This is the old-fashioned way of obtaining the software. You buy Captivate and get a serial number to activate your installation. The serial number is valid for a specific version of Captivate, and for a specific platform (macOS or Windows) only. Once activated, that version of Captivate is permanently available on your computer. With this option, you get all the functionalities of Captivate, and you can start working on your eLearning projects right away! You also get all the patches and bug fixes for the version you bought. All the step-by-step exercises of this book work flawlessly with the Captivate 2019 perpetual license.

You can download and use this version of Captivate free of charge for 30 days. This should be more than enough time for you to go through the exercises of this book. However, once the trial period is over, you will not have access to Captivate unless you convert your trial to a licensed version. This can be a perpetual or a subscription license.

With this licensing model, you subscribe to Captivate on a monthly basis. This means that you pay a certain amount each month to keep using Captivate. The main benefit of the subscription model is that you automatically get all the updates as they are released. The subscription model is the best way to ensure that you always have access to the latest version of Captivate. Note that the subscription is just another licensing model; the software itself is identical to the perpetual licensing model.

Although the Captivate subscription model is very similar to the way Adobe Creative Cloud works, Captivate is–at the time of writing–not a part of the Creative Cloud.

 

The Technical Communication Suite (TCS) is yet another bundle of applications from Adobe. It is designed to create technical content, such as help files and user guides. TCS includes applications such as FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Acrobat Professional, and of course, Captivate. The Technical Communication Suite itself is also available under both the perpetual and the subscription licensing model.

This is the only step of the process that does not involve working with the Captivate application. Depending on the project you are planning, it can last from a few minutes to a few months. This step is probably the most important step of the entire process. This is where you create the scenarios and the storyboards. This is where you develop the pedagogical approach that will drive the entire project. What will you teach the students? In what order will you introduce the topics? How and when will you assess the students' knowledge? These are some of the very important questions you should answer before opening Captivate. Step zero is where the teacher's skills fully express themselves.

 

At the most basic level, a typical Captivate project is a collection of slides, just like a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. So, your first task when creating a new Captivate file is probably to create a bunch of slides to work with. There are several ways to do this:

 

This step is the most time-consuming phase of the entire process. This is where your project slowly takes shape to become an actual interactive course module.

In this step, you arrange the final sequence of actions, record narrations, add objects to the slides (such as Text Captions and Buttons), arrange those objects in the Timeline, add title and ending slides, develop the advanced interactions, create the Question Slides for the quiz, configure the quiz reporting options, and so on. At the end of this step, the project should be ready for publication. Sometimes, it can take several rounds of edits until you have a project that is ready to publish.

Note that, for most projects, step one and step two overlap. Unless you use screen capture, there is no clear distinction between step one and step two. It is ok to go back and forth between those two steps when developing your next Captivate project.

Step three is where you make your project available to your learners. Captivate allows you to publish your course modules in a wide variety of formats. The two formats that you will use most of the time are the Flash and the HTML5 formats:

 

Note that some features of Captivate are only available either in Flash or in HTML5. For example, Responsive Projects and Virtual Reality Projects can only be published in HTML5, while a Text Animation object can only be published in Flash. It is very important to know the publishing format you will use before starting the development of a new project.

Captivate can also publish the project as a standalone application (.exe on Windows and .app on Macintosh) or as video files that can be easily uploaded to YouTube and viewed on a tablet or smartphone.

Step three will be covered in great detail in Chapter 15, Finishing Touches and Publishing.

If you are used to other Adobe tools, such as Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator, the default behavior of the Captivate interface probably looks very different. Luckily, there is a way to make the Captivate interface behave similarly to the interface of other popular Adobe tools. This is called the Advanced Interface Mode:

When the project reopens, note that the Properties and Library icons of the Toolbar are no longer displayed.

The interface should now look pretty much the same as when you closed Captivate earlier in this chapter.

In Advanced Interface Mode, the panel layout is always maintained when you restart Captivate. In the next section, you will take a closer look at those panels. But first, let's first have a quick summary of what has been covered in this section:

You already know that Captivate contains a lot of panels and that those panels can be shown or hidden using the Window menu. In the Advanced Interface Mode, the Captivate interface offers even more flexibility. In this section, you will learn how to move the panels and create a unique custom screen:

When a panel is moved above a possible docking location, a blue outline appears on the screen. Releasing the mouse at that moment docks the panel at the location highlighted by the blue outline.

This action docks the HTML5 tracker panel with the Properties inspector and the Library panel, as shown in the following screenshot:

This first action illustrates how to dock the panels that are initially floating on the interface. You will now do the opposite to illustrate that a panel that is initially docked can be turned into a floating panel.

The Library panel is now a floating panel, even though it was docked by default. You have now arranged the panels in a truly unique way. This customized arrangement of your panels is called a workspace.

The Advanced Interface Mode of Captivate allows you to apply your own unique (custom) workspaces. Depending on the project you are working on, the size of your computer screen, your working habits, and so on, you might want to have several workspaces and quickly switch between them. In this section, you will first learn how to reset to the default workspace. Then, you will create and save a new custom workspace.

The default workspace you see when you first open Captivate is called the Classic workspace, as shown in the top-right corner of your screen:

After doing this, your Captivate screen reverts to what it looked like when you opened the application at the beginning of this chapter:

The default Classic workspace is an excellent starting point for defining a custom workspace.

Just like the Properties inspector, the Timinginspector always shows the properties pertaining to the object you select. 

After this last action, your screen should look like the following screenshot:

 

 

This workspace is very practical when you have to precisely define the timing and apply effects to the selected object. You will now save this panel layout as a new workspace.

Note that a Timing button now replaces the Classic button. You can use this button to switch between the Classic workspace and your own custom Timing workspace!

This demonstrates how you can quickly switch between your saved workspaces.

If you ever need to rename or delete a custom workspace, use the following steps:

Note that the Window | Workspace menu displays the same items as the workspace switcher button at the top-right corner of the screen.

 

Note that the default Classic workspace is not listed. This means that this default workspace cannot be renamed or deleted.

You can return to the normal interface mode using the following steps:

Confirm that the Properties and Library buttons are back in the top-right corner. This indicates that you are back in normal interface mode.

In normal interface mode (that is, when the Enable custom workspaces/panel undocking option of the Preferences is not selected), only the Classic workspace can be applied or reset. If you want to use your custom Timing workspace again, you first need to return to Advanced Interface Mode, and then restart Captivate.

Before moving on to the next topic, these are the key points to keep in mind when creating custom workspaces:

The first application that you will explore is a project that uses the screen capture feature of Captivate to create a screenshot-based course module:

Captivate generates a temporary file and opens it in the floating Preview pane. Follow the onscreen instructions to go through the project. This puts you in the same situation as a learner viewing this eLearning content for the first time.

This first sample project is called a Demonstration. As the name suggests, a demonstration is used to demonstrate something to the learner. Consequently, the learner is passive and simply watches whatever is going on. In a demonstration, the Mouse object is shown. It moves and clicks automatically. If the learners move their own mouse, it will not affect the content in any way.

This particular demonstration features some of the most popular Captivate objects, including Text Captions, Highlight Boxes, and Smart Shapes. The audio narration was generated by Captivate's Text-To-Speech tool. We have simply typed the narration in the Slide Notes panel, and Captivate turned it into audio files using the voice of a predefined speech agent. You will learn more about audio and Text-To-Speech in Chapter 3, Working with Multimedia.

Another popular feature in Adobe Captivate is the ability to add Closed Captions to the audio narration. You will learn more about Closed Captions and Accessibility in Chapter 13, Creating Accessible eLearning.

 

 

This is one of the icons you'll use the most during this book and when you design your courses. It has seven options that control which part of the project you want to preview, and how you want to preview it. Note that each of these options is associated with a keyboard shortcut that will be different depending on the system you work on (macOS or Windows). Place your mouse on top of each of the items to see the associated keyboard shortcut in a tooltip.

Let's now describe the options of the Preview icon in more detail:

 

You will now open another sample project. Actually, it is not a real other project, but another version of the Encoder demonstration you worked with in the previous section:

This project is made of exactly the same slides and assets as the demonstration you saw in the previous section. When the project reaches slide 3, it stops and waits for you to interact with the course. This is the main difference between a demonstration and a simulation.

In Captivate, a simulation is a project where the learner is active. In a simulation, the Mouse object is hidden, as learners use their own mouse to click around the screen and progress toward the end of the course. The fact that the students are active implies a new level of complexity; the learners can perform either the correct or the incorrect action.

In each case, the course must react accordingly. This concept is known as branching. This means that each student experiences the course module based on their own actions.

This second sample file features pretty much the same Captivate objects as the demonstration you completed in the previous section. Both typing and mouse actions are replaced by interactive objects. The Mouse is replaced by Click Boxes and a Text Entry Box replaces the typing object on slide 11. These interactive objects can stop the course and wait for the learner to interact. Using the interactive objects of Captivate will be covered in Chapter 5, Developing Interactivity.

Both the Encoder demonstration and simulation are based on the same screenshots. To create these sample courses, the first two steps of the production process described earlier were used:

Video Demo mode is a special recording mode of Captivate that is used to produce .mp4 video files. These files can be uploaded to online services such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Daily Motion for playback on any device (including the iPad, iPhone, and other internet-enabled mobile devices):

First, note that a Video Demo project does not use the same .cptx file extension as a regular Captivate project. It uses the .cpvc file extension instead. This is the first indication that this project is going to behave differently than the other ones you have worked with so far. In addition to having a specific file extension, Video Demo projects also have their own unique interface, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the preceding screenshot, note the absence of the Filmstrip panel. A Video Demo project is not based on slides. Actually, it is a single big video file. So the Filmstrip panel makes no sense in a Video Demo project.

In a video file, interactions are not possible. The file can only be experienced from start to finish in the order defined by the teacher. To use instructional design terminology, a video file gives a linear experience to the learner, while branch-aware interactive projects provide a nonlinear experience where a learner can make choices that change the way the course progresses. Therefore, interactive objects, quizzes, and branching are not available in a Video Demo project.

You have now experienced the Video Demo you will create in Chapter 9, Producing a Video Demo.

You will now preview the next sample application using the following steps:

This sample application is very different from the projects you worked with so far because it is not based on screenshots or screen recording. The capture tool of Captivate was not used in this example. Instead, all the slides have been carefully crafted in Captivate.

For its audio narration, this project does not use text-to-speech. Instead, the narration was recorded and polished in an external audio application (Adobe Audition, in this case) and imported to the project.

This course is also much more involved than the Encoder examples. Advanced Actions and Variables are used throughout the project to power the dynamic features, such as the name of the student appearing in the title of slide 4. This course also features the certificate interaction at the very end (only if you pass the Quiz!), an Interactive Video is inserted on slide 23 of the project, and it uses the built-in collection of characters to spice up the training with a human touch! But the most impressive feature of this particular project is probably the Quiz, one of the most important and most popular tools in Captivate.

The project contains seven Question Slides. Six of these are stored in the Question Pool. Each time the project is viewed, three questions are randomly chosen from the Question Pool and displayed to the student. If you want to experiment with this feature, view the sample project a second time. Because we used the Question Pool to generate the questions, you should not be asked the same Quiz questions as when you first experienced the project.

The next sample course you will see is not part of the download that comes with this book. Instead, you will use one of the sample applications that is included in Captivate. Use the following steps to open it:

 

As shown in the following screenshot, you can access various sample files and tutorials right from the Welcome Screen of Captivate:

You will now open one of the sample files provided by Adobe.

The project you just opened is a Responsive Project. This means that it can adapt itself to the screen it is viewed on. Note the extra toolbar at the top of the stage. This extra toolbar lets you switch between different devices in order to check how the project is displayed on screens of different sizes.

This action resizes the Stage to the size of an iPhone 6 (375 px by 559 px). As shown in the following screenshot, the elements of the current slide are rearranged to fit the new size of the Stage. Some elements (such as the big image that was on the right side of the stage) have even been completely removed to accommodate the reduced screen real estate of a smartphone:

 

You will now preview this project in a web browser, using the following steps.

There are a lot of differences in the way you preview a Responsive Project, compared to the way you preview a non-responsive Captivate project:

All these changes have a single root cause: a Responsive Project can only be published in HTML5. That's why you need a browser to preview the project.

To make this project responsive, we have used Fluid Boxes to define the slide layouts for the different screen sizes. You will learn more about Responsive Projects and Fluid Boxes in Chapter 10, Creating a Responsive Project.

The special previewing features of the Responsive Projects let you test the responsiveness of your project during the development phase, but they have one major disadvantage. Because you preview the project using the default browser of your desktop or laptop computer, you can't experience the course on an actual mobile device. 

Adobe Captivate 2019 has introduced a new type of project. Thanks to Virtual Reality (VR) courses, you are able to generate an interactive 360° Virtual Reality environment that will immerse your learners in a specific training situation! VR projects are based on 360° pictures or videos used to recreate an entire environment. You will now experience one such project using the following steps: 

Just like Responsive Projects, VR projects can only be published in HTML5. This is the reason why Captivate displays the project in your default web browser once it has finished publishing the preview.

You should notice that the background image moves in the direction you drag it! You are in the very center of an entire 360° space! The black circular buttons are interactive hotspots that have been added to the 360° environment using the tools of Adobe Captivate.

The new Virtual Reality projects of Adobe Captivate 2019 make it incredibly easy to create immersive trainings in a custom 360° space based on 360° images or videos. Typical topics for such Virtual Reality courses include virtual tours, safety drills, first responder situations, crisis management, and so on. But, of course, the sky is the limit, and your imagination that will ultimately define what Virtual Reality will be used for.

 

This is the last sample project for you to experience before wrapping up this chapter. Use the following steps to open and preview this project:

This project has been entirely developed in Microsoft PowerPoint and converted into a Captivate project using Captivate's ability to import PowerPoint slides. You will learn about importing PowerPoint presentations in Captivate in Chapter 12, Using Captivate with Other Applications.

After viewing these sample applications, you should have a pretty good idea of the tools and general capabilities of Adobe Captivate. Before moving on, let's summarize what you have learned from these sample courses:

David Kelly is the executive vice president and executive director of The eLearning Guild. David has been a learning and performance consultant and training director for more than 15 years. He is a leading voice for exploring how technology can be used to enhance training, education, learning, and organizational performance. David is an active member of the learning community and can frequently be found speaking at industry events. He has contributed to organizations including ATD, eLearn Magazine, LINGOs, among others. David is also known for his curation efforts, especially related to conferences and events for learning and performance professionals.