Options to develop training for a customer with no LMS

[pamela_tenaglia]

Hi folks - I'm new to Captivate. I'm hoping someone on this discussion group can help me.  I have a customer who needs training built, but doesn't have an LMS or access to one.  The final training hand-off is being requested as a CD-ROM.  Shocking - I know!

Is it possible to build interactive training in Captivate, and burn the final output on a CD?  If so, how?

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Do their users have access to the Internet?  If so this might be a solution for them. Share Your eLearning Using Amazon AWS - YouTube

[Pkoel]

Hello,

  One option is to create a basic "menu" HTML page with a button(s) or link(s). Each button or link would point to the index file of a Captivate solution. copy the menu page and Adobe Captivate solution files to the CD. On the CD, have the autorun bring up your menu page so that the menu appears when the CD is inserted in the CD ROM. In this example, you would not be able to store or send the results of any quizzes.

Cheers,

Peter

[pamela_tenaglia]

Thank you both for trying to help me with my issue.  I was hoping to find a solution where I can publish to a CD, as the client wants a CBT.

Paul Wilson​ I'm not sure if the client will have access to the internet in the field.

Pkoel​ I don't think the client is worried about scoring quizzes.

I learned that SL3 or SL360 has a publish to CD option.  I shared all three ideas with my supervisor and we'll see which option she decides on.

Thanks for your help, Ya'll are Rock Stars!

-Pam

[RodWard]

You may need to check into whether or not that publish to CD ROM option in Articulate is only for SWF-based content.  If it is, then you are going to run into the issue that Flash content will cease being supported next year.

For the record, in Captivate, if you choose the publish option for EXE then you also have the option to select a checkbox to create an autorun file that is needed when the content is launched from a CD ROM.  However, EXE content is also really just SWF content wrapped up in a self-running Flash Player.  Once you have that autorun file, you can edit with a text editor to point to a different file, such as for example the index.html file of HTML5 output.

However, publishing to CD-ROM nowadays has many potential issues, so we don't recommend you go that route. As mentioned, SWF content is technically not going to have a future.  But the other issues you may run into are that browsers now often have much stricter security settings than they did back in the day when CD-ROM based learning was more popular.  The fact is that you could supply CD-ROMs to your target audience and they may find that their web browsers refuse to play the content anyway.

Nowadays your best option for delivering content to end users is always going to be to do it from a web server.  It gets around most of the common issues.

[pamela_tenaglia]

Rod - Thanks for all that great information. I completely agree with you regarding hosting training on an LMS or web server, however, the folks at Raytheon (my employer), asked me to do some research for a project, where the customer is asking for the training to be handed off on a CD-ROM.

I'm assuming the customer is a little behind in the times for hardware - or maybe they don't have internet access out in the field. I have no idea. I wasn't given many details.

[RodWard]

Just do some testing.  Create a dummy project with a couple of simple quiz questions and try to get it to work on a CD-ROM.  Let your client see what they are up against.  But as someone else said here, if you're talking about the course having multiple modules, you'll be able to handle the navigation to allow launching each module better if you use an HTML page with links to the main HTM or HTML file that launches that module.  Trying to have one module that acts as a menu module to launch the others is likely to run into security issues.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

CBT doesn't mean it has to be CD-ROM based. I would ask a few follow up questions before you go in with a suggestion that you put it on CD-ROM. CBT simply stands for Computer Based Training (what we used to call eLearning before the internet). My suggestion would be to put it on a USB thumb drive before taking the time to put it on CD-ROM. At least most devices have a USB drive. I have two laptops in my house do not have optical drives at all. At least with a thumb drive, I could access the content.

[pamela_tenaglia]

Paul - I suggested a thumb drive, because there's more room on them, as compared to a CD-ROM and very few laptops come with a CD drive any more.  I was shot down because they feel there would be a security issue involved, and the client is specifically asking for the content to be presented on a CD. Go figure.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Well best of luck. Just for my own curiousity, would love to know what security they believe CD-ROM offers over a thumb drive.

[leonorab75997843]

Paul,

Can Captivate run on any computer even if it doesn't have the captivate program or isn't in an LMS?  How do you do that?

Thanks for answering

[Lilybiri]

Captivate's output to HTML5 is like a website, you only need a browser to view it.  There is a big difference between the raw Captivate file and the output folder. You only need Captivate as developer.

As an example of a published file, have a look at this published tutorial (interactive video):

Roundrtip with Photoshop

This published folder resides on my domain, which I use as a webserver. If you want to track scores, you would need a LMS which is not the case here.