The Captivate production process at a glance

Producing content with Captivate is three steps process, or to be exact, four steps process, but only three of these steps take place in Captivate. That's why I like to refer to the first step as Step zero!

Step zero: The pre-production phase. This is the only step of the process that does not involve working with the Captivate application. Depending on the project you are planning, it can last from a few minutes to a few months. Step zero is probably the most important one of the entire process as it is where you actually create the scenarios and the storyboards of your teaching project. This is where you develop the pedagogical approach that will drive the entire project. What will you teach the students? In what order will you introduce the topics? How and when will you assess the students' knowledge? and so on. These are some very important questions that need to be answered before you open Captivate for the first time and start building your project. Step zero is where the teacher's skills will fully express themselves.

Step one: Capturing the slides. When you know exactly where and how you will lead your students, it is time to open Captivate. During this first phase, you will use one of the most popular Captivate features: the ability to record any action you perform onscreen. You will simply use your mouse to perform actions on your computer. Behind the scenes, Captivate will be watching and will record any action you do using a sophisticated screen capture engine based on screenshots. This first step can be compared to shooting a movie. The goal is to acquire the required images, actions, and sequences. In the movie industry, the raw material that comes out of the shooting is called the rushes. It is not uncommon for a movie director to discard lots of rushes along the way, so that only the very best sequences are part of the final release.

Step two: The editing phase. This phase is the most time-consuming phase of the process. This is where your project will slowly take shape. In this step, you will arrange the final sequence of actions, record narration, add objects to the slides (such as Text Captions, Buttons, and many more), arrange those objects in the Timeline, add title and ending slides, program the advanced interactions, and so on. At the end of this phase, the project should be ready for publication.

Step three: The publishing phase. This is where you will make your project available to the learners, and this is where Captivate really is awesome! Captivate lets you publish your project in the popular Adobe Flash format. This is great since it makes the deployment of our eLearning courses very easy: only the Flash player is needed. The very same Flash player that is used to read Flash-enabled websites or YouTube videos is enough to read our published Captivate projects.

Captivate can also publish our project as standalone applications (.exe on Windows and .app on Macintosh) or as a video file that can be easily uploaded to YouTube and viewed on a Tablet or Smartphone.

One of the most significant new features of Captivate 6 is the ability to publish our projects in HTML5. By publishing in HTML5 format, the Flash player plugin is not required anymore to play our content. Thanks to this new technology, our students are able to take our courses not only using their desktop computers, but also their tablets (including the iPad), their smartphones, or any other internet-enabled device. The door is open for the next revolution of our industry: Mobile Learning (or mLearning).