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Adding video to eLearning can greatly enhance the learner experience.
If you elect to include video in your project, you’ll need to decide where the video will be stored when it’s time to be viewed by the learner. Will you use a web server or media service?
We’re looking to find out what the eLearning community is doing when it comes to video. Spend a moment to take our Video in eLearning poll. We’ll share the results with you here.
You can add several types of video into a Captivate project, including AVI, MOV, and Flash Video (FLV or F4V). To insert a video, open or create a Captivate project and then choose Video > Insert Video to open the Insert Video dialog box.
You have two choices when inserting video: Event Video (typically video that is expected to play on only one slide) or Multi-Slide Synchronized Video (video that is expected to play across multiple slides). Most developers elect to use Event Video since videos that are confined to a single slide are easier to control.
After you've made a decision between Event Video or Multi-Slide Synchronized Video, the next big decision is to load the video from a file that is already on your computer (by selecting On your Computer), or link to the video that is stored on a server (by selecting Already deployed to a web server, Adobe Media Streaming Service, or Flash Media Server).
If you choose On your Computer (which most developers do), you simply Browse to the video that's on your computer or network drive, open it, and the video will be inserted onto the slide. From there, you use the Properties Inspector to set the video's timing and other attributes. It's a clean process with one major drawback: when you publish an eLearning lesson containing video, the resulting output could be quite large. And large lessons take longer to open and view over the Internet than smaller lessons that don't contain video.
Instead of embedding the video in a Captivate project, you lower the size of the project and decrease load times for learners accessing your published content by linking to the videos that are stored on a server.
If you have a web server, you can upload the videos to the server in advance and simply copy/paste the URL to the video into the URL field. Your corporate IT can set you up with a web server or, if you're up to the challenge, you can create your own web server using free media server software.
If you don't have a web server, your server cannot handle large amounts of traffic, or you simply don't want to create your own server, a media service could be the way to go. Generally speaking, media services are servers available in the cloud that house your videos for you. When a learner watches your eLearning content and comes across a video you've added to a slide, the video is streamed from the media server to your learner. There are several pay-as-you-go companies/websites that provide media servers including Adobe Media Streaming Service, Wowza, Subsonic, and Plex.
I'd love to get feedback from you about this topic. I've created a quick poll that asks how you're using video in eLearning and, just as important, where you're storing the videos. You can take the poll here.
See also: Adobe Media Server 5 With Kevin Towes and a review on five of the top-selling media servers.
I've talked about assure, ensure, and insure in the past, but I think these supremely confusable words deserve a reprise.
Assure–to tell someone not to worry, is the way I think of it, as in the word reassure. This is also the word that the term quality assurance is based on. Here, I think of it as a process that allows a company to assure customers that the product is of high quality.
The postal clerk assured me that the package would arrive on time.
Ensure–to make sure or to make certain. This verb is the one you want when you ask a student to double-check something:
The clerk ensured that the correct zip code was printed on the label.
Please ensure that the checkbox is selected, then click the OK button.
Insure–You are safest in usage on this one if you are talking about purchasing insurance. However, the U.S. military tends to use this also as a synonym for ensure.
All of the specific usage I am discussing here goes beyond what descriptive dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster's, indicate. I found their differentiation of these terms to be too vague, compared with the standards I have typically been asked to follow when doing professional copyediting. So to be precise, make the distinctions indicated here.
Here's a second set of confusing words: comprise/compose/constitute.
Comprise–just memorize that the phrase is comprised of is always wrong. The larger thing comprises the parts, or draws them together:
The monument comprises a stone obelisk and a colonnade.
Compose–to make up. Is composed of is correct:
The monument is composed of two parts: a stone obelisk and a colonnade.
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This Week's Challenge: Which is correct?
Feel free to post your answers below as comments.
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A few weeks ago I showed you how you can use multilevel lists to easily create complex lists with multiple levels. But multilevel lists are far more powerful than I could show you in a single article. This week, I'm going to expand on the multi-level list theme by teaching you how to add sub-numbers to lists:
Sub-numbering is important for many procedures and legal documents. You simply can't have sub numbering in RoboHelp without multilevel lists, unless you want to manually type in all sub-numbers. But with multilevel lists, you control this behavior right from the style sheet!
To add sub-numbering to a Multilevel List, first Create a multilevel list. Then, on the Project Manager pod, double-click your style sheet to open the Styles dialog box.
In the Styles dialog box, select your multilevel list. From the Apply Formatting To drop-down menu, choose a level that will use the sub-numbers.
Click in the Edit Style field and, from the Insert Level drop-down menu, choose 1.
Click OK to close the Styles dialog and save your changes.
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Test your Knowledge of Japanese Culture
Quick Tips for Training & Development in Japan1:
Trivia Answers to the Questions Above