Adobe Captivate 8: Geolocation

You can create an eLearning lesson that changes dependent upon where your learners are physically located. For instance, you can create a Captivate project for learners who live in the United States or Australia. While much of the course content is relevant to both Americans and Australians, thanks to Captivate's geolocation feature, learners in both countries will see unique, location-specific, information while taking the same course.

The first step to adding geolocation features to a project is creating the project as you normally would. In the example that follows, I've created a project for learners in Asia and the United States. (I created the project as a branching scenario… the first half of the project was for learners in the United States, the second half was for learners in Asia.)

 

Once you've created the project for both audiences, adding the geolocation features is very easy. First, choose Window > Mobile Palette to open the Mobile Palette dialog box.

 

 

 

Select Geolocation and then click the OK button.

 

Next, you'll need the Latitude and Longitude of the locations you'll use in your project. As I mentioned above, my two locations are Asia and the US. While determining Latitude and Longitude might sound difficult, I simply asked Google the following: "what is the lat and long for the united states?" The answer, rounded to whole numbers, was 38 and 77. 

 

 

I repeated the same question for Asia (and ended up with aLatitude and Longitude of 48 and 86).

 

Now that you've got the Latitudes and Longitudes figured out, you'll need to create one variable for each location (via Project > Variables). When creating each variable, select Geolocation and you'll have access to a Lat, Long, and Accfields. The Acc value is based on how close you want the learner to be to the latitude and longitude location; it is based on meters. Think about the meters surrounding the area like a large circle. When building your course, consider starting with 1,000,000 meters, which will allow anyone within range to still be able to access the course.

 

 

The final step (besides publishing) is to create an Advanced Action (via Project > Advanced Action) and attach it to a Filmstrip slide.

 

Set the Action Type to Conditional actions and name the action GeoLocation.

 

 

 

Double-click the first column under the IF Statement, click the word variable, and select cpInfoGeoLocation.

 

 

 

 

Under Actions, double-click in the first column and chooseJump to Slide. From the next menu, select the slide in your project where you want your learner to end up.  I selected the Asian branch in my project (I called it Asia Scenario). 

Attach the GeoLocation Advanced Action to the first slide by selecting the slide on the Filmstrip. On the Properties Inspector, select the Actions tab. From the On Enter drop-down menu, choose Execute Advanced Actions and select the GeoLocation action as the Script.

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