Combining elements from Camtasia and Captivate

On Monday and Tuesday I worked on combining the video elements of each module created in Camtasia with the exercises created in Captivate. On Friday I had tried publishing the Camtasia elements as flash videos (FLV files) and importing them into Captivate slides, but as far as I could tell, it wasn't working (only a gray box showed up in on the slide, and nothing happened when I previewed the project). Once I talked to Matt, though, I found out that this was the correct method, and my problem was simply the fact that the video only shows when you preview the project in a website. Some other problems/issues that came up as I was putting the modules together were:

• Links - the default is that they open in the same browser window as your project, so you have to use the back button to return to the tutorial (which then starts from the beginning). When you create an action that links to an outside website, you can specify that you want it to open in a new browser window - I've been going back and changing the links to be sure that they do so.
• Flash skins - when you import a flash video into Captivate, the default settings create a skin with separate pause/play/volume buttons for the video and pause the Captivate presentation while it is played. Having two sets of control buttons is certainly not visually appealing. It can also be confusing because there are forward and back buttons in the Captivate viewer which only move forward and back through the Captivate slides and don't work if you try to fast forward or rewind while you're watching imported flash video. As a solution to this problem, I've started using the following procedure: make the Captivate slide as long as the imported video, have no skin on the video, and don't pause the Captivate slide while the video is playing. Then there is only one set of controls and they work for the whole project.
• Timing - There's still a lot to do with regards to getting the timing of everything right. I did some edits to the "answers" in the scholarly vs. popular and research vs. review modules. The default slide length is 3s - I read the content of these slides aloud to determine how long they would take to read and adjusted the length accordingly (to around 10-15s).
  

I was able to create combined videos for 5 of the 6 modules (the Camtasia portion of keywords & controlled vocabularies was corrupted in some way and will have to be redone) and show them to Roxanne on Tuesday. Here are the changes I'll be making based on that meeting:

• Overall:
  
• Add a slide at the end of each module that says "the end" or something like it
  
• We decided that we didn't need to have much library branding throughout the tutorial since it will be found on the library website. I'll take the intro slide used in the Catalog vs. databases module and use it in the other modules.
  
• Scholarly vs. Popular:
  
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• In the "answer" for the article from Nature, take out the comment about Nature being one of the most well-known journals.
• In one question slide, italicize Economist.
• In the "answer" with graphs - take a new screen shot of only one graph and make the caption larger.
• Roxanne will send the correct citation format for the wikipedia article "Colony collapse disorder" and I'll put it on the question slide.
• Research vs. Review:
• Fix the links so that they open in a new window
• On all of the question slides change the text that says "(Click here for abstract.)" to "View this link, then answer the question below." This is to clarify that they have to view the database record with the abstract in order to answer the question.
• Boolean operators and search strategies
• Look into improving the video quality
• In the drag-and-drop exercise bold or highlight the connector and change the text for AND and NOT: "Please move only those animals that lay eggs AND fly."
• Change the length of the "answer" slides to around 10s each
• Catalog vs. databases
• The link to another tutorial does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Italicize the title in question 5
• Take out the "Question _ of _" text on each question slide
• PubMed
• The link to PubMed does open in another window, but should also pause the tutorial.
• Use the mouse to hit "search" instead of using the keyboard to enter in the MeSH search
• Solve problem in going between Camtasia and Captivate portions of this module

I'll be making these changes and sharing the updated modules with Roxanne in webspace by this evening. Then I'll be working on adding audio to the modules.