OK folks! It’s been longer than a week (blame the Polar Vortex, everybody else does ; ). Here’s the follow-up to the original post about publishing Adobe Captivate 7 e-learning modules on HTML5 (not Flash) to the web.
The Not So Great…
This is a quick look at what Adobe needs to pay attention to for a better user experience.
Module Navigation
One of the great features we can offer adult e-learners is the freedom to navigate anywhere they would like on your course. Unfortunately, there were instances where the Table of Contents (TOC) did not respond to clicks although it did display formatting changes when a user would hover with their cursor on any given section (BTW, yes I did enabled navigation on the module settings). The Flash version works like a dream but, this limits you to watch the module on Flash-supporting devices which means no m-learning for you : (
Development Overhead
Sorry, I could not come up with a more clever heading for this section. However, what I mean by it is that you have to set some time aside to configure Captivate 7 by templates so you can truly rip its benefits; otherwise you will find yourself backtracking or manually editing fonts, captions, skin overlays and customized controls which can add hours to your production time. In this scenario, the purpose was to give the user a choice for a “host” between Wendy and David which was programmed through Advanced Actions to just show the user the selected host from there on. To achieve this in Captivate 7 you would have to come up which additional programming or custom ActionScript 3.0 and remove the navigation controls to keep the user from seeing the same slide content twice i.e. once with David and once with Wendy. Who has time for that?Achieving this is way easier in Articulate Storyline.
The Great Stuff!
Now that we vented out the not so great stuff, here’s what rocks about Captivate 7:
Widgets abound- In previous versions you had to program timer slides or other trainer timing aids. Now, they are included and FREE!
Built in interaction slides- YES, this is a super cool feature, something less to build from scratch. It bears to mention that “Drag-n-Drop” interactions are available out-of-the-box too.
In Closing…
Adobe Captivate has come a long way and it has been the king of authoring tools for
end-users since its creation. Captivate 7 still shows some of that greatness but, there are some technical issues to overcome. This is not to say that Articulate Storyline (in fact, I’ll be testing it shortly) is glitch-free but, in fast-paced environments (which is pretty much any company nowadays) instructional designers need tools that can enable the most interactivity with less development overhead.
