Captivate Authoring for Moodle?

[SandyDebreuil]

Hi All!

I'm an animator, and I've created some training animations for a client. The idea is that the user will watch the animated video (created in AE), and then do a quiz or reflection based on the video. There will be six videos, followed by six quizes. The client will deliver the material on Moodle 3.9, hosted by them.

So my question is: Would Captivate be a good tool to do this with? I need it exported as a SCORM package, and I don't have a ton of experience with Captivate.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

I would suggest that the issues you may encounter are less likely to be related to Adobe Captivate as your tool of choice for creating a SCORM package but your use of video.

Captivate can certainly create a SCORM package that contains video (MP4 format) on one or more slides within the project.  Configuring the project to publish out as SCORM format that is compatible with Moodle is very simple.  You will need to use SCORM 1.2 and select Moodle as the specific LMS type and configure the Manifest settings to identify the overall Course ID and SCO ID etc.

If you run into playback issues, it will not usually be the fault of Captivate or Moodle but with the weight of your video files.  If they are set up as download video rather than streaming video, and the videos are too large for the bandwidth available to the end user, then they may experience buffering during playback, or just delayed start to playback while they wait for the video to download ready to play.

So my suggestion is to download the trial version of Captivate and do some testing by uploading your project to Moodle and see what happens.  If you don't know anything about Captivate, there are plenty of good videos on the web that explain how to do just about anything.

[SandyDebreuil]

Thanks, Rod, that's really helpful! I've been a bit worried about video size as well, but it sounds like the users will mostly be on a local intranet, so hopefully that's not an issue. Also hoping that having a series of short videos rather than one large one will help.

I'm also hoping that being an Adobe product I'll have a bit less of a learning curve than I might with other tools, as I use a pretty wide variety of Adobe applications.

The big things is to just know it's possible, glad to hear that it is!

Thanks again for the great response!

[Lilybiri]

You would need an eLearning authoring tool anyway to publish to a SCO, which needs to be uploaded to a LMS. Moodle is such a LMS.µ, as Rod points out which has its individual place in the Reporting dialog box in Captivate.

Each video will be on a slide, problem is that it needs to be loaded On Enter for each slide which can cause the buffering issues. If the company is hosting Moodle itself, don't they have a webserver as well? You could try to upload the videos to that webserver and insert them as a web object in Captivate.

I don't want to spoil the fun, but having a lot of experience with other Adobe applications, is not a guarantee for learning Captivate quickly as I experience personally when starting with Captivate in 2008 after having taught Photoshop, InDesign etc since many years.

From your question I deduct that you really will need to be able to use the Quizzing feature in Captivate. It is one of the main stumbling blocks for new users (sorry), based on the number of posts (and their views) in my Captivate blog. Reason I dared to answer here as well. Recently I uploaded a short basic course about Quizzing, here is the first post:

https://blog.lilybiri.com/quiz-basics-1-terminology

You'll easily find the next 4 posts. 

Since you talk about intranet in a company, I suppose you'll go for a non-responsive (scalable) project. Choosing a responsive project would add more complications.  Be also careful with tweaking design of the quiz slides (which I expect due to your background) to avoid issues. Captivate is a theme-based application and quiz slides are based on dedicated master slides (and object styles) with inbuilt functionality.

[SandyDebreuil]

Thanks for such a detailed and thoughtful response, Lilybiri!
The company is actually a government agency, and I'm not sure I'll have much access to their servers, or how co-operative they'll be about uploading videos outside of the SCORM package. I'll ask though, that would be an excellent solution.
I appreciate the heads up about the learning curve in Captivate, these apps always looks so easy when you watch the two minute video promo 😉 Always harder when you get into the weeds of making actually work!
Thanks so much for the link to your blog, it's just what I was looking for! Terminology is such a big stumbling block when you're starting out, it's hard to search for answers when you don't know the proper terms. This is legit helpful.
And good heads up about the themes! I used them a lot MS Office, and that can mess you up pretty quick if you don't know what's going on. I'll watch for that, because you're right, I'll be tweaking the design for sure!
Thanks again for taking the time to post this Lilybiri, super-useful!

[Lilybiri]

You're welcome. I really hope that this basic course will prevent you from getting in trouble when starting to tweak the design. Do not hesitate to post more questions, both Rod and myself are around daily (and in different time zones).

[SandyDebreuil]

Thanks again, and I'm sure I'll be around posting questions!

(I'll be the guy in the corner pulling my hair out 😉