One of the most time consuming things I think is producing user guides. These produced in a wordprocesser and perhaps pdf require numerous screenshots and then text explanations. Excluding the time factor of producing them they also are not very inclusive for people that have literacy problems. Their only advantage is that you can have them printed and look at the while working.
At the moment I'm subscribed to Lynda.com. This opened my eyes to how effective a simple quicktime movie of work can be. Admitedly I have two computers on at the same time so I can watch the video with one screen and practice with the other screen. But with a pause button and timeline I really don't think that's essential.
So I started looking for screen-recording software and came across Camstudio which is opensource (or some sort of free license - I forget which). This is superb at what it does. It makes wmv files (which are huge) and swf files which are okay, but still large.
I now thought how great it would be if you could have flv files. I came across Riva which has a free cut down version (making use of the opensource ffmpeg).
Riva is excellent at producing flv files. It is incredibly simple to use, yet it offers you full control over the frames per second and bit rate of the movie. I spent an hour or two fiddling with the settings. Finally I found settings with reasonable output and frame rate and only 1.5MB/minute! I recorded a sample 4 minute tutorial of setting up Dreamweaver to make a web site and it was about 6MB.
The reason I'm interested in this golden 1.5MB/min figure is because if anyone has broadband (256kb/s or faster) then they will be able to stream at that rate!
I also think the filesize is not much larger than a similar Word document that provides that kind of training.
Having got all excited about these two products working together, I quickly put the flv into flash and made the surrounding swf. I then made myself a sample SCORM package with eXe that incorporates the flash swf that I made. - I had to put the flv into the zip myself but that was trivial. I also found that eXe seems to have a bug around inserting flv's directly, but swfs seem to work fine.
The result is that I can make a course module with eXe, that incorporates video tutorials of how to carry out certain parts of the course - AND, unlike Lynda the filesizes are more manageable for lower bandwidth broadband! (Lynda though has far higher quality tutorials!).
Okay, I realise that this is a long post, but I really feel that the camstudio, riva, eXe route is a great one - and it can all be done for free!
While Captivate is impressive in what it does, I really think from my own experience of learning with this method that the point/click/testing/overlays etc are not condusive to learning in many cases. The realtime video with warts and all and a nice commentary to explain things seems far better. - The price tag is certainly nicer!
Comments
:-) Yeah, I've tried wink before. It's alright I think and may have improved since I last played with it.
My main take since actually learning with this method via Lynda.com is that just a plain video is really good for learning (often better than clever solutions such as captivate). With wink you have to set if you want continuous capture or just when you click.
I do think it possibily makes a difference what you are trying to teach. If it's something like Word then per screenshot may be fine. But Photoshop/Illustrator etc need continuous capture as so many visual clues are happening in real time.
Oh btw - cheers for the first post :-)