Captivate Menubuilder

The report on using Captivate and Menubuilder to create a tutorial for use of SCCS was interesting because it resembled the result of assignments I can very much see as being common to this class.  Aside from being an example of a pretty good explanation and summary of the creation of an online teaching tool for a graduate course (I assume this may have been a sort of HCI or Education program?) I had a few takeaways.

When conducting early user surveys to determine user needs, it was interesting that parents as well as students were taken into account.  Obviously, as it turned out parents did a lot to help with their students' use of SCCS and would want to know how to navigate it themselves to check on their kids' work, it made sense to consider both groups.  However, both groups will clearly have different perspectives and assumptions, due to having slightly different motivations for using the site (directly doing work vs. facilitating or reviewing work) and an obvious age gap.  The reflects a huge challenge in creating educational tools like this: it's impossible to be all things to all people, but one still has to try and determine what the largest group needs and wants are in order to find some sort of balance.  For some extremely specialized topics or resources with very narrow user communities, this might not be so bad.  But trying to design a tutorial for, say, a web catalog that's used by ages 4 to 104 for myriad different reasons should undoubtedly be trickier.

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article was the possibility that the tutorial created would need to be changed or replaced as SCCS layout and functionalities evolve.  A challenge to creating learning materials is that they can be extremely time-intensive as they need to be updated or completely replaced as what they teach about changes.  This highlights the extreme importance of having good, sustainable design from the get-go for online resources, where basic services are not likely to change, though add-ons or enhancements are possible. 

I also found it rang very true that the group found module time needs to be kept short, even shorter than expected.  I personally find myself being very frustrated when listening to video/audio tutorials and needing to wait to get the info I need.  This is one drawback when compared to text: text tutorials are generally easy to scan and skip to get exactly what you need.  I wonder if in the future screen casts will come with some sort of timestamped transcript or table of contents, making them more or less as skimmable as text.  I'd be interested to see if this is the direction things go.