Discover What’s New: Exciting Features in Adobe Captivate 12.4

Introduction
Adobe Captivate 12.4 has arrived with exciting new features aimed at elevating the experience for eLearning developers and learners. These enhancements not only streamline the course creation process but also provide more versatility and interactivity to your projects. Whether you’re designing assessments or simulations, or simply looking to enhance the visual appeal of your modules, Captivate 12.4 has something new for you. Ready to transform your eLearning game? Dive in and discover what’s waiting for you!

Question Pools

One of the standout features of this release is the Question Pools functionality, designed to make quizzes more dynamic and personalized. For those unfamiliar, a question pool is essentially a bank of questions that can be categorized by difficulty, topic, or any other metric relevant to your course. When creating quizzes, Captivate will pull random questions from these pools, ensuring that each learner experiences a unique set of questions.

Steps to create a question pool in Captivate:

1. Create a new slide:

• In your project, click on “New slide” from the toolbar.
• From the “Question Slides,” select “Random.”
• Choose “Edit pool” to access or modify your pool of questions from the Visual Properties inspector.
• Select “New Slide” to add more questions to the pool.
• You can either import a CSV file containing questions or add a question slide by choosing “Add from assets.” This will open up questions from ready-made assets (QSPs). You can select the one of your choices.

2. Select random question:

3. Edit pool:

4. Add new questions:

Simulation Enhancements

Simulation enhancements in Captivate 12.4 provide more control over how you capture and display interactive demos or system simulations. These new options make it easier to record, edit, and refine the simulated content.

New simulation features:

• Blur area: Now, you can add blur effects to certain screen sections, which is especially useful when dealing with sensitive data or private information during demonstrations. Simply select the area you want to blur, adjust the intensity, and Captivate will ensure it’s hidden from view during playback.

• Recording pod: Sometimes the automated screen captures during a simulation don’t suffice. With the new manual screenshot feature, you can capture additional screenshots whenever necessary. This adds a layer of control, especially when fine-tuning the content of your simulations. You can now manually control full-motion recordings to capture smooth, seamless transitions in your simulations. This is particularly useful for capturing dynamic processes, such as scrolling or dragging and dropping.These enhancements provide greater flexibility in creating realistic and interactive simulations, making Captivate an even more powerful tool for software training.

Customizable Project Dimensions

Gone are the days of being constrained by fixed project dimensions. In Captivate 12.4, you can now customize project dimensions, giving you the freedom to design your course for any screen size or orientation.

Learners access content on a variety of devices with different screen sizes. With customizable dimensions, you can:

• Optimize your course for various devices.
• Preview how the course will appear on different screen sizes.
• Ensure that learners have a seamless experience, regardless of the device they’re using.

Enhanced Padding for Components

Captivate 12.4 introduces the ability to add padding to components and blocks. This might sound like a minor change, but it significantly improves the flexibility of designing layouts that are visually balanced.

Say you’re working on a slide that contains multiple text blocks, buttons, and images. Previously, positioning these elements close together might have made the layout look cramped. With the new padding feature, you can now add breathing space between these elements, making your course appear more polished and professional.

This is particularly useful for creating responsive designs that look good on any device, as you can ensure that components aren’t squished together on smaller screens.

Direct Publishing to Adobe Learning Manager (ALM)

Another major enhancement is the ability to publish directly to Adobe Learning Manager (ALM). This integration streamlines the course distribution process, saving time and effort.

How It Works:

• With a simple click, you can publish your Captivate course directly to ALM.
• No need to export SCORM files manually.
• The Table of Contents (TOC) within your course is automatically synced with ALM, making it easier to manage your course structure.

This feature is a big time-saver for those who use ALM as their Learning Management System (LMS). The seamless integration means you can spend less time on administrative tasks and more on creating engaging content.

Enhanced Voices Workflow

The Enhanced Voices Workflow is an excellent new feature that significantly improves audio captioning by streamlining voice selection and synchronization. Users can now add multiple captions and easily choose from system, speaker, or custom voices in the new voice dialogue. This interface allows for searching, favorites and selecting voices. Once captions are added, the system synchronizes the audio to match, reducing the gap between captions and audio. This update modernizes the workflow by enabling multi-selection, adding voices to favorites, and exporting or replacing audio more efficiently. The voice dialogue is now more intuitive and user-friendly.

Resizable Hotspots

Hotspots are a crucial component of interactive eLearning content. In version 12.4, Captivate introduces resizable hotspots, giving developers more flexibility in creating easy-to-use and visually appealing interactions.

This is especially important for accessibility, ensuring all learners can interact easily with the course.

Additional Button Functionality

Lastly, Captivate 12.4 now allows you to add up to 10 buttons within a single block. This enhancement opens up new possibilities for creating more complex interactions, like multi-step branching scenarios or tabbed content layouts.

Conclusion

Adobe Captivate 12.4 packs a punch with features to make eLearning development faster, easier, and more dynamic. Whether you’re leveraging the enhanced question pools for assessments, customizing your project’s dimensions, or adding engaging simulations, Captivate continues to solidify its position as a leading eLearning authoring tool.

Stay tuned for more updates as Adobe continues to refine the tool, and don’t forget to share your feedback on their forums to help shape future releases!