Book Image

Mastering Adobe Captivate 2019 - Fifth Edition

By : Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Damien Bruyndonckx
Book Image

Mastering Adobe Captivate 2019 - Fifth Edition

By: Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Damien Bruyndonckx

Overview of this book

Adobe Captivate is used to create highly engaging, interactive, and responsive eLearning content. This book takes you through the production of a few pieces of eLearning content, covering all the project types and workflows of Adobe Captivate. First, you will learn how to create a typical interactive Captivate project. This will give you the opportunity to review all Captivate objects and uncover the application's main tools. Then, you will use the built-in capture engine of Captivate to create an interactive software simulation and a Video Demo that can be published as an MP4 video. Then, you will approach the advanced responsive features of Captivate to create a project that can be viewed on any device. And finally, you will immerse your learners in a 360o environment by creating Virtual Reality projects of Adobe Captivate. At the end of the book, you will empower your workflow and projects with the newer and most advanced features of the application, including variables, advanced actions, JavaScript, and using Captivate 2019 with other applications. If you want to produce high quality eLearning content using a wide variety of techniques, implement eLearning in your company, enable eLearning on any device, assess the effectiveness of the learning by using extensive Quizzing features, or are simply interested in eLearning, this book has you covered!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
7
Working with Quizzes
14
Variables and Advanced Actions
Getting Started with Adobe Captivate 2019

Welcome to Mastering Adobe Captivate 2019, Fifth Edition. Since its introduction in 2004, Captivate has been the leading solution for authoring interactive eLearning content. In the beginning, it was a very simple screen-capture utility called FlashCam. In 2002, a company named eHelp acquired FlashCam and turned it into a full-fledged eLearning authoring tool called RoboDemo. In 2004, another company called Macromedia acquired eHelp and changed the name of the product once again. Macromedia Captivate was born. A few months later, Adobe acquired Macromedia and, consequently, Macromedia Captivate became Adobe Captivate.

As the years passed, Adobe released Captivate 2, 3, and 4, adding tools, objects, and features along the way. One of the most significant events in the Captivate history took place in July 2010, when Adobe released Captivate 5. For that release, Adobe engineers rewrote the code of the application from the ground up. As a result, Captivate 5 was the first version to be available on both macOS and Windows. Version 6 was another milestone for Captivate as it was the first version to offer an HTML5 publishing option. More recently, version 8 has introduced the ability to create Responsive Projects, as well as a brand new user interface. A Responsive Project allows you, the eLearning developer, to automatically adjust the layout of your Captivate projects to fit the various screen sizes of tablet and smartphone devices. This makes mobile learning a whole lot easier by creating content that looks perfect on any device.

At the time of writing, the latest version of Captivate is Adobe Captivate 2019. This version introduces many new features and enhancements, including the ability to create Interactive Videos and an exciting new project type for creating Virtual Reality training courses. Other new features introduced in Captivate 2019 include the ability to test your content on an actual mobile device (a feature called Live Preview on Devices) the ability to record your webcam and to change the background of your video (something called the Chroma Key effect) as well as other smaller enhancements.

With all this power only one click away, it is easy to overload your projects with lots of complex audiovisual effects and sophisticated interactions that can ultimately drive the learner away from the primary objective of every Captivate course: learning.

While working with Captivate, never forget that Captivate is an eLearning authoring tool. At the most basic level, it simply means that you, the developer, and your audience are united by a very special kind of relationship: a student-teacher relationship. Therefore, from now on–and for the rest of the book–you will not be called the developer or the programmer, but the teacher. The ones who will view your finished applications will not be the users or the visitors, but will be called the learners or the students. You will see that this changes everything.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • Discovering the available options to install Captivate
  • Seeing the general steps of the Captivate production process
  • Exploring and customizing the Captivate 2019 interface
  • Working with panels and workspaces
  • Viewing the completed sample applications you will work with during the course of this book