Category: HTML5

You're recording a complex series of steps on the computer using Adobe Captivate. As you near the mid-point of the recording process, the phone rings. It's your boss and he is demanding that you immediately stop what you're doing and check your email for some reason or other.

If you check your email now, without stopping the Captivate recording process, the act of checking your email is going to be recorded by Captivate. Do you ignore the demands of your boss and continue with the recording? Or do you stop the recording process and re-record everything later? What is a developer to do?

Stop a second and pause…

Prior to recording the lesson in Captivate, display Captivate's Preferences dialog box (Edit > Preferences on Windows; Adobe Captivate > Preferences on a Mac).

Under the Recording category, select Keys-(Global). 

  

When selecting an Action for an object (i.e. Click Boxes, Buttons), you can select from several options available in the On Success drop-down menu including, but not limited to: Continue, Go to the previous slide, Go to the next slide, Jump to slide, Open URL or file; Open another project, and Execute Advanced Actions.

If you choose Open URL or file and target a website, learners will be taken to the website you specify should they click the object. That makes perfect sense. But after a learner clicks the object, the Captivate lesson will disappear when the target website opens. That's not such a good thing. Besides losing contact with the lesson, learners will have to click the "Back" button on their browser to return to the lesson. Of course, if the learner clicks around the website, it's going to potentially take several clicks to return to the lesson. Possibly worse, I've seen learners close the website, thinking they'd return to the lesson… only to realize the lesson was nowhere to be seen.

If you are like many Captivate developers, and plan to utilize the Open URL or File action, I have a simple option you can use to ensure that learners easily return to your lesson when they are finished browsing the website.

1. In the image below, I've set the Action for a click box to Open URL or file. The URL is the Super Simplistic Solutions website.

     

2. To ensure that the URL opens in a new browser window, I clicked the drop-down menu just to the right of the URL and selected New. 
    
   

It's as simple as that. If you preview the lesson in a web browser and click the object, a new browser window (or tab) will open. If you close the new browser window, the lesson will still be available, in its own window.

I've created a video demo of the process and posted it to IconLogic's YouTube channel. The video demonstrates the URL action without the URL opening in a new window, and how it looks if you specify a new window. 

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If you're a Captivate developer working with non-Captivate developers, you may be asked to share some of your project assets so those assets can be used in other applications.

I had a PowerPoint developer ask to use one of the audio clips in my Captivate project in his PowerPoint presentation. If I had access to the file on my hard drive or server, it would have been simple enough to email the file to him as an attachment. Unfortunately, my Captivate project was pretty old, and I no longer had access to the original clip that I had imported onto one of my Captivate slides.

Fortunately, there is a handy feature within Captivate that saved the day. First, I opened the Captivate Library (Window > Library). Next, I right-clicked the audio clip and chose Export. 

From this point it was a simple matter of picking a save location and then emailing the file to the PowerPoint developer. Had the developer shared my network, I could have easily exported the file to a shared folder on a network drive and saved the email step. 

Keep in mind that you can export any Library asset (images, animation, etc). And if someone has provided assets for you, you can use the Import menu item (shown just above Export in the image above) and import multiple assets at once.

Note: If you'd like to watch the Export process, check out this short video recently posted to the IconLogic YouTube channel. The video was created using Captivate's Video Demonstration mode.

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When it comes to adding narration audio (voice-overs), Captivate developers have plenty of choices. You can insert audio using any of the following methods:

Object-Level Audio 

Right-click any slide object and choose Audio > Import to or Audio > Record to. If you choose Import to, you will be presented with an Import Audio dialog box. You can import wav's or mp3's. 

Object-level audio is ideal if you want to quickly add sound effects to slide objects. However, I wouldn't use this technique for voiceover audio. If you attach audio to multiple slide objects, there is a good chance that those objects will take longer to work with (when compared with a project that has more slides, but fewer objects per slide). There's also a Section 508/compliance issue you'll need to forward-think, but I'll cover that later.

Background-Level Audio 

To add Background audio, choose Audio > Import to Background or Audio > Record to Background. Once again, you will either be presented with a dialog box to open an existing audio clip, or a dialog box where you can record your own audio. You will also have options to lower the background audio if there is competing audio on the slide, and you can elect to loop the background audio. There is even an option to stop the audio when users close the lesson.

Background-level audio is perfect for background music… if you intend to include it. Personally, I think background music will quickly becomes a distraction (perhaps even an irritant) for your learners, which is why I shy away from it. 

As for voiceover audio, I don't recommend that you add it to a project as the background. If you do, you'll likely find yourself facing all kinds of object-to-audio synchronization issues as you move from slide to slide within the project.

Slide-Level Audio

You can attach audio directly to the slide by selecting the slide on the Filmstrip and choosing Audio > Record orAudio > Import.

There are a couple of reasons that slide-level audio is preferred over object-level or background-level audio. First, there's a production speed benefit. When I produce eLearning lessons for my customers, I try to keep the number of slide objects to a minimum. Typically I only allow for one text caption, and one button or click box per any given slide. Keeping the number of slide objects to a minimum speeds up the production process significantly In fact, fewer slide objects means less time spent synchronizing the timing of those objects with other objects or voiceover audio.

If you're not concerned with saving production time, perhaps my second reason for adding voiceover audio at the slide level will get your attention. If you are required to include closed captions in your eLearning (for Section 508 compliance), you must include voiceover audio. In fact, closed captions cannot be added to slide objects. You can only insert closed captions at the slide-level, and only if the slide already contains audio

Over the years I've heard horror stories from developers who were required to add closed captions, but couldn't because the audio had been added to slide objects instead of the slide itself. Unfortunately, the only solution to the dilemma is to remove the object audio, and then manually add the audio to the slide. It's not a difficult process, but it takes time. Of course, now that you've read the  text above, that particular production conundrum isn't something you'll need to worry about.

My next goal is to provide feedback should my learners select either of the other answers. On the Question Slide, I selected answer B (Green Lantern).  

On the Properties panel I found the Advanced Answer Options group. I selected both Advanced Answer Option and Show Feedback Message.

A feedback caption appeared on the slide.  

I edited the caption and then repeated the process for the other answers. 

When the learner takes the quiz, the proper feedback caption will appear depending upon the selected answer. 

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