Adobe Captivate eLearning Development Times

by Kevin Siegel

Many new Captivate developers underestimate development time needed to produce eLearning lesson in Adobe Captivate. The following table should help.

Small Projects (1-25 slides): 1-4 hours of production

Medium Projects (26-75 slides): 4-7 hours of production

Large Projects (80-150 slides): 8-10 hours of production

Bloated Projects (more than 150 slides): Consider splitting projects this large into smaller projects.

I bet you’re wondering what "production" means, especially considering the fact that most of the projects you create will likely be in the large category (80-150 slides) and take you, on average, 10 hours to produce.

To begin, let’s consider what "production" does not include. You’ll need a script and/or storyboard.

Storyboards: Rough sketches that show the general content of your project, slide by slide. If your projects contain more screen shots of an application than captions, a storyboard is a good idea.

Scripts: Detailed step-by-step procedures. These are ideal if your project will contain a significant number of captions.

Voiceover Scripts: If you are using voiceovers, you'll need to write the script for your voiceover talent (even if that talent is you).

A typical one-hour eLearning course consists of 12, five-minute lessons. It could take up to three hours to write each of those lessons. Therefore, you should budget 40 hours to write the entire one-hour eLearning course. Depending on how fast you write, you could easily double those hours, meaning you may need to budget 80 hours for writing... which has nothing at all to do with Captivate production.

Production won’t include creating a Captivate template, a completed shell project that you will use as the basis of all of your projects. It’s not difficult to create a template, but it will take time. An ideal template will contain text captions using approved font settings, an introduction slide, transitional slides, a conclusion slide, a skin and appropriate Start and End Properties.

Finally, production does not include creating/recording the audio, making corrections to the script post rehearsal, resetting the stage prior to recording, or recording the lessons using Captivate (the recording time should take the exact same amount of time as the process being recorded).

What Does Production Include?

So what’s left? As I mentioned above, it’s going to take 10 hours (on average) to produce each Captivate project. What’s part of the production process?

You’ll spend a lot of time working with Text Captions. You’ll be adding interactive objects (click boxes, buttons and text entry boxes) on several of your slides.

During the production process, you’ll likely be adding audio clips to the project’s background, individual slides and even objects on the slides.

During the production process, you’ll be publishing the project into any one of several output formats and possibly uploading those files to a server (LMS) and testing for scoring or interactivity errors. After that, you’ll need to fix problems you run across (don’t worry, there will be plenty of problems that need to be fixed). After fixing those problems, you’ll need to republish, repost and then retest.

Add it all up, and your budget looks something like this (keep in mind that the timing below does not include the time it will take to record and edit your own voice-overs or narrations):

40-80 hours to write the script or create the storyboard

120 hours to produce 12, five-minute lessons for a one-hour course

Note: Add another 40 hours if you need to write your own voicover scripts.

So there it is... approximately 200-240 hours is all that stands between you and your eLearning course. Are you tired yet? Nahhh, not you... and not me. Here’s the deal: while creating eLearning lessons in Captivate takes a lot of work (likely more work than you thought prior to reading the past few paragraphs), the work will be a blast... and rewarding. I’ve gotten more satisfaction watching students move through my eLearning lessons and learning, and had more fun creating the lessons, than just about anything I’ve done in my career. I wish the same for you.

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I'd love to hear from Captivate developers who have similar experience, or from those Captivate developers who have experienced different development times.

Comments

[Michael]

It seems to pretty much correspond to the development times we have for our productions in Captivate. We have 5 Captivate developers and 2 Flash developers and our aim is to get down to 100 hours of production time per hour eLearning (without audio).

We normally end up with around 120-160 hours of development time per 1 hour eLearning but this also includes custom Flash work (animations / interactions), image processing (creating templates in PhotoShop, processing images used in the course e.g. borders, drop shadow) and creating the quiz in Flash since we don't use the Captivate quizzing feature at all.

However for smaller courses the development time isn't reduced proportionally unfortunately because there is still a lot of stuff that needs to be done in a 20 minute course.

Best regards,
Michael

[chris]

At my college we use a different tool for working on our projects online.
Its free and needs no installation since its online, go to http://www.showdocument.com
pretty useful for me since i usually do my projects on the laptop. -chrisman