I took Macromedia Captivate in the winter session in January 2006 taught by Pamela Rockx. This was a one week course that met three times. Although the teacher extended the course so that we could have an extra week to turn in our assignment I worked hard to turn it in the Monday after the class was over, since the spring semester was starting immediately after this course. I found Macromedia Captivate very easy to use although a very impressive powerful program. There were no programming skills needed to create a fully functional computer-based tutorial. The end product is in Macromedia Flash and looks like I spent hours coding it.
Sadly I did not find the instruction of this course up to par compared to all other instructors in the ID&D program. I did look past the teacher’s downfalls and taught myself what I needed to know to get the assignments completed. You will see in my training tutorial Welcome to Bugzilla that I was able to fully implement a training demo and interactive quiz at the end. My idea to create this demo about Bugzilla came about when my boss asked me to train my entire company on this bug tracking system in a company meeting the day before our last class. One hour before the meeting I thought I should create something that would last instead of a two minute walk through of the product. So I used what I had learned in the class to develop the demo and all my co-workers were very impressed by the demonstration.
If someone is not a technology guru but wants to know how to put training materials into an interactive program, this is the class I would recommend taking. From my on the job experience, I am seeing less usage of Authorware and Director and more usage of Flash for training materials. This program allows the final product to be in Flash without having to know the specifics of how it is programmed. I plan to use this program for other projects at work.
Standards for the Accreditation of Programs in Educational Communications and Instructional Technology Chart
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