Captivate – Mylearning.be

Book: Adobe Captivate 7 for Mobile Learning

People are often asking me if I can recommend good study material about Adobe Captivate 7. Of course, there is a lot of “free” material available on the web, especially from the Adobe site, but it is not always easy to get a full, structured overview of what is the best way to use the program to its full potential.

Recently, I had the opportunity to review Adobe Captivate 7 for Mobile Learning, written by Damien Bruyndocnkx. The title indicates that the book was written with a specific focus on the use of Captivate for Mobile Learning, but it is also a good introduction for people who are just getting started with the program and want to create animations and simulations that will just be published to pc. If you are creating e-learning content today, it is in your best interest to go directly for a “mobile-friendly” format, as you will get the question anyway to make your content available on iPad or other devices.

The book is really “hands-on”, with practical step-by-step exercise and does not just explain the features of the program, but teaches you the optimal “workflow” to produce Captivate content. This is what makes this book stand out from some others that are just explaining what the different buttons in the program do.

The book is available in e-book and paper format. Table of contents and sample chapters are available.

What if Captivate 6 or 7 sends zero-scores to your LMS?

Recently, we ran into an issue with a piece of Captivate 6 content in our LMS. Although the content did not contain any quizzes, the content sent a score of 0 to the LMS, messing up the reporting.

We had a look at the reporting settings in Captivate, these were the settings used:

If you use these settings, the content communicates the following to your LMS:

[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.raw”, “0”)
[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.max”, “0”)
[2013-06-16 09:15:49] LMSSetValue(“cmi.core.score.min”, “0”)

Strangely enough, the solution is very simple: under Data to Report, you change the option Quiz Score to Percentage. This stops sending cmi.core.score values to the LMS. You would expect that this setting has no importance because you specified that you do not want to track the Quiz, but it does make a difference.

I have noticed exactly the same behaviour in Captivate 7.

iBooks, the future of course material?

If you are in the training and learning business, you know that course material always has been the subject of many discussions. Some say it is necessary, others say that they are never used, but most students want “a manual”. Entire forests disappeared because of it, the added value of it is uncertain.

What if you could avoid using paper, and make the manual really deliver added value? I spent some time playing with iBooks author, a manual in Word format about an IT application, and Adobe Captivate software demo’s, to see if this could be a valuable alternative.

The workflow to replace all your paper based manuals by this solution would be:

Get yourself a Mac :–)
Get yourself an iPad if you want to preview your iBooks
Download a copy of iBooks author
Import your Word document into iBooks author
Publish your Captivate demo’s as .mp4 (standard publish function in CP 5 and higher)
Convert your .mp4 files to .m4v with QuickTime
Insert the demos in your iBook using the Media widget
Add some interactivity if necessary, e.g. multiple choice questions
Publish your project
Distribute your iBook (via the store or as a file)
Get an iPad for all your students :–)

I will let you judge for yourself. This is the result:

How to publish a Captivate project to a SharePoint site

Microsoft SharePoint is an interesting platform if you quickly want to publish your e-learning content. These are the steps to publish an Adobe Captivate project to a SharePoint site:

1. Publish your Captivate project as Flash(SWF), and make sure that you have the option Export to html checked. This will produce a set of files: a .html file, a .swf file and a .js file.

2. Upload these files into a document library on a SharePoint site. You can start your project by clicking on the .html file.
If you are running SharePoint 2010 and the file does not open, you might need to change a security setting in SharePoint. Also, SharePoint has a default file size limit of 50 MB. Your system administrator can increase this limit.

3. Optional, but recommended: to make it easier for your users to start your course, you can include a link to the .html file on the home page of your site.

Watch the demonstration below for more detailed instructions:

Adobe Captivate and SharePoint Learning Kit

The SharePoint Learning Kit is a lightweight LMS module that can make your SharePoint site a mini-LMS. Especially together with Windows SharePoint Services, it is a very cost-effective way to distribute e-learning content in your organisation with a minimum of “tracking”.

Of course, you do not get the very detailed reporting a true Learning Management System offers, but you can track progress (not attempted, in progress, completed), track score of a test, assign learning content to users or usergroups, and grade tests manually. Your content needs to be SCORM-conformant, as the SLK uses the SCORM API for communication between content and LMS.

The SharePoint Learning Kit is a feature that needs to be deployed on your farm, assigned to a web application, and gives you a feature that you can activate on a site level. It includes an “assignment” web part that instructors and learners use to assign, follow and grade content.

I had some trouble getting Adobe Captivate content to communicate with the SLK, I did not get the scores from a test. Finally, I found this article. In the .HTM file that is generated by Captivate, you can tune and tweak some scorm parameters. Changing var g_intAPIOrder = 0; from 0 to 1 does the trick for the SLK.