There’s a lot to love in the 2019 Release of Adobe Captivate, but the big headline has to be that the creation of 360 virtual reality (VR) simulations and training are supported in this release. You might think that would add a lot of complexity to the authoring tool, but nope. I actually found it takes only seconds to create VR content with the quick and easy tools Adobe has included. I’ll drill down into the examples and activities in a moment, but first, a high-level summary of a sensational release from the Adobe team.
There are three major new features in this release along with a number of minor features and many enhancements. Of course VR course creation will get all the headlines, but the new video overlay (think popup video) feature brings huge opportunities to interactive and remediated instruction via video. It's no secret that video has been doing the heavy lifting in e-learning for decades. It’s a trend that has pushed ahead even further with the excitement over microlearning.
The new overlay video feature in Captivate brings a number of interactive video power tools over to the cool kids' table to make spicing up your video and adding knowledge checks, interactions, and even remediation a breeze. The secret is that they’ve added bookmarks to the overlay video workflow and provided a method for creating overlays of custom shapes and sizes, with a gorgeous video blur effect to gently reassure the learner that their training hasn’t gone anywhere while they experience the latest knowledge check challenge, informational nugget, or even interaction. Here’s a quick example that I made using the Captivate course that is included in the 2019 release.
I added a drag-and-drop activity into the interactive video. (See the interactive version above.) The entire exercise took me under an hour, and to be honest most of the time was spent building a rule to bulk-process all my image states so I could show off on the drag and drop actions. That’s because all you have to do is build a normal slide, and then within the overlay video slide, add an overlay. The overlay selector will let you choose from any of the available slides you already built. That slide will now appear as an interactive video overlay. The only thing to do differently than a typical slide is that you will probably want to add some background, using a shape for example, that is smaller than the whole slide. You don’t have to, but it’s a great way to get that light box look for your popup overlay.
Inserting a video is just one click from the timeline. You can select from your other slides. You can also create a bookmark anywhere on the video timeline and use it for remediation. They failed that knowledge check? No worries; easily send them to any bookmark in the video using the new GoToBookmark command from the question failure options.
I absolutely love that the video pauses and blurs and that I can control every aspect of what goes on top of that background. You can also use this to do irregular light box overlays, because any shape or stack of shapes you place on the slide above the background layer can form the foundation for your popup. The huge win here has to be the remediation workflow for video. You can import YouTube video or start from a local video file. Captivate handles this one like a champ!
