Maybe Captivate has been updated to support non-software simulation, but as the say... the cure is worse than the disease. Captivate is good for software sims and that's about it as far as I am concerned.

A war story with Captivate.

We did a project on Captivate where we blended performance based testing with multiple choice questions. We were launching the training to a worldwide audience so were using AICC over SCORM. In testing, it worked fine the first time through, but if retakes were allowed, it was a total disaster. So we tried SCORM, and it did better but still entirely inconsistent.

Maybe Adobe has fixed the problem. The level 1 technical support was beyond horrible insisting it was the LMS, the version of flash, the environment... anything but their product. We put our LMS vendor through the ringer on this and they stepped up and developed a profiling application to show what the problem was.

The problem was Captivates tracking logic was remembering the answers you selected and in the case of non-simulation questions was preselecting the answers you originally made.

Captivate was NOT doing what it was represented as being capable of and it was not until we had to demand escalation and really yell at Adobe when we got to some pleasant programmer who knew all about the problem.

It's a classic example of a bad support experience and why I tend to be leery of big software companies. They are just too far removed from the customer. We ended up doing the project in Lectora and did Lectora to Captivate integration which for reasons which are beyond me, worked.

If all you are doing are basic instructional exercises, Lectora is the best commercial, out of the box product to use. If you are more adventuresome, I like the free couselab tool. http://courselab.com/db/cle/default.html

I will add another war story with Captivate. With Captivate 1.0, if you had a RealTek audio card (which is pretty common), Captivate would not recognize your microphone. Adobe knew about this for a year before they fixed it. I had to get an external soundcard just to record narration. And they never responded to my multiple requests for help. That being said, I am using Captivate 2.0 just because for software simulation, it has the best features (when they work). I'm hoping version 2.0 is more stable.

quote:

The problem was Captivates tracking logic was remembering the answers you selected and in the case of non-simulation questions was preselecting the answers you originally made.

This sounds simialr to certain issues we found with Captivate. On retakes of a course requrieing a certain passing score, learners found themselves unable to start over: Each time they launched the content, they were moved to the end and taken right out of the CBT. One of the things I do with Captivate CBTs now is to create a trap page at the end of each CBT. On that page, i place decision buttons such as whether you'd want to start over from the beginning, continue, or go to the menu. This way, on retakes, the CBT will always stop at that page and wait for learner decision instead of skipping right out.

Aside from CP war stories, which there are surely many, the only way I know of to do 'drag and drops' in CP is to embed a custom SWF...that was developed in Flash...to handle that for you. As of CP 3, there is no native DnD capability.

CP 4 may address that but I don't know.

A couple years ago, I too would have recommended Authorware. With it's EOD, I don't think that's a fair recommendation anymore. So I'd also then recommend Lectora if you want interactivity more advanced than simply clicking on hotspots.

Unfortunately, Lectora (and Authorware) are significantly more expensive than Captivate.

The advantage of learning Flash is growth. It's harder to learn, longer dev curve, but once you get it - you can do some Really Cool Stuff.
CM

I do use Captivate but another option is Articulate Studio 09. You can quickly and easily create engaging courses, presentations, quizzes, Flash/Flash videos and surveys.