My first Captivate Project!

I don’t feel I have a lot to contribute – most of the blogs featured here are written by eLearning professionals or Adobe Evangelists whereas I am a total beginner.

The following is my first experience using Captivate:-

I didn’t have a clue where to start but I had a deadline – approximately 3 weeks and no prior knowledge (not even PowerPoint)!

Pre-production
I created a storyboard for the workshop including all the elements and the order to introduce them. I wanted the content to be, as much as possible, engaging, interactive and self-paced. Having previously delivered this type of content to young learners I know how difficult it is to engage them.

Project type
Accessibility was the main priority, with so many learners needing to access the course it made sense to deliver on multiple screens. So I chose a Responsive Project – suitable for all devices.

Publishing
The project was going to be up loaded to and accessed via Moodle our LMS.

Problems I encountered:-

Adding a videos to my project
I linked to a YouTube film by inserting a learning interaction into my slide but struggled to make it work. After some Googling I discovered a YouTubeFixed widget so I downloaded and used this instead. I had to set the slide to Pause so that the film would have time to play before the slide ended. However, this meant that I needed the Playback Control bar to be present for the user to move on the the next slide once the film ended. I would have preferred to have a hidden next button revealed once the film finished playing but didn’t have enough time to experiment with this. Also, I wasn’t sure whether to embed the films but I was concerned that this would make the final project too big.

Hyperlinks
I needed to include 3 hyperlinks to different URLs, however, only 1 of the hyperlinks worked even though I followed the same process for all 3. I even deleted a slide and rebuilt it but still couldn’t get the link to work. I had to put a transparent button over the top of the text as a work-around.

Text formatting
I had to put each paragraph in a separate text caption, otherwise, if I made 1 character bold or italicised this formatting was applied to everything, which I found really frustrating and limiting.

Publishing
I published as an HTML5 SCORM-compliant package. When I uploaded to Moodle the results weren’t as I expected – the content wasn’t displaying correctly. I was told by one of the the Information Technologists that there were known conflicts causing problems. The project had to be uploaded outside of Moodle.

After testing across all screens I opted to create a separate simplified mobile friendly version but in the end I decided against it altogether as I felt it was too compromised compared with the desktop version. I was testing on my iPhone SE and it was just too small for the type of content I was delivering.

I didn’t have enough time to experiment and familiarise myself with the software and its myriad tools and functions. However, I was pleased with the project that I constructed under a tight time constraint. I really enjoyed creating in Captivate and I am looking forward to developing my skills and knowledge for future projects and sharing what I have learned with colleagues.