our "non-interactive" eLearning modules, we create them to run no
longer than 5 minutes. Any longer, and our audience starts to
"tune-out" rather quickly. The key to success for longer modules is
interactivity. Break up a 20 minute module with a couple of interactive
segments. Show them, then make them demonstrate what they've learned.
This will reinforce your subject matter and cement those concepts into
their brain. And if you're using Captivate, creating an interactive
module is a breeze!
Improving Audio in Adobe Captivate
From Ken Lash
I
was forced to move to Captivate 3 because I purchased a new computer
with Vista. I'm happy I did. There were some glitches in Captivate 2
that I found rather inconvenient. Occasionally, I would publish a
project and then when I played the published project there were
problems with the sound. Sometimes I would get a double voice with two
identical narrations out of synch and playing at the same time. Other
times the narration would simply stop at a slide and not come back. To
fix it I needed to go back into the unpublished project, move the
narration bar a little in the timeline of the slide where the narration
problem began and then republish the project.
Another
problem I had with captivate 2 was, after saving and closing out of an
unpublished project I would sometimes get an error message when
attempting to open the project back up. The error message indicated
that the file was damaged and could not be opened back up. The only
solution was to make backup copies of the project often so that if it
did become corrupted I would not loose too much work. I've encountered
none of these glitches with Captivate 3.
Another
issue that I solved after much experimentation was getting rid of
background noise. I found the level of background noise to be
unacceptable when I first began recording. I upgraded soundcards but
without solving the problem.
I
did a lot of research and determined that the background noise was a
result of the computer itself and the sound card being in the
case surrounded by a bunch of electronics.
I purchased a microphone headset–the Sennheiser PC166 USB. This headset allows you to bypass the computer's soundcard by using an inline USB soundcard that comes with the headset.
So the USB soundcard is plugged into a USB port completely outside of
the computer case. This reduced the background noise to a very minimal
level. It's a high quality headset that provides excellent voice as
well as sound, and since the soundcard is part of the headset you can
move between computers with no variation in the sound. It cost around
$95 and was very well worth the price.