How I Got My Students Hooked on History with eLearning Using the New Adobe Captivate

Introduction: I am an instructional designer specializing in K-12 eLearning projects. Designing engaging eLearning courses, specifically for the History subject is always a challenge as the subject is often perceived as distant and irrelevant, especially by younger students.  

I realized that a design strategy with strong story-telling and visual appeal works great for subjects like History. Younger audiences are hooked to visually attractive, modern-looking, and interactive yet simple-to-navigate courses. However, implementing these design strategies can be cumbersome due to the complex workflows and design limitations of some authoring tools. The new Adobe Captivate has useful features that facilitate creating appealing courses especially when working on tight development timelines. 

Based on my experience, I am glad to share a few strategies that I found useful while developing eLearning modules on History subject.   

Storytelling to Make History Memorable 

Historical stories never fail to fascinate. Incorporating the storytelling strategy ensures that the learners remember the content effortlessly.  

For one of the topics titled “Indus Valley Civilization,” I created a visual story instead of plainly stating the facts. The story helped learners visualize the location, culture, occupation, pottery, jewelry, and city design of the Indus civilization without any information overload.  

The new Adobe Captivate’s content slide templates especially “Conversation”, “Meet the Team” and “Character and Text” proved helpful in designing a gripping story. Its unique range of animation effects like swirl, swing, puff, and so on helped me to animate multimedia elements easily. The text-to-speech functionality has a range of human-like voices in a range of language options. My personal favorite is “Paul-English (United States)” whose pace of speech is perfect for K-12 learners. Thus, with Adobe Captivate’s animation and text-to-speech capabilities, I was able to create an engaging visual story from a dry topic. 

Virtual Tours to Bring History to Life 

One of the best ways to get students interested in History is to bring it to life. And with the help of the new Adobe Captivate, you can do just that. 

I created an interactive virtual tour video for a Grade 7 topic on “Ancient Egypt-Age of Pyramids and Mummies.” I started with importing a video on the topic in the “Slide Video” media block. Then using bookmarks and overlays I added text content, images, and interactive quizzes to the video’s timeline. The bookmarks, readymade widgets, and text and media blocks proved very useful when creating this interactive video course.  

 

Multimedia to Improve Visualization 

Concepts can be made interesting for students with the use of multimedia in the form of images, audio, videos, icons, infographics, and so on.  

For one of my projects, I created a visual differentiation for the topic “Medieval Art vs. Renaissance Art.” This helped the learners to visually compare the differences between the art forms of the two ages. For this content strategy, the image and video grid feature of the new Adobe Captivate worked well. This feature allowed me to arrange multiple images on the slide quickly. It saved a lot of effort to place the images appropriately on the slide, as I had to just choose one of the predesigned slide layouts and add the required images.  

I also added a couple of videos showcasing the real monuments to the same slide, thus allowing the learners to understand the nuances in an engaging and interesting way. With the infinite scroll option, I could add multiple content blocks like image and video grids, text, and images to the same slide. Thus, the learners could view all the content related to the topic on the same screen, just like a website. This ensured a cohesive learning experience of the topic without any break in the content caused by navigating to multiple screens. 

I used the vertical scroll navigation (infinite scroll) and horizontal slide navigation in the same course thus adding a unique dimension to the course. The in-built image editing functionality comes in handy to customize the images as required. The assets library has a range of multimedia types like audio, video, images, icons, and characters that are useful to enhance visual appeal. 

Interactive Quizzes to Assess Student Learning 

No history lesson is complete without a quiz. The new Adobe Captivate makes it easy to create and report quizzes to the LMS. Instead of traditional multiple-choice questions, I designed quizzes that resembled challenges based on historical facts. 

For the topic “Ancient Egypt,” I created a quiz based on hieroglyphics. I used readymade widgets like click-to-reveal and hotspots to design this interactive quiz. The LMS reporting feature in these widgets helped me to add scores to these quizzes. This ensured that learners not only took the quiz seriously but enjoyed it too.   

Interactive Timelines to Present Chronological Events 

Memorizing the chronology of various historical events is challenging for many learners. Innovative learning aids can help students remember them. You can make them interesting and engaging with interactivities. I created an interactive timeline for the topic “Roman Empire” using the readymade “Timeline Widget.” I selected the suitable design of the timeline from “Design Options” under “Visual Properties” and customized it with relevant images and content. Thus, my interactive timeline was ready in a jiffy which otherwise would have taken a lot of effort to create.  

Additional tips for using the all-new Adobe Captivate to create impactful eLearning modules on History: 

Use high-quality images, videos, and audio clips. This will help to make your lessons more visually appealing and engaging. 
Use a variety of learning activities. This will help to keep students interested and motivated. 

Conclusion 

The new Adobe Captivate is a versatile tool that can be used to create engaging and effective modules for subjects like History. By using the features listed above, you can bring History to life, keep students engaged, assess student learning, and make the learning more memorable. 

I too would like to know your go-to design strategies for making dry and rigid subjects interesting for learners. Kindly share them in the comments section below. 

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