As a newbie I have grown so appreciative of this community. As Pooja stated in a previous post, this really has become a one-stop shop for Captivate resources to so many of us. For that reason I feel it is only appropriate to begin making contributions myself for the newbies to come.

This week marks 3 months for me as a Captivate user, and I continue to learn so much each day. When our organization decided to make the switch to Captivate we did so with no true expert on hand. Thus, we have been teaching ourselves over the last few months and, BOY, have we come a long way!

A couple of months back I was tasked with creating a series of customer service modules for our company’s patient-facing employees. I was very excited for this new project because it would allow me to finally get my hands on a Captivate license and begin working with the program. Once the download was complete I opened Captivate to quickly realize that I had no idea where to begin. Have any of my fellow newbies out there wondered, “Where do I start?”

Please understand that I am by no means an expert, however, below are a few steps that helped me tremendously while working through my first project.

Know your audience

• Can you even really begin a project without knowing your audience? Knowing your audience will help you identify important information up front such as the course objectives, content, and length.

Create an Outline

• Outlines are a great way to map out project. I keep it very simple in order to get all of my thoughts, and then I go back and fill in the outline with content to be included in the course. Below is an example of the outline that I used for one of my customer service courses.

Customer Service Quick Tips

1. Introduction to CS quick tips
2. Soft Skills: Active Listening
3. Listening activity
4. Activity debrief
5. Improving active listening
6. Open ended questions
7. Closing

• If you’re a visual person take it a step further and turn your outline in to a storyboard.

Choose a style/theme

• Once I found my style/theme it was very easy to find a natural progression in to different scenarios and interactions. For example, the first customer service module that I worked on began in a training room. This gave me the ability to keep my interactions realistic by building them in to items that could be found already in the room such as computers, bulletin boards, or the projection screen.

Learn From eLearning Assets

• There are so many great templates that can be found in the free eLearning assets. However, I struggled to find one that would naturally fit in with the style of my project. As a solution, I opted to build my own interaction from scratch. The only problem was I didn’t really know what I was doing, especially in the advanced action department. Luckily I have great co-workers who were able to work though this with me, but another solution that I have found helpful is to mirror your advanced actions off of those included in a template. What I mean by this is: Build your own interaction and use the template’s advanced actions as a way to teach yourself. Voila!

Obtain Feedback

• Share your project with coworkers along the way in order to gain feedback. This helps point out things that you may have missed because you are too close to the project. I cannot stress enough how helpful this step is!

What steps have you found helpful when starting a new project? I’d love to hear what everyone else is doing!

Thanks for stopping by!

Brianna