Tips and recommendations for a newbie
I am new to instructional design, Adobe Captivate, and the Adobe e-learning community. Where should newbies like myself begin? Should I spend hours going through video tutorials or jump right in and try to create something?
I have been in this community and using these tools for a while now and still consider myself a newbie. I’ve used the Lynda (now linkedin learning) courses, I’ve taken in person courses at conferences, and watched countless hours of youtube videos, and the thing that has been the most helpful for me is just to take small challenge/task specific type activities and try to recreate them and make them myself. That has caused me to really dive in and learn to use the tool in ways that no tutorial or instruction seemed to. I honestly believe there is a huge gap in instruction in this community of people willing/able to “work out loud” and make the entire process transparent. There is an abundance of “how to get started” and “finished examples” but the chasm in between has often felt impossible to get across at times for me. Best wishes!
“Work Out Load” seems like a good title for a series.
Do you think it should start in analysis, beginning of development from the design brief, or somewhere else?
I think the complete process is so valuable. Hearing people think through their decision making process from concept to finished product is rare, but Adobe is doing it more with other products (XD, photoshop, etc.) on Behance. I would love to see more with Captivate along these lines. A community I’m active in (TLDC.us) often has guests that just share what they’re currently working on, broken, in progress, drafts, etc and that has been more valuable to me than almost anything else I’ve seen.
Personally i don’t like pure video tutorials, they are good for simple step-by-step workflows, but seldom explain the core, the reasons for choices.
Best way is to take real training from a good trainer (beware, many bad trainers aroundà. Did you ever learn to drive a car without a good coach?
You are even asking about two things: first is insight in how a good eLearning course is designed, second is how to use the most complete authoring tool which is Captivate. Or do I misunderstand and do you have already skills in one of those two domains?
If you don’t like to read, skip this part. Otherwise, have a look at this post, where I summarized what I experienced to be the 3 most important challenges for newbies in Captivate. I didn’t add Fluid Boxes (which is another one) because I always recommend to start with non-responsive projects as a newbie:
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