by Kevin Siegel
When I teach my RoboHelp class, one of the RoboHelp features that most excites my students is RoboHelp's ability to import eLearning lessons published by Adobe Captivate.
In this age of visual communication, incorporating interactive eLearning with your help content just makes sense. You know the old saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words." Instead of a topic in RoboHelp going on and on for paragraph after paragraph, why not simply explain the concept in a few sentences and then let the Captivate video do the talking?
Here's how you can quickly incorporate Captivate content within a RoboHelp topic:
When I teach my RoboHelp class, one of the RoboHelp features that most excites my students is RoboHelp's ability to import eLearning lessons published by Adobe Captivate.
In this age of visual communication, incorporating interactive eLearning with your help content just makes sense. You know the old saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words." Instead of a topic in RoboHelp going on and on for paragraph after paragraph, why not simply explain the concept in a few sentences and then let the Captivate video do the talking?
Here's how you can quickly incorporate Captivate content within a RoboHelp topic:
- Using Adobe Captivate, create and publish a Captivate video as a SWF.
- Using RoboHelp, create a RoboHelp topic and type your topic content as you normally would. Of course, as mentioned above, I'd think about keeping the content you type as short and sweet as possible and then lead into the Captivate video with something along the lines of The following interactive topic lesson will allow you to perform these actions now.
- Insert the Captivate video into the topic by choosing Insert > Adobe Captivate Demo. Navigate to the location of your Captivate published SWF and open it.
At this point, your RoboHelp topic will contain a large box that won't look much like the Captivate video you published. No worries. Simply preview the topic and you'll see the video. Your customers will only need Adobe's free Flash Player on their computers to watch and interact with the lesson.
Would you like to take this concept to the next level? Consider setting up the RoboHelp topic so that the Captivate video only appears if the learner wants to see it. (As it stands now, the video will automatically play when the topic is accessed. If it's lower down the page, the learner might not even know that it's there and could miss it.)
If it were me, I'd make the video part of an expanding drop-down link. If the learner clicks the link, the video opens (otherwise it stays hidden).
Would you like to take this concept to the next level? Consider setting up the RoboHelp topic so that the Captivate video only appears if the learner wants to see it. (As it stands now, the video will automatically play when the topic is accessed. If it's lower down the page, the learner might not even know that it's there and could miss it.)
If it were me, I'd make the video part of an expanding drop-down link. If the learner clicks the link, the video opens (otherwise it stays hidden).
- Select the Captivate video and cut it (it will be moved to the Clipboard and will be pasted back into the topic next).
- Highlight the text you typed to announce the lesson (i.e: The following interactive topic lesson will allow you to perform these actions now.) and choose DHTML > Create Drop-down Hotspot and Text. Select the placeholder text and paste the clipboard content into the Expanding Text Window.
Preview the topic and click the link. BAM! The topic text will get out of the way and make room for the interactive simulation. How cool is that?
***
Comments