Thursday, December 25, 2008

The dreaded Right Click

I am working on developing eLearning technical training courses for an ERP software application being implemented within a division of the company I work for using Adobe Captivate 3. If you are familiar with Adobe Captivate then you are familiar with "Assesment Simulations." I love assessment simulations because they require the learner to do the clicking rather than just viewing a screen recording of the process. This is great because they can actually practice using the software in a safe environment where they can't mess anything up and they will receive constructive feedback based on where they click. This is particularly great for my situation because in this software implementation, learners will be expected to be using the application full time the day the switch is flipped and the software is available to them. Captivate and the assessment simulations are a life saver for me because I can train them on the software without them actually having access to it.

Problem is that the software application has a lot of features that are accessed through right clicking and Captivate has no answer for the right click. I am on a deep dive for ideas of how to simulate the right click in a captivate simulation. I have heard that Captivate 4 is the answer for the right click in a post on Wendy Wickhams blog. Unfortunately Captivate 4 is not out yet and it's going to be a while before I have the budget to upgrade.

There's got to be some creative instructional designers out there who have come up with a way to cover right clicking in a Captivate assessment simulation but I haven't found them yet.
Please post a comment or send me an email if you have any ideas. Look for future posts on my solution to this issue

5 comments:

Mukul said...

Hi,
As you correctly identified, Adobe Captivate 4 is the solution to your problem. Adobe Captivate 4 has released now and you will find the details here.
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate

Also, you can find the solution to your 'right click' problem here. Please visit http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/
It tells you about workarounds you can use in Adobe Captivate 3 and also tells you about 'right click' feature in Adobe Captivate 4

Joe Deegan said...

Thanks so much for the link Mukul. This is exactly what I was looking for. Now if I can just save myself some development time and get the budget to upgrade to CS4. Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

Hi Joe,

To cover up the right click action, we can combine some animation steps with guided steps. For example, we can animate the right click actin and say that "the XXX icon has been right-clicked for you. Now, perform the step to ....task". This way learner doesn't need to right click and will also learn to perform steps.

I've a question. How do we calculate score for simulation based assessments...like there may by number of steps in an assessment. How do we calculate scoe for each correct and incorrect task...I want to ask more about assessment based simulation...will wait for your reply.

Rgards
Let's Talk ID

Anonymous said...

Any response on how to calculate scores for each correct or incorrect task? I am working on a project that will require this same process using Captivate 4.

Joe Deegan said...

Hello,
It's different in every situation but I have calculated scores for correct or incorrect scores for tasks by using the "Interactions" option the SCORM Reporting preferences. This allows you to see what learners are clicking on in the tutorial. I believe you might also be able to award points through SCORM reporting within click boxes. So if it is a simulation where they have to click on the correct spots to complete a task then you can assign different point levels to each click box. However, I haven't looked at this recently so let me know if you have any other questions or need further explanation.