Saturday, July 18, 2009

Exploring an Authoring Tool

How do you go about exploring an authoring tool? What methods do you employ to create an Instructor-Led training on an authoring tool?

Here is what I did to explore and create a training material on Adobe® Captivate®4. It is an elearning tool that enables you to create powerful and engaging elearning course.

I was asked to create a HDD for the training material in such a way that the training could be completed within2-3 days. Most of the people believe that Help files are of no use. I would say the Help file is of immense use if only you know how to utilize it in the best possible way. Since this is a tool, you need to try out each and everything that you want to include in the training material.

The video tutorials provide you a basic understanding of all the major usage of the tool. Apart from this, I read up as much as possible to gather information to create the training material. Creating a step list along with relevant screen grabs, coupled with relevant demos can go a long way in making an instructionally sound training material. The most challenging part was to create the demonstrations without any glitches.

Let me list down the latest features that Adobe® Captivate® 4 offers:

  • provides professional design templates that provide a consistent look
  • enables the reviewers to add comments directly to your SWF files
  • allows you to import demonstrations created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 in the PPTX format, as well as the PPT format
  • allows you to edit PowerPoint content in Adobe® Captivate® 4

You can visit www.adobe.com/products/captivate/faq/ more information.