Characters for Scenario-based situations

I am finally making progress on my design.  It feels pretty good.  It does seem though that some of the details can bring the project to a standstill and what would seem to be a straight-forward task can add hours to the project. This has happened with me this past week.  I am going to have a scenario based video to set up the  motivation for the training.  I like to use illustrated characters instead of photo-realistic characters.  I am not sure why, just my preference. (I wonder if there has been any research in which type of characters work best and under which situations?)  Finding characters I like and in the correct poses has been very difficult.  I don't want to pay a lot of money for them but wouldn't mind paying some. There are not that many sites to find them.  The one site I did find and did pay (just a few bucks) has not allowed me to download them.  I need to call customer service but that will take more time.  I finally decided to use the default characters in the animation package because I have got to get on with the project.

Pilot done...now on to climbing the Captivate mountain

It is such a relief to have the pilot done and uploaded!  I probably overdid my storyboard and now I am having to figure out how to get the animations, which I did in PowerPoint, converted and working in Captivate.  Since my final course will be much longer than 15 minutes (I was overly ambitious as usual), I will just be completing an introduction module for this course.  I am hoping that it will meet the 15 minute criteria, it will definitely be longer than 15 slides.  I do not have a lot of narration for the introduction so I may be adding in more to meet the criteria for the project.  I feel more comfortable with getting this project done and have a better idea of how to complete it, than I did last week.

I am going to schedule hours on my calendar to work on this project so that I get this done before the end of the semester.  I am so looking forward to the break in May before summer school starts.

Working on my first Storyboard

I have finally broken through and have made some progress on my storyboard.  I have found that it is important to take one step at a time but keep moving.  It has also been important to have time to think about how transform the outline for the course into visuals.  I woke up this morning with several thoughts about how to operationalize the motivation piece.

I have decided not to use a script for my introduction and instead use music.  I am using a great website which allows the non-commercial use of audio.  It is called Free Music Archive and it is located at http://freemusicarchive.org/.  Here you can find all kinds of music and sort by style.  I picked a song by Forget the Whale called The Little Robot.  I am going to use audacity to clip the file to the length of my slide.

I also created a customized button to use in navigation by clipping portion of a spreadsheet using Snagit and adding word art and then saved it as a png file.  This will save a lot of time in recreating the button for every page requiring navigation.

7 slides down, 8 to go.

Captivate versus Articulate

Being new to this field, I find it very interesting that there is something of a “browser war” in e-learning software.  The dominate software in this field are Captivate and Storyline.  Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  I have looked at both software packages and come up with my own assessment of each software.

I started with Captivate.  It was the software designated to be used for our class activities for IDTE 533.  It has some great features and at the beginning I was very happy and excited about using it.  During the semester, we were asked to do an assignment in another course.  This assignment was to turn ”static instruction” into “interactive instruction”.   I decided to use Captivate to do the assignment.  My rationale was that Captivate was built for interactivity and it had a feature to convert PowerPoint slides.  Unfortunately, it did not work as well as I hoped.  Captivate did not give me the ability to change or edit the slides after download.  

This is where Articulate can do a better job.  Articulate has a better import feature for PowerPoint slides than does Captivate.  Since I have been teaching for many years and have thousands of PowerPoint slides, Articulate may work better for my purposes.