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Microsoft released a new version of its Learning Content Development System, the free content authoring tool. The release notes show the following changes:

• E-learning created is compatible with Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.6.3.
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Media Player for animations that include closed captioning.
• Enhanced keyboard accessibility for the sort and tile games, adventure interactivity, and Voice of the Expert element.
• LCDS authoring and e-learning created are completely compatible with Microsoft Silverlight 4.0.

An interesting new feature is the possibility to create content on the “lesson” level. Previous versions did not allow this, which sometimes resulted in blank pages in the course structure when you imported the SCORM package in an LMS.

When you open a course in the new version, you will notice an option to enable the content at the lesson level:

Tip: if you don’t know which version of LCDS you are running, open LCDS and press Shift+F1.

I am running Captivate 4 on a Windows 7 64-bit operating system, and this does not seem to be a good idea; although most of the functionality works fine, I am having problems editing items in the library. E.g. when I try to edit a background with Paint or another graphics application, it opens the background, but when I save my changes, Captivate hangs. It does this consistently, and it has been confirmed as an issue by other users (see http://forums.adobe.com/message/2887534). Other users are even reporting issues with capturing 64 bit applications.

So for now, if you want to use full functionality of Captivate and you have a choice between Windows 7 32 or 64 bit, I would go for 32 bit. Lets hope that everything will be fixed in Captivate 5 or with the next update.

We experienced a serious issue in one of our Moodle platforms. Flash animations that worked before, suddenly did not appear anymore. Instead, a warning message appears stating that the Flash player used is too old.
This issue was caused by a recent upgrade to the platform. For security reasons, a new parameter was added, that forces the Moodle users to upgrade to a specific version of the Flash player.
The default in my Moodle version (1.9.7) was set to version 10.0.12, which is pretty recent. In corporate networks, users often do not have the rights to upgrade the player, so this might cause some problems.
You can set the value to an earlier version, or leave the option blank to disable the checking. The option is called Required Flash Player Version and can be found in Site Administration – Security – HTTP Security.

I was looking at the stats of my blog, and some of the most visited articles are the ones about Microsoft LCDS. A lot of people are contacting me because they have trouble publishing the LCDS content to a learning management system (e.g. to the SharePoint Learning Kit). Tom Molskov already posted a very useful comment with a procedure on how to do this, but I thought it was time for a little screencast.

This is how I do it:

1. Open your course in LCDS
2. Click the Media button in the toolbar to open the Media folder
3. In the Media window, go one level UP. This brings you in the Courses folder
4. Select all files (Ctrl+A) and add them to  a compressed folder (.zip)
5. Upload that zip file to your Learning Management System

Recently, I had to produce screencasts that needed to be published/played in a Microsoft Silverlight player. I know, most people are still using the very popular Flash format, but sometimes there are reasons why you need to use Silverlight. For instance because it needs to be published on a Microsoft platform. ;–)

The trouble is that this requires your movies to be in .wmv format. Captivate currently ony produces Flash output (of course).

If you are starting from scratch, you can use a screencasting tool that produces .wmv files directly. You can use Camtasia Studio, or Microsofts Expression Encoder 3. This will give you a nice .wmv file that you can then embed in your authoring tool, or play directly with a Silverlight player (e.g. the free one on Codeplex.).

But what if you have tons of Captivate movies ready to be published? Or if you like Captivate better than Camtasia? Well, no worries, you can follow these steps:

1. Remove the “interactive” elements from your Captivate movies. This includes buttons, playback controls, question slides, anything a user can click on. This is important, otherwise your conversion will fail.
2. Publish your project  and get the .swf file.
3. Convert the .swf file to .wmv. I used Camtasia to do that (via Import media you can import an .swf file, and publish your project as .wmv), but I heard of other people using tools like Prism to do this.
4. Integrate the .wmv in your Silverlight authoring tool or in your player.
5. Done!

You can view an example of the final result. Requires the Silverlight Player (duh!).

Any tips or tricks? Share them in the comments!