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ColinA_83
Participant
December 3, 2012
Question

Can we cut project size with Captivate 6 and HTML5

  • December 3, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 779 views

Have just attended a large elearning conference in Berlin, where everyone s talking HTML5.

Captivate was only mentioned once at one of the stands, where it was stated that HTML5 can reduce file-size by 50%

Our company is using SABA as our LMS and in our department we have released 80 elearning modules last year, all published in Captivate 5.

Our employees are pleased with the content but our largest challenge, which is close to being a show-stopper, is the time it takes to load our modules; up to 20 minutes per chapter in India, China and USA.

Our lessons are split into chapters where one chapter=one Captivate project.

Everything is put together via Multi-Scorm Packager. Each chapter contains "Check Your Understanding" quizzies and the last chapter is a final test that has to be passed in order to complete the lesson.

We have another challenge with the scoring (100% in the test gives a score of 20 if there are 5 chapters (100/5)) but this seems to be a problem with Saba not being able to "understand" Captivate's scorm.

We need a quick fix on our load time problem, and we want to know if the problem can be reduced by implementing Captivate 6 and publishing as HTML5.

Our plan B is produce local Intranet based HTML versions of our content, and only having the Final Test in our LMS - not great but may be necessary.

Hope someone has experience with this.....

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

RodWard
Community Expert
RodWardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 3, 2012

How many megabytes are each of your Captivate SCORM modules? 

Are you perhaps using video as part of your content?

Have you checked the available bandwidth at the locations in these countries where the load times are slow? 

It's quite possible that your slow download issue is a combination of heavy course content and poor end-user bandwidth, in which case the 'fix' is to either redesign your courses to minimise filesize, and/or improve the bandwidth at the other end.  The first option is usually easier to achieve.

I question the idea that moving to HTML5 will half your filesize.  The SWF format is already heavily compressed, whereas most technologies associated with HTML5 are uncompressed.  I'd be interested to see the proof of this statement.

C
ColinA_83Author
Participant
December 3, 2012

Thanks for the prompt reply.

The chapters vary in size. An introduction module is about 3 MB, whereas the larger content modules can be between 6-10 MB.

We do not normally have embedded video and are using streaming video instead.

In fact, out courses are relatively simple regarding animation etc. Mostly only text + pictures.

We had hoped that HTML5 was our saviour here.

If content is created in pure Flash, will there be a difference in file size? In other words, does Captivate create an extra overhead?

I should mention that we use Closed Captioning with Text-to-Speech audio on almost all slides.

RodWard
Community Expert
RodWardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 3, 2012

Embedding the video or using streaming video doesn't necessarily change the total number of megabytes the end user has to download.

6-10 megabytes doesn't sound like a lot to me.  I would be checking the actual available bandwidth at the other end to see if the issue might be there.  Remember that many users don't actually have as much bandwidth as they think they have because they're actually sharing it with a lot of other people.  And in places like India or China the time of day when you are trying to download can have a huge impact on the time it takes.  When I was in Beijing a couple of years ago it was useless trying to download anything at certain hours of the day because of the load.

I don't believe Captivate creates any extra overhead.  Whether SWF or HTML5 will be smaller is easy enough to find out.  Just create a course in Cp6 and output it to both formats then measure the total filesize of each.  That's a pretty good apples for apples test.

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