Recently, I was honored to be rewarded with the Most Valuable Participant (MVP) badge for my contributions to the Adobe community forums. This made me look back how I ended up getting here from where I was about 2-3 years ago.
Till Adobe Captivate 6, I used the tool primarily to capture transactions and generate simulations in demo, try-me, and assess-me modes. I just add introduction and closing slides before the simulation and I was done with Captivate.
But one day while looking for some solution on the Adobe community forums I came across several posts where users were asking questions about features that I didn't even know about. More importantly, these were features I could use so well in my own courses. Soon after that, I ended up spending hours on these forums browsing through the posts as old as a month.
In this exercise, I discovered the real power of Captivate. The biggest influencer for me has been Lieve Weymeis, or Lilybiri as she is popularly known as in Adobe circles. She is one of the few experts who selflessly help fellow users on the community every single day. I got a reference to her blog in one of her replies to a user query and since then she has become my Captivate guru. This is the only blog which primarily focuses on advanced features of Captivate. Honestly, I am not aware of any other website/ blog which offers such in-depth information for free.
Apart from Lilybiri, I am also learning from Jim Leichliter (Captivate-Javascript), Rick Stone a.k.a Captiv8r, and Rod Ward.
As I started getting more hands-on with the tool, I felt a better way to learn is to take up real-life examples. For this, along with working on use cases of my own, I started to reproduce the issues users posted on the forums and share the solution whenever I had one. If somebody else posted a solution, I practiced that as well. If the solution didn't work for me, I asked for more info. I spent many evenings and weekends doing this. Gradually, I was ready to offer to immediate solutions for many issues.
This helped me a lot even professionally. My newfound knowledge helped me come up with some great interactivities, reusable components, and game-based quizzes for our own courses, making them more engaging than ever.
I am aware that I have only scratched the surface of Captivate and there are many more things to uncover. Even today, I try to practice the same way. However, I must admit the frequency is not as much as I want to. I have my reasons, but then they are probably excuses. But one thing is for sure. it will not stop anytime soon.
Till Adobe Captivate 6, I used the tool primarily to capture transactions and generate simulations in demo, try-me, and assess-me modes. I just add introduction and closing slides before the simulation and I was done with Captivate.
But one day while looking for some solution on the Adobe community forums I came across several posts where users were asking questions about features that I didn't even know about. More importantly, these were features I could use so well in my own courses. Soon after that, I ended up spending hours on these forums browsing through the posts as old as a month.
In this exercise, I discovered the real power of Captivate. The biggest influencer for me has been Lieve Weymeis, or Lilybiri as she is popularly known as in Adobe circles. She is one of the few experts who selflessly help fellow users on the community every single day. I got a reference to her blog in one of her replies to a user query and since then she has become my Captivate guru. This is the only blog which primarily focuses on advanced features of Captivate. Honestly, I am not aware of any other website/ blog which offers such in-depth information for free.
Apart from Lilybiri, I am also learning from Jim Leichliter (Captivate-Javascript), Rick Stone a.k.a Captiv8r, and Rod Ward.
As I started getting more hands-on with the tool, I felt a better way to learn is to take up real-life examples. For this, along with working on use cases of my own, I started to reproduce the issues users posted on the forums and share the solution whenever I had one. If somebody else posted a solution, I practiced that as well. If the solution didn't work for me, I asked for more info. I spent many evenings and weekends doing this. Gradually, I was ready to offer to immediate solutions for many issues.
This helped me a lot even professionally. My newfound knowledge helped me come up with some great interactivities, reusable components, and game-based quizzes for our own courses, making them more engaging than ever.
I am aware that I have only scratched the surface of Captivate and there are many more things to uncover. Even today, I try to practice the same way. However, I must admit the frequency is not as much as I want to. I have my reasons, but then they are probably excuses. But one thing is for sure. it will not stop anytime soon.
