The robot voice is the quickest and easiest way to lose the viewer’s attention, especially when it’s just playing “powerpoint karaoke” and reading the words on the screen

It depends on the culture of the organization, of course, but I’ve always enjoyed adding more personality into scripts and narration. Silly jokes, puns, less-than-formal tone. It reminds the viewer that there are real people behind the content, trying to connect with them.

Welcome to the field!

I am also newer to the field and have a background in education. I have a simple mantra I like to follow “What would I like the learner to do”. I find when I follow this motto, I can’t go wrong. I try to steer away from doing things just to do them and try to focus on meaningful learning experiences. I hope this helps.

I think a few of the most interesting things that Adobe Captivate can do to capture audience attention is the interactive quizzes and movement.  With careful layering and integration of effects in your timeline, you can have photos, texts, and illustrations move, appear, and disappear on and off the screen.  This almost gives the perception of animation.  You can tailor it really specific to your narration, so that each visual can greatly compliment the ideas you’re trying to convey.  Having an organic voice is very important to an Adobe Captivate project.  I’d definitely recommend using a human voice and using the audio functions within the software to create a seamless narration that’s organic and engaging.  Quizzes can be very engaging and interactive, if used in a way that relates to the course material in a new and novel way.  For example, I created a course on Personal Protection Equipment for timber harvesters.  For my quiz, I used drag and drop.  I had the outline of a person, and safety equipment scattered in a corner of the screen.  Students dragged items like steel-toed boots, hard-hats, and eye protection onto the correct area of the “logger” and it clicked into place.  While it may seem a bit elementary, this action reinforces the real-life action of putting on your PPE each morning for work.  Getting creative with quiz options within Adobe Captivate can really reinforce concepts in unique and fun ways.

Since you are a teacher, you don’t start as a dummy at all! Less than 20 years ago, I discovered Captivate as eLearning tool, while I was a professor in college looking for ways to innovate teaching and learning assets. It has been a long, sometimes steep but rewarding learning journey.  I totally agree that at this moment most courses are either ‘bling bling’ (Dutch word for ‘eye candy’) or simply boring.  The fact that a majority of eLearning developers still believe that an eLearning course is like a bullet-filled PPT presentation, that their pedagogical experience is very limited and budgets are tight may be some of the causes.

Captivate has NO default template at all, that is a misunderstanding. It is theme-based and you can develop a theme for a company, one course, or a group of courses. Design taste differs depending on the country and the audience you need to reach.  Personally I don’t believe in learning which is limited to just watching online courses at all, certainly not if they are boring or just passive video. The ideal situation is blended learning, but collaboration with a good Learning Management System and social media can at least replace some of the factors needed to replace the missing elements which you have in blended learning where F2F is combined with eLearning. It is saddening that the present pandemic situations didn’t ring a bell in formal education (at least not here in Belgium).

I didn’t answer your question directly. The interactive courses which I developed in college to replace a written course and lecture hall, in favor of project-based learning, have disappeared after my retirement. Too much work to keep them updated…one of the proclaimed reasons. No one can take away my happiness when I remember how students were spending over 40 hours a week on the campus absorbed by their project goals, and spending lot of time teaching their peers.

Tips? Take advantage of your existing skills, of the empathic attitude you have developed in your previous career. Take time to learn manipulating a tool, but know that even the best tool can only lead to an excellent result (efficient learning) in the hands of a good learning coach. Your frustration with existing courses prove it, and some tools sacrifice a lot to make them ‘intuitive’.

If you want to talk online, you can contact me (using my website form). No commitment at all, I am just happy to welcome and help.

At this moment I try to help Captivate users, solving problems, publishing tutorials, blog posts, interactive videos…