There was no easy way to get quiz scores from Captivate into our LMS. An alternative approach (which might be necessary for some LMSes) would be to use a service like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services to host the Web pages created by Captivate. You can click here to see the actual Web page created by Captivate. Here’s a video of what it looks like when a student accesses this Web page from SmartSite: I upload the Web pages created by Captivate to our LMS (SmartSite, aka Sakai), which allows me to create links from the Modules tool to the subunit videos.

There is an online service called Zaption that provides a simpler and prettier way of doing this, but I found that it was too limited (e.g., if you replaced one of the YouTube videos in a sequence of lecture segments, you had to recreate all the questions for that video). Captivate turns the slides into a set of web pages. You can also include a “table of contents” slide at the beginning, as in the screenshot below. Captivate allows you to create a set of “slides”, some of which contain embedded YouTube videos and others of which contain quiz questions. To link multiple lecture segments together, with interposed quiz questions, I use Adobe Captivate. You then upload the video to YouTube (or whatever system you’re using to host your videos). You can easily insert additional text, graphics, audio, and video clips. The basic idea is that you give your lecture with PowerPoint, just as you would in a live lecture, and the software captures the PowerPoint presentation on your screen (as a video, including any animations and mouse movements) and also records your “talking head” via a webcam. You could also use professional video production software, but Screenflow and Camtasia are designed for recording and editing lectures and are easier to use and less expensive. They allow you to record yourself giving lectures, edit the recordings, and upload them to YouTube (or save them to disk in standard video formats). I have a slight preference for Screenflow, but the programs are quite similar. There is a very similar program called Camtasia that is more widely used and is available for both Macs and PCs.

To record the lecture videos, I used a program called Screenflow, which is only for Macs. I’ll start with a big-picture overview of the process, and then I’ll discuss the details. I’ll describe the way I actually created the existing Intro Cognitive course, with a few comments about how I’ve changed my approach for the new course. I’m now working on a new hybrid course (an introductory psychology course), and I’m doing some things differently (and better, I hope).

In this page, I will describe how I created the lecture videos and integrated them with the embedded quiz questions. Up next: Hints for Creating a Hybrid-Format Course

Screenflow 8 slow motion