Looking for opinions and ideas to re-acquaint with Captivate and re-ignite my instructional design career.
I learned to use Captivate before it was an Adobe product. For 2 years, I used it to generate a wide variety of learning content for a sprawling marketing agency in Chicago. The client programs I served ranged from pet food, to golf clubs, to wine & credit cards (ugh). I found it genuinely rewarding and entertaining as I appreciated the variety, and the challenge of processing fresh subject matter on a regular basis. Like many of you, I get bored easily.
Fast forward many years later and I am now re-learning to use this authoring software as I re-boot my instructional design career in hopes of capitalizing on the opportunity to work remotely / from home. There are so many high-quality instructional designer positions available right now and I would prefer to keep my own hours and work from (wherever).
I’ve watched a handful of (YT) videos and am trying my best to get up to speed with what is now a far more powerful and complex platform than what I used to know (hopefully less buggy, too).
Am looking for informed opinions that can steer me in the right direction to efficiently and effectively re-acquainting with Captivate. I am currently 100% fluent in power point, do lots of narration, have good video editing skills and love to tell stories and connect with learners.
Suggestions are welcomed and appreciated!
As someone who creates YouTube tutorials, I can tell you that they are bite-sized training solutions and not what I recommend for someone who essentially has to start from scratch. However, if you are googling how to do a single thing in Captivate, they can be an excellent just-in-time solution.
Captivate is an entirely different product today. My advice would be to take a complete course on Adobe Captivate 2019. There has never been a better time to enroll in the Adobe Certified Professional: Adobe Captivate program. Due to the upcoming new release, Adobe is offering FREE access to the new online training curriculum when it becomes available to those who enroll right now. https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/captivate/certificate.html
Quite a long time ago, I also used Captivate when it was still Macromedia. However I stayed with it, and watched it grow into a very powerful authoring tool compared with those days.
You ask a difficult question, I do hesitate to answer since you seem like most people to look only for YT passive videos. Since that platform is not curated, you’ll find great videos but also a lot of crap or even confusing ones. Personally I have a personal blog since 2009 where I focus on use cases, and most of them have example interactive output courses from Captivate. Probably not what you are looking for. Since this portal was created a couple of years ago, some of those posts are also duplicated here. You may be interested to see how Themes simplified design processes, how the Timeline is used for interactivity, how to create responsive projects, interactive videos, use advanced/shared actions and integrate Javascript. Many older ‘objects’ have been replaced by more flexible objects. Typical example are text captions and buttons which can be replaced by one very flexible shape, acting both as text container and interactive object. I definitely recommend to have a look at multistate objects because they offer great ways to simplify workflows. Not to forget the ability to use SVGs. Just a small summary of newer features of Captivate but certainly not complete (VR not mentioned). The roundtripping with Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition is to me very important but I am an active user of many Adobe applications (having taught Photoshop for decades).
Using version 11.5 or later will give you the Assets panel, where you’ll find not only simple assets (audio, video, images, SVGs…) but also example projects (Quick Start Projects) which you could explore. They can be edited to suit your goals.
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