one of the more interesting aspects of the product is its support for "branching," which effectively allows the instructional designer to build in a "choose your own adventure" effect to the course, letting the learner explore nodes and discover the correct path. The branching view in the product is similarly impressive and easily editable in this view:
Slick navigation controls can easily be created in Flash, and the ability to layer and tuck in interactive controls is seemingly endless. I was also impressed by the library feature, which is a handy way to organize all of the project assets...and in the event that images are reused, the file size only hits the project once. Likewise, the interactions view is a single page view of all the interactions in the course, points associated with the interactions, SCORM tracking requirements, etc.
There are multiple ways to view and edit content, but the storyboard view is one of the more valuable. In this view, all slides or screens are visible as thumbnails and can easily be reordered or exported for sharing with the client.
All of which brings me back to the developer's conundrum: when does it make sense to design a custom course and when should the developer embrace existing technology like this to do it cheaper and faster...and in some respects, better? It all comes back to the client objectives, right? But as course designers, we'd better know what's out there, and out there, Captivate is breaking away from the pack.
Resources:
You won't be surprised that Captivate is well-integrated with Flash, and design tools within Captivate will be very familiar to the Flash designer. But one of the more interesting aspects of the product is its support for "branching," which effectively allows the instructional designer to build in a "choose your own adventure" effect to the course, letting the learner explore nodes and discover the correct path. The branching view in the product is similarly impressive and easily editable in this view:
Slick navigation controls can easily be created in Flash, and the ability to layer and tuck in interactive controls is seemingly endless. I was also impressed by the library feature, which is a handy way to organize all of the project assets...and in the event that images are reused, the file size only hits the project once. Likewise, the interactions view is a single page view of all the interactions in the course, points associated with the interactions, SCORM tracking requirements, etc.
There are multiple ways to view and edit content, but the storyboard view is one of the more valuable. In this view, all slides or screens are visible as thumbnails and can easily be reordered or exported for sharing with the client.
All of which brings me back to the developer's conundrum: when does it make sense to design a custom course and when should the developer embrace existing technology like this to do it cheaper and faster...and in some respects, better? It all comes back to the client objectives, right? But as course designers, we'd better know what's out there, and out there, Captivate is breaking away from the pack.
Resources:
Labels: Adobe Captivate, ASTD, custom courseware, e-learning
posted by David Martin at
8:55 AM
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