Greetings, Litmos community!

We’ve been taking a look at how to create efficiency when designing/developing eLearning in Adobe Captivate 5. Adobe recently added a killer master slide feature to Captivate.

If you’re familiar at all with how to use multiple master slides in PowerPoint, you have some idea of how effective this function could be when creating eLearning.

Master slides are cool. You can reuse elements (like backgrounds and text boxes) without pasting them in over and over again. You can create multiple masters for different slide types (e.g. intro, body, summary).

Why should you really care? The payoff:

• Master slides will save you time–massive amounts of time.
• Master slides limit mistakes and rework.
• Master slides allow you to direct your energy towards content; you won’t have to reinvent the wheel placing repeatable objects on each slide.

For example, I’ve been working on a delightful (and completely fictitious) course called Gaming 101. There are two main content areas (each with its own slide type): the odds for different casino games, and an etiquette guide for some of the world’s most sumptuous casino-hotels.

Throughout the course, I need to repeatedly create two types of slides to introduce chunks of content –so I’ve built two master slides:

Let’s take a look at our first master slide (the one we’ll be using for our discussion of the odds).

Everything you see is part of the slide master: the opaque yellow rectangle at the top, the semi-transparent rectangle at the bottom, the two text captions, the wholesome background image, etc.

Like in PowerPoint, you can name these masters. This one (our “odds” slide master) is called Fate: Body. As you would insert a new slide in PowerPoint with the desired name or layout, you can do something similar in Captivate 5–insert a slide and select what master to use from the Properties window (not shown, but it’s conveniently on top of you when you’re working in Captivate).

After inserting a new slide, we can add our slide-specific elements, such as additional text, graphics, and whatnot.

Here’s an example:We’ve added text to the right of our boilerplate, and an appropriate image (the roulette wheel). On the bottom, you can see stock Captivate image buttons for navigation.

Imagine if you had to do a slide like this for each game of chance. The master slide is an enormous time saver. You wouldn’t want endless repetition (i.e. 15 of these slides in a row), but you can use masters when repeatable elements make sense (such as introductory slides for each chunk of content).

Here’s an example of our Etiquette slide, master (top) and actual slide (bottom):

Pretty elemental stuff: we added the name of the place and the hotel (Macau; Lisboa), the buttons, and a picture of the hotel in question.

I would encourage you to learn master slides as you start using Captivate. This iteration of the software is terrific — you won’t have to deal with the heartbreak and baggage of a career spent without it.

Soon, we’ll look at some resources for learning more about Captivate: from Adobe and from the broad network of practitioners out there.

Cheers!

@jwillensky

P.S. With a house edge of 5.6%, roulette is a lousy play. Stick with craps (0.6%) or blackjack (0.8%).

Over the weekend we released a major upgrade to the way that Litmos sends emails. What this means for you is more of the emails that Litmos sends out to your students will find the inbox rather than get caught in spam or junk filters.

Over the past year the number of emails that Litmos sends every day to students all over the world has been growing rapidly. With the increased quantity of emails being sent we have noticed an increase in the number of undeliverable emails and also reports of email going straight to junk.

In order to solve this problem we have implemented a number of changes that we believe will improve the chances of emails making it straight into the students inbox – yay!

From Address

Previously any emails sent by Litmos appeared in your students inbox as being sent from system@litmos.com. We have changed this now so that the name of your organization will show up. This works a lot better as your students will recognize who the message is from and won’t be wondering who Litmos is! You can change your organization name on the “Account” tab.

Reply-To Address

You can now set a Reply-To address for all of the emails that are sent out by your organization via Litmos. This means that if a student replies to any of the new user welcome or course notification emails, you will get the response rather than them getting the Litmos auto-responder.

To set your Reply-To Address go to the  “Account” tab, then ‘Messages & Email’.

Email Unsubscribe

Similar to what you see when you get an email newsletter from someone, we now include an unsubscribe link in the footer of all emails that we send out. This is known to reduce the number of emails that people mark as spam and will in turn increase the chance of successfully delivering emails on the whole.

Unsubscribing via the link means you’ll still receive the messages inside your Litmos account in the Messages area, but emails are no longer forwarded to your external address anymore. You can choose to switch this back on at any time.

Whats Next?

This is just the first stage in a greater email related project that we’re working on. Next up will be:

• Stats & indicators to let you know if emails to a particular student are not delivered
• More control over the actual message content

Questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask us!

@Schnicker

You may think this has been a long time coming, but to be honest it has really only been a highly requested feature in the past few months. So without further ado, allow me to introduce the latest new feature rolling out today to all Litmos accounts – Custom Timezones.

How does it work?
Well, with our new custom timezones feature all users, administrators and learners, can set their own custom timezone based on their location. This means that all course completion times/dates, messages and reporting information will show up in the timezone that is relevant to them.

How do learners that already have a Litmos account select a timezone?
Learners who already have a Litmos account will remain to be on UTC / GMT unless they choose to change to a new timezone which can be done via the ‘Settings’ menu in their account. 

How do current training admins set their timezone?
There are two options here:

1. They can set it via the ‘Settings’ tab on the Trainer side, then ‘My Profile’
   
2. Alternatively, a timezone can be selected on the Trainee view via the Settings area as per above instructions for learners

New Litmos accounts from now
In new Litmos accounts, the Account Owner’s timezone will automatically become the default setting for the organization. All new users loaded in to the system from that point will select their own timezone on sign in or if none is selected, they will default to that of the organization.

New users to Litmos
New users to Litmos will set their custom timezone on their very first login on the same screen where they check their name details and select a password.

@Schnicker

We’re releasing some new color themes for Litmos accounts this week and so I was putting together a high contrast version for partially sighted people. After spending some time working out the right combination of colors needed I stumbled across a very simple way to do it which does not involve me creating a new theme at all.

In Windows 7 you can switch your whole display to high contrast mode and every website is transformed to give you the right view – how cool is that?!

This is how you do it:

1. Go to your ‘Control Panel’
2. Then click on ‘Appearance and Personalization’
3.  Under the ‘Ease of Access Center’ select ‘Turn High Contrast On or Off’
4. Scroll down the display choices and you’ll find are a number of high contrast options for your screen. Pick one and your screen will automatically adjust.

Also in the ‘Ease of Access Center’ are features for low vision like a magnifier, screen narrator, text or visual alternatives for sounds, onscreen keyboard and other shortcuts to make life a little easier. It’s cool to check out even if you have 20/20 vision as it gives you an idea of what it’s like to look at your website or app through someone else’s eyes.

@Schnicker

If you don’t have the budget for a professional voice-over person or you just prefer to do-it-yourself, these tips may help you to create more professional screen recordings using a product like Camtasia (which I use) or another screen recording tool on the market.

1. Storyboard your presentation and script it out making sure to note where slides change or where a point should be emphasized with voice inflection or a pause.

2. Record your visuals first, without audio, but for practice talk through the audio so that you get the right timing for slide changes. Personally, I’ve found the audio quality is much better when the visual and audio tracks are recorded separately.
3. It’s a good idea to start and finish your recording all on the same day as your voice changes pitch quite noticeably. It’s weird but I find it really hard to make my voice sound the same on a different day.
4. Record the whole thing in one take if you can, it doesn’t have to be a perfect one track wonder. If you mess up a line, make a loud noise to cause a spike on the audio track, pause a moment and then begin again. The spike on the audio track indicates where you need to come back to for editing.
5. Take a big drink of water before you begin and if you need to have some during the recording, just go ahead. Again, make a loud noise to indicate it’s an area of the track that needs editing, pause and then continue with the script.
6. Avoid coffee and sugary drinks before recording as it does something weird to your saliva production and can make for some interesting mouth noises.
7. Stand up to speak if you can. At the very least sit up straight on the edge of your chair and drop your knees to open up your chest for maximum voice projection and nice deep breaths.
8. I use a headset with a mic which works pretty well as you can position the mic a short distance from your face, and out to the side to minimize breathing and mouth noises.
9. Make sure to do your recording when traffic noise and background noises will be at a minimum. I always record on the weekend as my mic picks up every little noise. You can remove background noise afterward, but it’s not always perfect.
10. Finally, it may sound random but having apple slices handy while you are recording is a good idea because the pectin in apples helps to reduce mouth noises.

I’d love to hear of any more helpful techniques that you’ve come up with in the comments section below.

I also should say that I’m not affiliated with Camtasia in any way.

@Schnicker

I’ve just joined the group on LinkedIn called ‘Adobe Captivate‘. It was the only relatively populated group that I could find in there focused on this topic, which surprised me. So far though, it looks like a really great group of supportive Captivate users.

Scanning through the discussions I can see that there are over 350 members asking all sorts of questions and helping each other out. Their topics range from removing the company logo from published files, to help with screen resolution and Captivate 3 vs. 4 debates. I’m impressed with the level of people involvement and help offered. There’s nothing worse than joining a group that just does…nothing!

Aside from this group (and the actual Adobe Captivate forum), are there any other Captivate focused communities online that I should know about? I’d be really interested in any suggestions that other people are finding useful.

@Schnicker