Intro

In a previous article I explained the ‘rules’ I keep in mind for any training class independent of the situation: live class training, online class training, personalized training. I have been teaching in a university college for many years. The rules are based on my hands-on experiences in the first place, what I learned from my students. You may be wondering how I used an eLearning authoring tool within a traditional education situation? Or, as come members  from the Captivate team ask me, why am I so passionate about Captivate?  After the discovery of the WWW (was one of the first women in Belgium on it) and a LMS, Captivate has been for me the most flexible, multifeatured tool to enable me to improve the efficiency of the learning cycle for my students.  Explaining the situations in which I used it in college can prove this.

Teacher frustrations 

Good/excellent teachers in formal education have a problem. After each live session, the majority of the students are leaving the classroom happy to have understood most of what has been explained. Result: they do not bother to add more personal hours to ‘digest’ the content.  Usually the schedule is set to weekly sessions about a topic. Week later students return and have forgotten most of what they learned. This is especially critical for subjects where skills are built, which is the case for software training without any doubt.  I was persuaded that I had to increase their engagement, a feeling of responsibility for their learning. How?

Searching for a solution everywhere made me discover an article about ‘Captivate’, described as a wonderful tool for creation of software tutorials (was version 1 , still owned by Macromedia). I could purchase an education version and started exploring.

Setup Flipped Class

First idea was to offer software simulations in demo mode to the students after the live class where those workflows  were treated. That was no success. I switched to software sims in Training mode and that was already a better approach, even assessments were liked by some students. However the ‘lazy’ students didn’t bother to watch those sims.

I decided to reverse the situation, and to make the classes more ‘personalized’ to increase student’s engagement. The workflow simulations were posted on the LMS before the live class session. Students were asked to view the tutorials, and to bring their projects to the classroom. Class time was spent on solving their problems, increasing their skills learned from the simulations while practicing on their personal projects.  Later on I learned that this method was indicated as ‘Flipped Class’.

The described workflow was possible for most software applications in my teaching tasks, two examples:

1. Real Estate department: they had Photoshop classes.  Goal was to improve images of buildings to be sold. They also learned mostly to handle their cameras or phones in a better way.
2. Construction department: Project management classes, using MS Project. They all were in contact with a Building company, following up one building site. Perfectly possible to bring data to be worked on with MS Project.

I encouraged discussions about the tutorials using not only the LMS discussion groups but also Twitter as channel. Treshold to Twitter was lower, could be used from any device. One great advantage: due to the limited number of characters to be used in a tweet, the student had to reflect on their statements and questions.

Of course I expected complaints from the less motivated students.  The natural sense of competition of the increased freedom in the classroom however (I always encouraged peer discussions) did lead to a better result with this system. Not for all students, that is almost impossible.  During one exam for Photoshop I had the most rewarding experience: the big majority of the students were enjoying their tasks, some were smiling because they had gained a lot of confidence.

What had started with using Captivate version 1 only for software simulations, gradually spread in my workflows to using Captivate for theoretical tutorials as well.  I switched from using a presentation tool to Captivate as presentation tool. Instead of a written courses, they got the presentations as interactive tutorials. In some instances I embedded Captivate interactive simulations in InDesign (no longer possible now) where the necessary textual explanations were added.

I am no longer in college, too bad. With CP2019 I would have had the possibility to use 360 slides with hotspots and quiz overlay slides. The Indesign/Captivate combination could be replaced by Interactive Video.

More recently we had many students coming for one or two semesters from other European countries with the Erasmus programme (Spain, Germany, UK, France, Wallonia).  Big advantage of those software simulations was the easy way to localize them in other languages, provided the application was used in the same language (English mostly). Much easier then having to translate long course texts.

‘Distant learning’ students were working adults, who were not attending classes, only had some meeting days. That used to be a big problem with digital skills like the use of Photoshop or MS Project. The Captivate simulations and other assets were a big improvement for those students.

More?

This post described my first experiments using Captivate assets for class training. Referring to the guidelines in my first article, flipped classes are a way of giving more responsibility to the learner,  more personalized training is possible. For the ‘normal’ students visiting all live classes, peer collaboration was encouraged. However for the ‘distant learning’ students the component of social learning failed.

In a future article I will describe the use of Captivate assets for problem-based learning, which proved to be even more efficient than flipped classes.

As a last post I want to describe how I am now using my insights and guidelines for online personalized Captivate training: circle is finished, started with Captivate and gets back to Captivate.