Steve Howard

Magnolia Multimedia

I've been developing with Authorware for almost 10 years and it seems that training development can be separated into two general groups:

• Highly interactive content, requiring skilled developer input and lots of coding
• Light-weight content, requiring less-skilled developers and minimal amounts of coding

You will find many gray areas in between those two extremes, and Adobe Authorware has been a popular tool over the years for developing content across the full range of those extremes. The software is particularly good at making it possible to create highly interactive content with the barest amount of coding. Authorware, however, has not seen a new developer release since Authorware 7 in 2003, so many companies are considering their options and looking at other tools.

I was recently approached by a client who wanted to add new tools to the company's training processes. Specifically they wanted their instructional designers and their end users to be able to create the training content with minimal involvement from skilled (and expensive) developers.

The client mentioned Adobe Captivate. I had not looked at Adobe Captivate since version 1, so I had to check out the latest version to see what it could do. Until my client brought it to my attention, I thought Adobe Captivate was still a screen capture tool with a few extra tricks up its sleeve, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Adobe Captivate has advanced a long way since then. I was also lucky enough to be invited to test the Adobe Captivate 3 beta, and discovered even more power for both inexperienced and advanced users. Suddenly, it looked like it might fit the bill for their needs.

This article discusses features in Adobe Captivate that make it a great e-learning tool for people who don't want to learn coding. I'll also discuss features that I think make it a great tool for everyone, whether they like to code or not.

Requirements

Adobe Captivate 3

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

You don't need any prior knowledge of Adobe Captivate. A working knowledge of Authorware, LMSs, and other general e-learning technologies is useful, but not essential.

An overview of Adobe Captivate

Contrary to what many of us in the e-learning community still believe, Adobe Captivate is now much more than a simple screen capture tool.

In addition to capturing screen content and events, both as stills and as Flash animations, Adobe Captivate can automatically add captions. This is one of the most attractive features to new users. As you capture screen events, Adobe Captivate automatically creates captions and instructions that follow the steps you take. The short example below demonstrates this clearly.

Captivate demo: Watch this demo to see how Adobe Captivate automatically creates captions and instructions as you record your screen.

The short example above was created using the default Adobe Captivate settings. The instructions and captions were added automatically as the project was captured. In many instances, a short instructional project like the above can be created in minutes, or seconds, and the developer will need to make only a few minor edits. Even when more major edits are required, you will still find the automatically created captions useful.

Adobe Captivate enables you to add audio commentary or record it on-the-fly as you capture events on screen. It has a powerful, flexible quiz engine that can integrate with and report to SCORM and AICC learning management systems (LMSs), Adobe Connect, and QuestionMark. If you are using Adobe Captivate 2, you can automatically report your quiz scores to Authorware too; but note that this feature has been removed from Adobe Captivate 3. If you prefer something less high-tech, quiz scores can be e-mailed automatically to your training administrator.

Adobe Captivate 2 added a scenario-based learning feature, enabling users to create complex branching options. Note that the new Scenario Simulation dialog box says: "These projects are best suited for scenario and interaction based training like role-play, sales and management training" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Adobe Captivate 3 New project options dialog box, showing the Scenario Simulation option

The ability to create scenarios brings a lot of additional features and functionality to Adobe Captivate, and thus is probably the most significant innovation that moves Adobe Captivate out of the arena of screen captures and software simulations and into the broader e-learning arena. For example, scenarios go hand-in-hand with the ability to create your own templates (or import existing Microsoft PowerPoint templates) and to import your own images and animations, just as you would in more familiar development tools like Flash, Authorware, Director, and others.

Adobe Captivate 2 introduced a Branching view that enables developers to visualize and update branching options without the need to edit individual slides (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Adobe Captivate 3 Branching view

The branching options are pretty powerful, making it easy for the developer to create more complex Adobe Captivate projects than were previously possible (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Selecting Branching options in Branching view

The JavaScript option looks very interesting. You can type your JavaScript in-line, or you can add your own custom functions.

In-line JavaScript: You can use JavaScript in the "success" and "failure" branching options for interactive elements including click-boxes and buttons (see Figure 4). Text-entry boxes also include an option to execute JavaScript on-click. Finally, in the project preferences, you have the option to add JavaScript actions (by selecting Project End Options > Action), so that your chosen JavaScript is performed when the user reaches the end of your Adobe Captivate project.

Figure 4. You can select the target HTML window for your JavaScript.

Simply type your JavaScript into the JavaScript dialog box (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Simply type your JavaScript into the dialog box.

Custom JavaScript functions: If you've ever used JavaScript in Authorware, you will recall that you call it using ReadURL, like this:-

ReadURL("JavaScript:writeCookie('myCookie', 'Hello Mum')",2)

The above code can be used in Authorware to call a custom function that you have included in the HTML container for your web-published Authorware file. In this example, the function is called writeCookie,  and Authorware is sending the two parameters, myCookie and Hello Mum, to the function.

You can achieve similar results within Adobe Captivate by adding your own custom JavaScript functions to the HTML file that contains your project. Adobe has even provided a ready-made JavaScript file where you can enter your custom functions, and then have them available in every Adobe Captivate project that you publish to the web. The file is called standard.js and can be located in the folder (see Figure 6):

C:\Program Files\Adobe Captivate 3\Templates\Publish

Figure 6. Edit the file standard.js to provide all of your Adobe Captivate projects with your custom JavaScript functions.

To discover just how effective custom JavaScript can be when used in Adobe Captivate, I asked an Adobe engineer, Samhav Gore, for his thoughts:

1. Creating a personality test

In this scenario, the simulation asks a number of questions. Based on the points you get, you will be presented with your personality result. You can use this same sort of scheme for more complex knowledge testing, for instance confidence-based assessments (PDF, 204K).

Typically this type of test or survey may have four to eight result branches. It is not straightforward to create this in Adobe Captivate because Adobe Captivate allows only two branches for a quiz result—pass or fail. However, if a user writes his own JavaScript function(s) and calls them from various click boxes on various slides, he can create this kind of advanced branching for a quiz.

2. Timeout for the quiz

Adobe Captivate allows timeout for individual questions, but it doesn't allow timeout for the quiz as a whole. An Adobe Captivate user may choose to design the quiz in such a way that when a user begins the quiz, a JavaScript function is called which will start a timer (in JavaScript), and when the time allowed for the quiz is exceeded the quiz ends. This can be done by navigating to a different HTML page or calling the LMS API functions or any other way a user might want.

3. Controlling the playback

You could use JavaScript to store cookies, but it is not possible to transfer variable values into the Adobe Captivate project and then access them. However Adobe Captivate projects can be controlled with a few built-in variables and commands. You can use JavaScript to send setVariable commands to the Adobe Captivate project, just the same as you can with any Flash movie in a web page. These variables and commands can be found in the help documentation in Adobe Captivate (Changing timing section > Controlling Adobe Captivate Projects with variables).

A developer may want to store the position that a user is on and then, using JavaScript, he can store the position as a cookie. Later, by using that cookie, he can use the variables to control Adobe Captivate projects' playback, for example, he can use the command rdcmndGotoFrame to jump the project playback at a specific frame.

Advanced Flash users can also insert their custom SWF files as animations in the Adobe Captivate projects which can display the custom variables received from JavaScript. I am sure there are many other possible uses of JavaScript in Adobe Captivate, and I hope the examples above help you to see more possibilities.

Caution: You must publish your demo or simulation to a browser, not as a stand-alone application if you want your JavaScript branching options to work. You should also upload the Adobe Captivate project and its HTML file to a web server for testing. Local browser security settings have been tightening up over the years. If you don't know how to get your browser of choice to allow your JavaScript to run on your local machine, always test by placing your Adobe Captivate project on a web server.

You should also remember that Adobe Captivate needs the browser in order for your JavaScript to run, so if you publish your project as a standalone EXE file then, again, the JavaScript will not work.

There are many more great features in Adobe Captivate, but I want to concentrate on features that caught my eye for using Adobe Captivate as a full-scale e-learning tool.

Helpful features in Adobe Captivate 2 for e-learning developers

Adobe Captivate 2 added some great new features to help e-learning developers get the most from the tool without resorting to coding.

Quizzes

Adobe Captivate 2 introduced six question types:  

• Multiple choice
• True/False
• Fill-in-the-blank
• Short answer
• Matching
• Rating scale (Likert)

Those of you familiar with the Authorware KOs will recognize a similar range of questions to the Authorware offerings, with the exception that Authorware includes a Drag and Drop question type, but does not have the Rating Scale question type. It should be noted, however, that the Matching question in Adobe Captivate enables users to drag and drop the options onto their match. Since this can only be done with text only, some users may find this limiting.

Figure 7. Quiz question types in Adobe Captivate 2

You can, of course, create your own question logic from scratch in Authorware, which is not possible in Adobe Captivate. But for non-coders, that can be a daunting task and so I think Adobe Captivate 2 does an excellent job here with its built-in options.

Adobe Captivate gives considerable power to the developer through detailed options when creating the questions, including branching and reporting options. For example, Advanced Answer Options enables branching to initially be set, allowing the developer to set different destinations or outcomes for different user selections. These are the same options that can also be accessed in the Branching view (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. Selecting Branching options in a Multiple Choice question

The Quiz Manager is where the developer can define how the quiz results are reported. Figure 9 shows the new Quiz Manager dialog box from Adobe Captivate 3. As you can see, it is part of a new Preferences dialog box that brings all the global project settings into one dialog box. This is one of several UI updates that will be welcomed by regular users. Here you can see that Adobe Captivate is ready, out of the box, to report to your LMS.

Figure 9. The Quiz preferences dialog box

Advanced Interaction window

The Advanced Interaction window, shown in Figure 10, is probably the one area of Adobe Captivate that caused me the greatest excitement when I discovered it. From here, the developer can view and edit an overview of every slide interaction in the Adobe Captivate project.

Figure 10. The Advanced Interaction window

You can use the Add to Total checkboxes to have the result of any slide added to the user's overall score, allowing you to score every interactive event if required.

You can filter what slides you see by interaction type using the buttons at the top of the window: Click Boxes, Text Entry Boxes, Questions, Hidden Slides, and the currently selected slide is selected in the thumbnail strip to the left of the window.

The only properties not editable that are shown in this window are Slide name, Objective ID, and Interaction ID. No other e-learning tool I have used offers this powerful overview of the entire lesson.

SWF file output

OK, I cheated here. This is not new to Adobe Captivate 3. Adobe Captivate has always offered SWF file output. It's what makes Adobe Captivate so popular for many of us in the e-learning community. For many other tools (including Authorware), you need a special plug-in to play their content on the web. Adobe Flash player is so ubiquitous that for all but the most rare of cases, one can assume it is installed on most client machines. Thus your Adobe Captivate content can be viewed cross-platform and on almost any device. I've even built small sample lessons to be delivered on Pocket PC and Nokia smart phones. You will get best results on mobile devices by first exporting the content to Flash, then publishing the content as Adobe Flash Lite.

Zoom areas

Captivate demo: In this demo, see how the Zoom Area feature in Adobe Captivate 3

This is a feature that is easy to create in Adobe Flash CS3, but impossible to do natively in Authorware. It is so simple to implement in Adobe Captivate, too. Just select Insert > Zoom Area and resize or reposition the source and target boxes. Nice! Notice in the example above that the second slide actually shows a different image in the zoom box. This is a great feature.

Word output

As you can see in Figure 11, Adobe Captivate has the option to publish to Word. You have many options, including creating a Storyboard, Handouts, and Step by Step instructions. For those of us who have a blended learning system, mixing classroom training with e-learning, or for the purposes of review or documentation, this is a powerful and useful feature.

Figure 11. The Adobe Captivate 3 Publish dialog box, showing the Print to Microsoft Word options

I recently discovered that you can customize the output of this feature (see Figure 12). Salma Shaikh of Adobe gives full detail in her Developer Center article, Creating printed versions of Adobe Captivate Projects.

Figure 12.Sample storyboard output created by Salma Shaikh

Note that with Adobe Captivate 3, an extra option has been added to include the new Question Pool slides.This feature only works if Microsoft Word is installed.

Resizing a project

This has to be my second most favorite option in Adobe Captivate. I've used it extensively in the last month.

The Adobe Captivate developers recognized that sometimes we are forced to capture, or work with captures, that have been made at the wrong size. Perhaps we need only concentrate on a smaller area of the screen. Perhaps the Adobe Captivate project has to fit into a specific area within another application. It's not a problem, however, as there are enough options here to satisfy your need to scale and crop your SWF file (see Figure 13).

Figure 13. The Project Resize dialog box

If you are cropping your SWF file, you can even select on a frame-by-frame basis exactly which area of the screen you will crop (see Figure 14).

Figure 14. The Project Resize dialog box shows how you can crop an area of the SWF file

I've had to rebuild Authorware content more than once because of mistakes I've made in project screen size. There are some tricks you can use to help resize an Authorware project, but there is always a lot of manual work to do. I like this resize option instead.

Helpful features for e-learning developers in Adobe Captivate 3

Adobe Captivate 3 has an extensive list of new features. I have a few favorites that I would like to mention.

Microsoft Windows Vista support

Adobe Captivate 3 fully supports Windows Vista.

Find and replace

Find and replace is an essential tool in any development application, and Adobe Captivate 3 finally introduces this feature, which was absent from previous versions of the software. In typical Adobe style, the engineering team has not only added Find and Replace as a feature, they have added extra power by making it possible to filter the results according to the type of asset you may want to search within, as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15. The Adobe Captivate 3 Find and Replace dialog box

The full list of filtering options includes:

• All controls
• Text Caption
• Button
• Text Animation
• Rollover Caption
• Highlight Box
• Image
• Rollover Image
• Zoom Area
• Mouse
• Slidelet
• Click Box
• Text Entry Box
• Flash Video
• Animation

What can I say? Thank you Adobe!

Multi-mode recording

This is an amazing new feature in Adobe Captivate 3. With previous versions of Adobe Captivate, if you needed to record a demonstration, a simulation for assessment purposes, and a training simulation—you would have had to record and edit three separate Adobe Captivate projects.

Now, with Adobe Captivate 3 you can select either Demonstration, Training Simulation, or Assessment Simulation for an option before you start recording, and Adobe Captivate will record a project with appropriate features for you. Or, if you need to, go ahead and select two or three of those options, and Adobe Captivate will record up to three separate projects for you, each with appropriate captions and interactivity already built in and ready for your more detailed editing (see Figure 16). In Authorware, you can build your courses in such a way that you can reuse assets and logic for these separate parts of your course, but it takes a lot more effort than selecting three checkboxes!

Figure 16. The Adobe Captivate 3 recording options dialog box, showing multiple recording modes selected, and the various language options for captions.

While you are looking at Figure 16, notice two other interesting things. The first is that there is also a Custom checkbox. This option enables you to set up your own custom settings, as shown in Figure 17. This makes it possible for you to fine tune what is automatically recorded, and create the perfect feature set for your scenario, demonstration or assessment.

Figure 17. The Adobe Captivate 3 Preferences dialog box, showing the custom recording options

The second thing to notice in Figure 16 is the language options in the Captions In: drop-down menu option. That's right, Adobe Captivate can create captions in your own chosen language. That is going to be another great time saver for anyone who has to create multi-lingual or non-English projects.

Question pooling and randomization, and Answer Shuffle

The age-old concern of many training departments is cheating, oh, and boredom. Typically clients ask me to add randomization into their quizzes to help combat cheating. By randomizing the questions, it is a lot harder for users to write down entire quizzes, versus just writing down the answers.

With the Decision Icon in Authorware, you can easily create a random pool of questions, and draw, say, 20 out of 100 questions at random, but there's no way to automatically randomize the options without resorting to coding. I think we can safely say Adobe Captivate earns another point for Answer Shuffle.

Adobe Captivate 3 projects also support multiple questions pools so you can draw random question from different pools. Perhaps you have easy, medium, or hard questions. Perhaps you have several different topics and you need to ensure a careful balance of questions is asked from each topic.

Finally, you can also import question pools form other Adobe Captivate projects, making it possible to reuse your question pools instead of creating them from scratch, or resorting to copy and paste.

Replacing typed text after recording content

This is a feature that I have wanted to see in every screen capture tool I've used. In addition to changing the text, you have the option to change the look and feel, add transitions and so on (see Figure 18). Very nice.

Figure 18. The workspace shows how you can replace text within your recorded content

More question types

Adobe Captivate 3 adds Matching, Hot Spot, and Sequence questions types (see Figure 19).

Figure 19. Adobe Captivate 3 has additional question types.

With these additional question types, more users are going to find it easier to justify using Adobe Captivate for more of their training and assessment projects.

A cleaned-up user interface

There has been a general revision of menus and dialog boxes in Adobe Captivate 3 to make things a more logical for users. New users will welcome this change, whereas experienced users may find the change slows them down a bit, but not for long.

Assessing Adobe Captivate 3

I'm used to some very specific things in Authorware that allow the creation of almost any type of training. Some of those things revolve around being able to code things for myself.

Coding

Adobe Captivate is not a coders tool, and probably never will be. Adobe Captivate 3 has the option Export > Project to > Flash 8 or Flash CS3 (which replaces the options Adobe Captivate 2 Import/Export > Export the project to Flash 8 or Export the project to Flash MX 2004), which gives you access to powerful scripting features should you need it. If you need more power in your Adobe Captivate content, just publish it right into Flash and then you can do whatever you need to with it.

Scott Young has a great article on the Adobe Developers center that explains exporting your Adobe Captivate project to Flash in more detail.

Shared libraries, external assets

When working in teams, it's always great to be able to share assets, especially when someone decides to change the Corporate colors.

I've used Adobe Captivate 2 quite a lot over the last couple of months, and I have had to do some heavy editing of existing projects. I found the features of the library were very useful, especially the ability to right-click an image in the library and select Edit with… to open it in Adobe Photoshop or another editor of my choice. This is a feature that I have wanted to see in Authorware for years—since I first saw it in Director 6 or 7 if I remember correctly. The speed increase in workflow that this one feature adds is invaluable.

Mark Fletcher gives a lot more detail about libraries in Adobe Captivate, in his Developer Center article, Using the Library in Adobe Captivate 2.

Note: Before I read this article I was under the impression that shared libraries were not a feature of Adobe Captivate. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was wrong. This will make maintenance tasks like Corporate rebranding a lot easier.

Form controls

Many of us need to train our users on things like databases, web forms, and custom software. For this we often need to be able to simulate things like combo boxes, tree view menus, radio buttons and more. Adobe Captivate can capture and simulate much of this sort of content, but if you need to create in-depth training, you quickly run into the need to simulate these controls more fully than can be done with screen shots.

You could move your Adobe Captivate content into Flash, or even Flex for this, but since Flash requires more coding skills than Adobe Captivate, this may seem like a daunting task.

Really there isn't much else. I am sure, as you read this, you will be able to think of things that you want or need in your eLearning tool. But for rapid development, for people who cannot or will not use code, for people whose day job is not eLearning, Adobe Captivate has the vast majority of the things you need to make professional-looking, effective training, right out the box.

Why would I use Adobe Captivate instead of Authorware?

I would choose Adobe Captivate because it can capture most of what you need when you are doing software simulation. In Authorware you have to build all of the interactivity onto your screen captures manually.

Also, if you have the skill to build a PowerPoint presentation, you can probably pick up Adobe Captivate in a weekend and be ready to build your first Scenario or other training that is not software simulation.

Remember, Authorware can be used by people who don't code, and you can build full lessons with little or no code, but you do need a significant amount of basic Authorware knowledge before you can be productive. You may have greater limitations on possibilities in Adobe Captivate, especially if you consider the power of the Framework and Interaction icons in Authorware, but an imaginative user will always find ways to make up for or work around limitations.

What do you mean, "instead of"?

Well, you may not want to use Adobe Captivate instead of Authorware, but with Authorware. One of the great strengths of Authorware great strengths is its ability to act as a container for almost any content you can imagine. If you do want to use Adobe Captivate with Authorware, you may prefer to stick with Adobe Captivate 2 if you already have it, especially if you want to use the built-in tracking to Authorware.

Adobe Captivate 3 no longer exports to Flash 6, which is the version of Flash that Authorware supports natively. Don't forget, though, that you can also insert Adobe Captivate into the Flash ActiveX control in Authorware, but if you want to send data to Authorware you will have to experiment with JavaScript to send information out to Authorware, and try to catch it with an Event Response. At the time of writing I have not tested this so I cannot say for certain if it will work.

Migrating to Adobe Captivate from Authorware

Most Authorware users will not want to migrate their existing content from Authorware into Adobe Captivate, unless there is some overpowering reason to do so. Perhaps your client has withdrawn the Authorware Web player from their network; in this case, you will probably want to leave your existing content in Authorware.

Some of you may be considering moving your Authorware development to Adobe Captivate. If you are, I'll assume you fully understand the limitations of Adobe Captivate compared to Authorware, and comment on reasons for moving to Adobe Captivate:

• All of your training is software simulation.
• Your training needs are unsophisticated; you are never going to be creating flight simulations for the Boeing 747, or perhaps you teach soft skills to hardware store employees. The Scenario features of Adobe Captivate are likely to be very attractive to you.
• Your instructional designers use PowerPoint to create storyboards, and you'd like to streamline your development process. For a similar effort they could build their content into Adobe Captivate, then you might bring their work into Flash or Flex to add extra interactivity and finish the lesson.
• You have only occasional training needs, and so hiring a skilled developer, or contractor is not reasonable for budgetary reasons.
• You'd like to include SMEs in the development process or provide them with a tool for creating tutorials quickly to share knowledge rapidly.

I am sure you can think of many other reasons.

So what about literally migrating your content? I wouldn't advise it, because there is no automatic way to do this. Whatever approach you take to migrate existing Authorware content into Adobe Captivate, you will have to rebuild the flow, branching logic, and interactivity. Also, you will lose many of the powerful features of Authorware. However if you don't use many advanced features, or any at all, then this may be of little consequence to you.

Ultimately you could perform a migration of sorts. Here are some things to consider:

• Export Media: Authorware has the Export Media function that would enable you to extract audio, video, text, and certain animations so that you could reuse them in Adobe Captivate. This would be especially useful for soft skills demos and simulations.
• Export XML: I don't mean the full export that exports the entire Authorware file as XML, complete with media assets. I mean export questions created with the Quiz KOs as XML. All of the question KOs have options to both import and export the questions as IMS QTI XML.If your XML skills are up to it, the XML export option is there, and you may be able to repurpose it to the XLIFF XML used by Adobe Captivate.
• Copy/Paste: Yes I know that copy/paste is hardly rocket science, is bad practice, and is very boring, but you could do it if you needed to. But be sure to choose small lessons. As with the Export Media function, you really could only use media assets.

Where to go from here

It's not been long since the release of Adobe Captivate 2 in September 2006. Now, less than a year later, Adobe Captivate 3 has been released. Obviously Adobe has an aggressive development cycle for Adobe Captivate. No doubt the next version will continue to add power to Adobe Captivate, without harming its usability, elegance, and simplicity. High-powered development tools are great for the power user, but there have to be high power tools for everyone else, too.

Fortunately, Adobe has made a trial version of Adobe Captivate 3 available for you to download, so you can test it out for yourself. Once you have it installed, you might find some of the links below useful as you explore the possibilities with Adobe Captivate.

Read more about using scenario-based learning and branching options in Frank Nguyen's article, Scenario-based learning in Adobe Captivate 2.

Salma Shaikh of Adobe gives full detail on how to customize the export to Microsoft Word feature in her Developer Center article, Creating printed versions of Adobe Captivate Projects.

Mark Fletcher gives a lot more detail about libraries in Adobe Captivate, in his Developer Center article, Using the Library in Adobe Captivate 2.

Scott Young has a great article on the Adobe Developers center that explains exporting your Adobe Captivate project to Flash in more detail.

Other useful resources:

• Adobe Captivate Developer Center
• Silke Fleischer's blog
• Andrew Brown's blog
• Adobe Captivate tips
• Raising Aimee
• I came, I saw, I learned

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