I’ve used Captivate for about a decade. Like most instructional designers, I use Captivate primarily for interactive modules. More specifically, I generally produce courses focused on software training. My content strives to represent simulated software fluidly and accurately, and Captivate does a great job of handling the interactivity, variables, and advanced actions I need to create good products. I’ve also used Captivate to record videos. For about two years, I exclusively used Captivate to produce short videos for software demos. […]
Folks under the umbrella of training are tasked with solving problems. Maybe some key metric isn’t being met or an action is resulting in undesired outcomes. Developing strategies to optimize performance is really the bread and butter of our job. We absolutely love identifying problems, creating targeted interventions, and seeing behavior change. But often, that’s not what we’re asked to do. Instead, we routinely field solution proposals. “We need a 2-hour workshop for ABC,” or, “They need to be retrained […]
When my oldest child was around two, we’d play a bit of a game. His environment was a highly prepared one: clean, organized, and thematically arranged. When he napped, I’d often swap the locations of two toys or put a novel object on a shelf with a familiar one. Each time, he noticed immediately and was drawn to the change. Developmental psychologists have noted in several studies that children employ this sort of world-focused attention. They pay attention to everything […]
“It’s not supposed to be fun. We aren’t Google.” I had recently completed an interactive training module to highlight features of a new workflow organizer my company was rolling out when I was hit with that gem. I wasn’t surprised to hear that not everyone likes their work to also be fun, but I was surprised to hear a professional trainer attest to the evils of fun in a training product. Even more perplexing was the comparison to one of the […]
