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.

Storyboarding: From Petrified to Crawling...

These past couple of weeks have been difficult, I like to take action.  Storyboarding has made me quite "petrified".  It has been impossible to get started.  I have ideas about what my project should look like, but somehow it has not been easy getting started.  I think many people who are working on projects, have this issue.  Somehow, we think that we should be able to take all the ideas in our head and put it down on paper, easily.  Unfortunately, transferring thoughts to paper in any form is problematic.  "Writers Block" anyone?  This week, I decided to take it step by step.  I opened the visual storyboarding template that was provided and labeled the first slide with the title of my project and then the second slide with the introduction, the third slide with motivation.  At least that is a beginning and my stress level has decreased.  Hopefully, my slides will increase.  Congratulations, to all of my classmates who have started their storyboards and for those who haven't just take it slide by slide.

Technology Black Hole

This past week has been a technology black hole.  I decided to use Captivate for a project in one of my classes so I could learn more about it. (I give this advice to my students, "the only way to learn a tool is to use it").  It took a lot of time, more than the 3 hours allotted for the project.  I did learn many things including how to include a video and how to animate text.  Unfortunately, the program imploded on me during the publishing and no matter what I did (uninstall, reinstall, etc.) it would not run again.  In addition, my file became corrupted and the program lost track of it so all of my changes had been lost even though I saved it many times.  Since I could not get the program to run, I did what any person with VMware on their machine would do, I created a new VM.  It was long overdue since I was still using Windows 8.  I had created a Windows 10 VM but had not switched over.  It seemed now was the time.  So for the last several days, I have been reinstalling software into my new environment.  Good news, everything is working fine so far.  I did learn some lessons with Captivate.  #1- always save your project in two different places so that if it fails during rendering your original file is safe. #2- be careful when using videos, make sure they are compressed as much as possible and try not to use too many as this puts stress on the publishing process.

On with the IDTE Journey....Creating a Course using Captivate

So today, I had to commit to a topic for my project proposal. So many things interest me. I decided to do something that I know a lot about (no SME but me is somewhat of an advantage). In addition, I am passionate about this topic, so I am going to give it a go. Unfortunately, it is a somewhat nebulous topic that requires higher-order skills. I am a little afraid that I won't be able to accomplish all of the learning objectives. My topic is teaching spreadsheet design. This is an important topic. Excel is an important tool for business students to learn and master. Although spreadsheet programs like Excel provide powerful analytical tools for business, in practice, they are often created and used by people with minimal programming experience. Consequently, users can often develop spreadsheets containing critical errors, which, in turn, can cause significant losses for their businesses. Errors can be reduced, however, by learning and employing good spreadsheet design techniques. Good spreadsheet design also makes it easier to update and continue to use a spreadsheet over time. I hope that I will be successful in creating a module which accomplishes the objective of teaching and having students learn good spreadsheet design guidelines.

Captivate

This week, I have been learning how to use Adobe Captivate to design course content. There are many things I like about Captivate. It seems fairly easy to use and has a lot of options in terms of interactivity. My big want is to be able to build interactivity for software training. I am waiting to see whether Captivate is capable of this and whether I can operationalize this. So far, I really like the software and am looking forward to learning more.