Capture that E-Learning Demo: Update

I’ve been getting some very positive feedback about my recent series of blog posts reviewing TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate. Some contributors have also been kind enough to point out some deficiencies regarding the usability of the review - you may recall it was written over four days and four posts. One great suggestion was to create a TOC in each post so that readers could easily navigate to each section of the review.

Given the number of responses to the E-Learning Demo comparison articles, I have decided to combine them and make them available to all as a downloadable whitepaper (PDF format) so that the review can be read in one easily-accessible document.

Click here read the review in a new browser window, or right-click and Save As… to download a copy of the paper to your PC or Mac. You will need Adobe Reader to view the file. Click here to download Adobe Reader 9.

My final thought for today: I put a lot of time and effort into writing (hopefully) useful, informative and stimulating material for this e-learning blog. Being a learning and development professional, the posts I find most satisfying to write concern the reasons people want to learn, the theories and approaches that support learning, and how best to enable learners to acquire knowledge. I guess I have to admit that sometimes I forget that maybe the practical ‘just-in-time’ material is as important as the more esoteric material. In future, I’ll certainly add more posts concerning the practical elements of e-learning development, deployment and delivery into the mix.

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Capture that E-learning Demo 4: Captivate and Camtasia, concluded

Continuing my evaluation of Captivate and Camtasia Studio...

In my previous posting, I discussed the two applications' user interfaces and audio capabilities. Today, I will look at workflow and usability.

Captivate Usability

Captivate offers three customizable capture presets - demonstrations, assessment simulations, and training simulations. If you choose an assessment simulation, Captivate won’t capture mouse movements that highlight boxes, or text captions that would tell the learner how to proceed in the assessment. In demonstration mode, Captivate doesn’t include Click boxes, since it assumes that the audience is passively viewing the content.

As mentioned last time, Captivate uses an object-orientated paradigm to develop content. As such, events and interactions are captured as a series of screens. In edit mode, the content author can flexibly create new screens, import content (in a number of formats including AVI, PPT, and FLV), change the sequence of events, and delete unused content. As you can see from Figure 1, the edit tab look-and-feel is a combination of the Macromedia / Adobe Unified User Interface and Microsoft PowerPoint: this indicates to me that Adobe are targeting users familiar with developing content in the latter program as their core market for Captivate.

Figure 1. Detailed view of the Captivate UI.

[Click here to view larger image]

In this context, the UI works very well indeed; you can actually create a PowerPoint presentation in it's native format, import it to Captivate, enhance it with motion-based media, animations, quizzes, and audio narration, and generate a learning object with ease. The inclusion of a timeline at the center-top of the UI is reminiscent of Flash and Director, so users familiar with these authoring tools can transition to Captivate-based content creation. The timeline also contains the vector-based mouse layer, which enables the modification of the mouse motion track in a demo or slide,

Compared to Camtasia, Captivate captures a broader range of text and interactive elements. The author can also add Text Entry boxes, clickable buttons, animations and text animations. Once an element is added to the timeline, it can be lengthened, reduced, and repositioned, which allows for a high level of precision - count on spending plenty of time tweaking the automatically captured elements to get the timing right.

Camtasia's Usability

If you've ever used Windows Movie Maker, you will be familiar with the Camtasia Studio UI. The interface is based on the video editing suite paradigm and includes all the common features of this editing environment - a preview window, a timeline where edits are made, a clip bin, and effects (cross fade, contrast/brightness etc) controls. Since Camtasia captures all mouse and screen events, it’s perfect for developing process flows, hot to's and application demonstrations. Camtasia does not automatically generate onscreen text media like callouts, but they can be added manually in post-production. As with Captivate, TechSmith's program allows for very precise location of callouts and highlights. Similarly Flash Hot Spots—callouts with additional Flash properties— can be included - though you have to render the entire project to view their operation, which is a nuisance (Captivate facilitates a single frame, five frame, or entire movie preview which is great for testing interactive functionality). It is possible to add quizzes in Camtasia, but the results are not scored as they are in Captivate.

Conclusions
And so this is where I came in: I still don't know which application I prefer. Used together as part of your e-learning content development toolkit, the applications will provide you with the ability to cover most (if not all) e-learning development eventualities. Because of my own professional background in digital media development, I feel more at home using Camtasia, but that does not mean that it's better at what it does. In terms of Camtasia's advantages I could highlight the better digital media manipulation, sophisticated features like zoom-and-pan, and wider range of output formats that Captivate just can't match. On the other hand, Captivate is much more capable and easier to use when creating assessments and simulations, especially with its ability to preview Click Boxes and other user input in Preview mode.

A comment contributor to the E-Learning Curve Blog called rjnagle was kind enough to share their experience of the apps with me:

Captivate has lots of quirks that take getting used to. I haven't used the elearning capabilities, only the demo capabilities.

First, the html output consists of several swf files, several of whom reference the other. It can be troublesome to put on a website.

Some basic editing features end up taking a lot of time. (for example, I've never figured out how to crop the beginning of an animation, only the end). I notice that sometimes when you impose text it will append dead time at the end.

I wish there were a way to speed up the animation time so that it plays more rapidly.

Also, despite the claims of the documentation, you simply can't attach more than one slide to an audio clip. It causes lots of problems.

I do like the fact you can import slides from other projects into the current one.
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They go on:

I have been disillusioned about Captivate, but once I recognize what it does well, I can manage.

The problem is that on the job you typically are able to choose one or the other, not both.

As I said when I began this series, each program has uniquely excellent functionality.

In the context of my contributor rjnagle, I would have to suggest that if your requirements center on demo development (and not e-learning), Camtasia Studio is the better tool. As for me? Well... I would assert that (for the moment) both tools are essential. Once you become familiar with their strengths, weaknesses, and quirks, it is hard to imagine working without either one.

____________

Find Out More:

Adobe Captivate Homepage

TechSmith Camtasia Studio Homepage

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Capture that E-learning Demo 3: Captivate and Camtasia

In the previous two blog posts, I outlined – at a very high level - some of the features and functionality of TechSmith Camtasia Studio and Adobe Captivate, and in today’s post I will provide a equally high level assessment of these products, not so much in comparison to each other, but rather more at tools that enable learning professionals to create immersive, media-rich demonstrations and learning objects.

Now read on…

Writing this review has proven to be a much more difficult (and time-consuming) task that I had anticipated it would be; in fact, I can say that I experience a mild cognitive dissonance whenever I’m asked the question “which do you prefer (or recommend): Camtasia or Captivate?”

The answer is I don’t know. Or more accurately, I still don’t know. More on this later. Like most people (in any industry) I tend to have a single ‘weapon of choice’ for each task I undertake. Last weekend I spent some time doing some DIY around the house for example, and despite owning many screwdrivers, I always return to my trusty old Stanley DynaGrip 10, pretty much regardless of the gluing and screwing job I’m doing. Similarly when I post-produce video I use one editor – Vegas Video, when I edit audio the files are authored in SoundForge, and I use DreamWeaver to do 95% of my HTML and website- related production. But when it comes to authoring demos? Well… there I have a problem. Inevitably I run mentally run through the dialog that I am about to share with you, dear reader.

Adobe Captivate and TechSmith Camtasia Studio are similar e-learning content development tools with uniquely different strong points. If you’re creating a software demo, or a PowerPoint presentation to deliver online, Camtasia is a better application; conversely, if you’re making interactive web-based training, or a complex software demonstration, Captivate is superior is definitely the tool for the task.

Even where their functionality converges, their operating procedures and user interface are so different that each will probably appeal to different users. If (like me) your background is in media production, you’ll find Camtasia easy to learn and use, and Captivate frustrating. On the other hand, if you’re used to authoring content in PowerPoint, you’ll find Camtasia a strange, and Captivate more intuitive and fit-for-purpose.

Figure 1. Captivate UI (above), Camtasia UI (below).

[Click image to enlarge]

Beyond these, however, are certain functions at which one product excels and the other either doesn’t perform or performs quite poorly. For example, Camtasia excels at capturing streaming video content, which Captivate cannot do. If you need to ‘pan and scan’ a close-up of a screen element of the content that you’ve captured, Camtasia is your only choice. However, the reverse pertains if you’re creating a quiz - Captivate offers a much richer toolset. Similarly Captivate’s ability to generate Word or PDF versions of files for hardcopy distribution is a fantastic timesaver.

Indeed, the more you use both tools, the more you begin to realize that if you’re authoring a range of e-learning, demonstration, and presentation projects, you probably really need both .

Using Camtasia
Like most screen-capture utilities, Camtasia captures a video of the screen as you interact with it, with added audio if you enable narration, as well as Picture-in-Picture (PIP) video if you add a webcam. The resultant CAMREC output file is a recording of all of the audio, video and interaction elements. In editing mode, Camtasia enables the addition of multiple tracks for captions, breakout boxes, callouts, PIP, quizzes, and so on.

Using Captivate
Captivate works differently. Rather than capturing one multiplexed file, Captivate captures the user’s interactions as a series of screens, each containing one mouse click and movement. Very much like its progenitor Flash, Captivate stores each object of each captured screen as a separate element. As with Camtasia, you may add additional content enhancements – 508-compliant closed captioning, callouts, quizzes, etc in post-production.

Audio
Both applications enable the author to either record audio narration in real time during capture time, or import MP3 or WAV audio in post-production. In my experience, Captivate audio recorded in real time loses synchronization over the duration of the recording: this becomes especially noticeable in 20-minute-plus recordings and can be very frustrating to remediate. However you can add post-content captured audio slide by slide (tedious), or by importing a completed audio file. A very neat feature of Captivate is that it recognizes audio markers, so if you include these in your WAV or MP3 file, it will synchronize with the slides in the presentation. I have also noticed that the audio generated by Captivate can be pretty ropey (even though it’s MP3 format) – in fact, at some of the lower sample- and bit rates, it reminds me of the horrible .VOX format I had to use in my Authorware days, back in the last century.

In my view, Camtasia Studio provides a much more easy-to-use and intuitive audio recording and editing experience. The fact that you can see all the audio on a timeline layer means that you can see how the audio fits in context with the presentation's ‘big picture.’ The ability to split audio and move it around the timeline is an added bonus. Similarly, I feel that the audio enhancement features – normalization, noise reduction (NR) and so on – are easier to preview and use in Camtasia. In terms of outputs, there no end to your choice of formats – MP3, WAV, and WMA. The facility to render podcast-formatted audio is a very cool feature that Captivate just can’t compete with.

This concludes this part of my head-to-head review.

Next time: Video editing, content rendering, and my conclusions.

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Exciting new online comms and collaboration tools from Adobe

I had planned today to continue my series on organizational learning and e-learning ecosystems, but I have become aware of an interesting new hosted productivity and collaboration suite from Adobe called Acrobat.com, so I thought I'd discuss that today. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary is known to respond with the acronym "IMFA" (It's My Airline) when others disagree with his decisions, so in the same spirit, IMFB.

Now read on...

Aligning with their stated aim to become a major force in so-called webtop software, Adobe released two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Product manager Erik Larson has stated that Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web.

It is [Adobe's] intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past.

Acrobat.com is a combination of three online services:

• Adobe ConnectNow (a "lite" version of Acrobat Connect 7 for web conferencing and desktop collaboration)
• Adobe Buzzword (and online word processor)
• Adobe Share (online file sharing)

In my view, this represents a serious attempt by Adobe to compete with many of Google's Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa, as well as solutions like Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting, usually associated with organizational collaboration.

Buzzword
Buzzword is the default word processor in the suite. it enables multiple collaborators to edit and comment documents. As well as providing a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor, tabs along the bottom of the UI represent the people who have accessed the document most recently, as well as their status (author, reviewer, etc.).

Uniquely for a web-based word processor, Buzzword paginates documents, supports a range of fonts, and lets you generate a pretty good equivalent to a PDF document. However, this is still in beta, so you will likely encounter some frustrations if you are used to creating documents in a desktop environment (i.e. during cut-and-paste operations) and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than via the previously mentioned cut-and-paste.

However, I have found this to be the case in similar apps such as Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to create this post); the software is still buggy - I'm happy to live with this in a beta app, though some might not be.

Adobe Share
This is a file-sharing application that focuses on document sharing.
You get one gigabyte of free storage, and it enables you to embed a Flash preview of your documents into any Web page (quite similar to FlashPaper). Adobe say that this enables anyone to download and print a PDF of the file (though I have yet to test this myself). I guess that you could describe this tool as 'Flickr on steroids', given Share's facility to make available a range of document types in an environment that those familiar with that tool can easily appreciate.

ConnectNow
I love ConnectNow. I've long been an advocate of online communication and collaboration tools as a powerful solution to the challenges organizations face, particularly if employees work in distributed teams, as well as for hosting training and non-formal learning interventions. I have to declare an interest here: the organization I work for relies heavily on Adobe Connect Pro (currently version 6) for training and informational purposes and I think that it's a great system, not least because it uses the Flash plug-in, so no large player downloads or quirky clients to be installed.



Even in it's cut-down form, making this functionality publicly available is going to be very popular (no more excuses not to talk to the relations in New Zealand!).
ConnectNow allows up to three people have free online meetings, with

• screen sharing
• desktop video
• voice conferencing
• IM-type chat
• white-boarding

Note that significant portions of Connect's functionality have been removed, including the recording facility, as well as the asynchronous meeting playback facility. You can also forget about hosting your on-demand e-learning content on the system, because that's been excised too, though that doesn't mean that you can't use the tool for synchronous learning, such as small-group online mentoring and so on.

Interestingly, ConnectNow (kind of) replicates Connect Pro's ability to integrate with telephone conferencing system via a fee-based toll line (currently only available in some territories like the US, UK, Germany etc). Now that the Flex-based UI uses Adobe Flash 9 rather than Flash 6, the screen looks great - a small thing, but it's attractiveness will certainly enhance users' enjoyment of the product.

Other commentators have suggested that the business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use:

while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.

I would assert that while this may be the plan at the moment, the ubiquity of other free-to-use applications (not to mention the competition in this increasingly hot marketspace) will force Adobe to either make these tools available gratis or include so many extra features to entice paying users that Acrobat.com will becomes a professional-level hosted solution, which presumably is not the consumer market that Adobe are attempting to dominate.

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More on defining e-learning, elearning, eLearning...

As I wrote yesterday, Don Morrison has defined e-learning as:

The continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by adults stimulated by synchronous and asynchronous learning events – and sometimes Knowledge management outputs – which are authored, delivered engaged with, supported and administered using internet technologies.

(2004, p.4)

I briefly touched upon "continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by adults"; andragogy.

Today, I'm going to talk a bit more about synchronous and asynchronous learning events. A proportion of the content I develop for the workplace includes non-formal informational and knowledge content delivered to learners (which I call "Information Sessions") via a number of synchronous and asynchronous channels. We will delve into the detail of this at another time, but for now it is useful to note the meanings of these categories. Colvin Clark and Mayer in e-learning and the Science of Instruction (2003) define synchronous delivery simply as that which occurs simultaneously, whereas asynchronous “occurs at different times” (p.201). I would suggest that implicit in the term ‘synchronous’ is the term ‘collaborative’ – that is, two or more learners, possibly in the presence of an instructor or domain expert, participating (remotely) in a learning event and exchanging information and knowledge.

In Designing World-class E-Learning Roger Schank (2002) calls this “e-learning by doing” (p.13) and cites the industry-wide use of computer-based air flight simulators in aviation as training tools to understand the potential of collaboration to develop learners in situated environments. Equivalently, implicit in the term ‘asynchronous’ is, I suggest, the notion of self-paced content. As Morrison points out though, “the flexibility of internet technology creates grey areas around the notion of synchronous and asynchronous” (p.7). He gives the example of a virtual class which “starts life” as a synchronous learning event, is recorded and can thenceforward be played back on-demand by learners. In a sense, Morrison argues, the presenter and participants taking part in the original event become co-authors of an asynchronous learning event. This, in fact, could serve as a rather broad working definition of the category of learning that the Information Sessions inhabit.

References:

Clark, R. C. & Mayer R. (2003) e-learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer

Morrison, D. (2004) E-Learning Strategies: how to get implementation and delivery right first time, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Schank, R. (2002) Designing World-Class e-Learning. London, McGraw-Hill