Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Trials and tribulations

My former boss let me know that there were problems with viewing the tutorial now that it's live. When it first went live, I checked it and it loaded properly. Now, however, it launches a new page and the tutorial doesn't load or play. Our distance learning librarian has been tinkering with the code, trying to embed the tutorial into one of our webpages so I'm assuming that is the cause of the difficulty.

I have emailed him so that he's aware of the issue and can hopefully get it resolved and the tutorial loading and playing like it should be. These are the kinds of problems that I didn't think about and anticipate. Very frustrating.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Live!

The first tutorial is now live on the library web site! There's been no promo on it or anything yet, but it's there. The Research Tutorials link on the nav bar has now been changed to go to the new tutorials page, which links to the first one.

I have the slides done for the second tutorial and am now working on creating the quiz questions. Then I still have the narration to do and the accessibility. Still, it's come along quite nicely, I think.

I've asked my chair for feedback on the first tutorial but haven't heard anything yet. Part of me wonders if that's a bad sign...No, I'm sure it's just that she's been busy. I was pleased with how it came out. It's always hard knowing, though, if what you have in your head, that you had planned, translates into what someone else is expecting.

We shall see...

Friday, September 5, 2008

Success!

I believe that I have all of the finishing touches on the first research tutorial! I basically had it finished a day or so ago and had both my husband and son (age 9) go through it to make sure that it made sense, that there were no glaring errors, and that the quiz at the end was appropriate (9-year-old passed it with 80% so I'm feeling pretty good about that!) I made some final tweaks to it today, including attempting to enable the quiz reporting. I currently have results set to be emailed to me but I'm not sure if that feature works until the published tutorial is actually "live" online. Or how quickly those emails are sent.

I have published the tutorial and viewed it, completing the quiz myself, and am waiting to see if I get the promised quiz results. It's not "live" online, though. The publishing is just a step that is taken to create all the necessary files to put online.

I have emailed Paul to see what is needed on his end in order to put this up for live testing on the library web page. We need to create a general tutorials page (I gave him the link I needed that one to be at), which will be linked from the library home page and the completion page of all of the research tutorials. So now I shall await word from him to see what he needs me to give him.

This also coincides with my completing all of the lessons in the Essentials of Adobe Captivate book. This book was invaluable in figuring things out and I'm sure I'll continue to refer to it time and again to refresh myself on how to do things. I'm going to look at my other Captivate book to see if it gives me any insight in having those quiz results emailed, as well.

I can't believe how wonderful it feels to have completed this first module! Hopefully, the others won't be disappointed!

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Accessibility

I've been learning about accessiblity this week and how to make my Captivate tutorials Section 508 compliant. I have the tutorial part of the first tutorial essentially completed, although now I need to go back in and add close captioning, even though the audio pretty much matches the text that's on the screen anyway. Still, better safe than sorry. Next, I plan on jumping into the information on adding the quiz/assessment portions of the tutorial. It's shaping up nicely, if coming along slower than I had anticipated for this first one.