Recently at work I was subjected to the arduous task of watching a software tutorial prior to the implementation of a new CRM. Needless to say it was produced in Captivate. I am not inferring that Captivate is a bad tool. I believe it may lend a hand in creating uninspired, lumbering, monotonous junk due to a perception of embedded Instructional Design. An outline in the sidebar does not make for good online instruction.
The technology truly is not the issue. This tutorial failed at the planning level. One of the best methods to engage students is by telling stories. Whether the instruction follows a users path through a series of steps to accomplish a real-world task or whether it fleshes out a scenario from beginning to end – tell your audience a story.
A story takes time to write. You need characters for your story to work. In this case you may only have two characters – the narrator and the viewer. Write for them, it is worth the work.
Another excellent method to engage your students, especially in the online education space, is to have the content expert do the narration. It is a mistake to let the content expert write the content and have a voice talent narrate. The right content expert will posses passion and exuberance about the topic at hand.
In addition to using a true expert to demonstrate the software have them do so in a conversational tone. They are, whether they realize it or not, having a conversation. It helps if the stories and the narrator make the user feel like the person on screen is talking to them, not to a wall.
I can’t even believe I have to mention this last error. The tutorials we were subjected to covered very basic information. For instance the steps to click in a form field and then in the next form field and then how to click the submit button. The use of Captivate’s keyboard noise to demonstrate on screen typing does not make these mundane tasks more interesting.
So the next tip is, don’t dumb down your instruction. Instructional Design can go too far. When this happened I could sense the eye rolling and hear everyone’s trust escape through their groans.
Were no user studies done of these tutorials? Did they think is was good enough to have robot man read us the manual? Oh but wait you say there was formative assessment throughout the course. Not good enough.
Formative evaluation is a great tool if used correctly. Most of the questions we were asked were there to take up space, to fulfill a the appearance that some Instructional Design was at work.
My suggestion to any vendor or in-house e-Learning team that creates online tutorials for software – go to Lynda.com. Miraculously I have learned about a myriad of software tools without once bumping into Captivate.
Lynda.com uses basic capture software that puts you with the expert while he or she works through a real world project. Each video tutorial is broken down into small, digestible chunks. Plus I bet you, even without an assessment, that I took something away from every clip I have watched.
A bag of candy (you choose, within reason) to the person that can guess the CRM vendor. Sorry, fellow employees need not apply ;)
I LOVE Lynda.com!