Bespoke feedback in Captivate assessments – Part 3

This is a follow up post to my previous Bespoke Feedback in Adobe Captivate Assessments.  I was reviewing the results slide and thought that having the subject to be reviewed appearing with text ‘You might want to review’ on each line was a little clumsy and so I wanted to put the review text separately.

This meant I needed to add another tab in the advanced action which would present the review text if any of the subject text was going to be presented.  This took advantage of using the condition ‘if any of the conditions are true’ option.

This might sound a little complicated but it really is quite straightforward.  Have a look at the video.

Could there be another way of making the text appear?

I’d love to have your feedback!

How do I change the toner?

A recent tweet by Craig Taylor and a company called Wistia got me thinking about video for learning.  Video has been gathering pace over the last few years and more companies are introducing this as part of their learning strategy.

The Wistia blog has some very good ideas, and I think that for a company who deal with video every day, it’s both refreshing and honest of them to chart their journey with video as a marketing tool.

How do I change the toner?  – was the question that prompted the video below.  I thought that this would be a great opportunity to demonstrate how useful video could be in the business so within half an hour I’d created this video about how to change the toner in the printer.  I filmed it on iPhone and edited on iPad with the iMovie app. At the time we were using Jam as our social platform and I could upload the video from my pad.

So if you are just starting off with introducing video, try with something that is necessary but infrequent – or even something that you are always asked about.

Chances are that if more than two people ask you how to do something more people want to know how to do it but won’t ask.

Then when you are asked again – point them in the direction of the video which will get them used to using/searching for video.

What else would be ideal for a short video tutorial?

Have you found resistance to using video as a reference tool?

Another string to our bow

As a learning designer I seem to be asked to do more than just design online learning or other ‘learning’ interventions.

As part of a large project at the end of last year I was asked to create a video that would be shown to the business which would give a high level view of the new system that was to be introduced.  This provided me with a couple of problems – I’ve never worked in marketing/PR – so how can I make something as dry as a new system interesting and engaging?  The brief was – make it upbeat.

So I thought that it would be good to get an authentic voice from people who had already used the system, and maybe get them to answer some questions or concerns from the people who were getting it.

I also wanted to show the interface and how to navigate around it.  Here is the first part of the video (I took out the bit with the system!)

To any of you who have developed video as a demo/into to a concept etc. I’d love to hear your feedback, as I think I may be doing more of these this year, and would like to get better with each one!

I filmed this on a Canon D600 and edited in iMovie using Keynote for the text.

I do not own the copyright to the music  M83 – Midnight city.

Creating Bespoke feedback in Captivate Assessments

I’ve recently been putting together some assessments for a new system release and was presented with a request.  Our project lead wanted the assessments to let the delegates know the subject area that they got wrong, without having to use the ‘review quiz’ option in Captivate.  The review function in Captivate is fine, but not only does it tell the delegate which question they got wrong, but it also tells them which was the right answer.  We didn’t want to do this, so I had to devise a way of presenting subject areas only, which they would need to revisit before re-taking the assessment.

I also wanted to keep the random question functionality along with the question pools.

So I came up with this solution.  This is my first attempt at doing a demo video – I had to cut it into two!  Hope this is useful.

Creating a menu in Captivate

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve had Adobe Captivate 5.5 for over a year now, and with no formal training, me and a few others are learning the software as we go.

Here is an example that I put together of a menu using the rollover sidelet feature.  This was inspired by the ‘flat’ design of this website Palace which utilises a tiles layout with rollovers.

Here is the example

Click on the picture to see the example

As the user hovers round the sections, a transparent colour appears.  When they click on the colour, information about that section is shown, and then they can click to be taken to that section.  The concept is quite simple, but here is how I did it.

I used rollover slidelet as this has two functions in the properties box.  ‘On click’ and ‘On rollover’.

• First of all – make sure all pictures, colour blocks and transparencies are named! this will avoid confusion later.
• Arrange the slide how you want it with all of the elements on it.
• Insert the rollover slidelet – but remove the ‘reveal’ shape – we only want the rollover box.
• Build some Advanced Standard Actions – you will need to create a standard action for each of the rollover boxes, this is so that the transparent box will appear, and then disappear when the mouse rolls over another box.
• The standard action will be something like this

Standard action name – ‘Rollover_1

Show – Colour_orange

Hide – Colour_blue

Hide – Colour_red

Hide – Colour_Dark blue

• Create the standard action for the rest of the coloured boxes, revealing each colour, but hiding all of the others.  Turn the visibility of each of the coloured shapes off.
• Under the properties box for the rollover, on rollover, choose ‘execute advanced actions’ then choose the relevant standard action.
• I then duplicated each slide so that when the delegate clicks on the rollover slidelet, they will be taken to the relevant slide where the information for each section will be displayed.  Again in the properties panel, under ‘on click’ choose ‘jump to slide’
• It’s then just a matter of inserting click boxes to either go back to the main menu, or to the actual module itself.

Hope this was interesting – If you have any thoughts as to how I could do this in a simpler way, please let me know!

The eternal question

I know I know – I’ve not posted for ages, but I need to start to blog again – so where do I start?  As someone said when asked the same question ‘start anywhere’.

So – for a quick post, this caught my eye this week on the BBC  where Tesco, a large multinational supermarket was fined for selling half price strawberries contrary to trading standards.

Now I’m no apologist for Tesco but it looks like this was a technicality which they should have known (if that had affected the public buying the things I’m less sure about) but towards the end of the article Tesco said that they were offering ‘training’ to their staff to make sure that this didn’t happen again.

How often do we see this?  Someone did not ‘know’ or deliberately did not follow trading rules.  To me, this does not appear to be a process fault, just a basic ‘follow the rules’ issue – however, training is seen as the ‘cure all’ and has satisfied the court.  This could just be a simple communication piece, because this would probably mean ‘repeating’ the wording of the trading standard clauses.  How would they assess that this had been successful?  No more prosecutions probably.  But as with most of these ‘risk’ issues, by not having prosecutions, does not necessarily mean that people ‘know’ or could demonstrate that they ‘know’ the rules about sales.

So – what type of training do you think people are having?  And do you think this would just be head office, who make these decisions, or do you think the staff on the shop floor will be having emergency training? Is it training or communication?