Solving technology problems, one at a time
Web-based learning activities in our old LMS were displayed in a flexible-size frameset, – the Rustici SCORM Engine player window. The SCORM Engine spoiled us with its many settings Content that needed to be large
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At this time, the maximum width the template can handle is 1024px. Set your project size at 1024 x
768 or smaller.
Although Captivate has its own SCORM interface, its reliability in our LMS over the last few years has become increasingly problematic. Data gets lost, quizzes score incorrectly, or do not complete at all, and there is a lot of frustration.
At the same time, there has been increasing demand from subject matter experts and educators for inexpensive, easy to learn tools like Captivate that leverage their Powerpoint skills but have plenty of flexibility and options for interactivity. So something had to be done to make Captivate useful again.
What I decided to do was to turn over all the SCORM communication for Captivate activities to our HTML template, which doesn’t have the communication issues of the Adobe products. Using the SCORM template as a wrapper does not add a lot of work to a project, in fact, it requires only one line of code to add a scored Captivate or Presenter quiz to a template-based learning module.
Any type of scored Captivate file will work – both question slides and interactive slides. The module can handle one or more Captivate quizzes, either by themselves, or in combination with other types of content and quizzes, such as Questionmark Perception or the template-based interaction quizlets.
Continue readingOne of my colleagues wrote that she had used the right-click feature in her latest Captivate project. When she previewed the file using Preview > Project, it worked fine. But when she attempted to publish
Continue readingGood news for those who are interested in creating interactive learning content on the Mac: Adobe Captivate for Mac is in beta testing. You can volunteer to test the pre-release versions here: Prerelease Interest Form
Continue readingI got a chance to take a look at a new Captivate eBook the other day, “GooberGuides – Captivate Tips & Tricks,” and I really wish I’d had this months ago. Captivate Tips and Tricks is a compendium of all the time-saving answers the other books never tell you. For example the tip on how to use wildcard text in text entry boxes would have been well worth the modest price of the ebook when I ran into that problem on a recent project.
The chapter on preventing project corruption is brief but extremely useful. If you’ve worked with Captivate for a while, you’ve probably corrupted a project. The tips in this chapter should be on the opening splash screen when you first launch Captivate.
Continue readingA customer’s course was crashing Internet Explorer when a popup window script executed. It turns out that the name of the new window contained a space. This didn’t bother Safari or Firefox, but Internet Explorer
Continue readingWe use Captivate 3 quizzes sometimes with our Docent 6.5 LMS. Usually the quizzes have multiple parts or “SCOs” but occasionally we build one that has only one part.
Sometimes people launch a quiz but need to quit before they are done taking it, and in such cases we would prefer it be marked “incomplete” and allow them another chance to take the quiz. Usually we would also prefer any failed quiz to be allowed to be retaken.
But, by default, Captivate sees any failure to reach the mastery score as completions.
There is an easy fix,
suggested by Franck Buland on the Adobe Captivate forums
– simply modify the [project].htm file at lines 95, 96, 97.
Continue readingIf you want to create widgets that control Captivate files with new functions, other than the standard playbar functions, you will need to develop them in flash. Here’s how to figure out what is going on in a Captivate movie file:
Create a Captivate movie, and publish it (Captivate 2) or export it to Flash (Captivate 3). To create my faster-slower widgets, I had to decompile it into an .fla (I used SWFdecompiler )
Open it in Flash, and start exploring the structure. If you are using version 3, by far the best tool you can use include the “debug movie” command.
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