The Tutorial's Home: COPPUL DSpace In order to make Animated Tutorials easy to identify and share, COPPUL librarians felt it was important to house all shared Tutorials in one location. A home for these Tutorials was found in the spring of 2005 when the University of Calgary opened its Institutional Repository - DSpace - to the project. DSpace is an Institutional Repository that can handle a wide variety of file types. It also met all of the other standards set out for the Tutorials' home as it:

• Is accessible to any librarian who registers with DSpace.
• Is archival in quality.
• Allows for the incorporation of Metadata
• Is Searchable and Browseable

DSpace also contains a Creative Commons License that asks that all depositors make their creation publicly accessible as a condition of depositing any learning object in it. In so doing the author retains copyright, but ensures that their creation remains in the Public Domain. Anyone wishing to learn how to use D-Space can do so by viewing Uploading Tutorials to the DSpace Shared Tutorial Database . This will tell you how to register for D-Space, how to upload files, and how to subscribe to D-Space so you can be notified whenever new content is added. Those adding Camtasia files will also wish to view our How to Load Camtasia files to DSpace Tutorial as well.

ANTS also recently introduced a second site where you can get source code, shockwave flash files and html code for embedding tutorials in Web Sites or Blogs. It is at our Screencast.com site. This site has also proved to be more reliable when it comes to viewing tutorials that do not display on DSpace, so use it if DSpace will not display a tutorial for you.


Registering for D-Space

To register for D-Space go to https://dspace.ucalgary.ca and select Sign On to My DSpace. If you do not have an account you will be prompted for information. Follow the prompts and an account will be created for you. Alteratively, you can also contact our DSpace administrator - Paul Pival (ppival@ucalgary.ca) - and he will create an account for you. If you wish to learn more about registering, please consult Uploading Tutorials to the DSpace Shared Tutorial Database.

Including Relevant Metadata

In order to ensure that all relevant information about the Tutorial is included when you submit your Tutorial to DSpace, please ensure that the following information is included:

• Author of the Tutorial
• Name of the Tutorial
• Name of the Database or E-book / E-journal Collection the Tutorial deals with.
• Name of the Database Vendor
• When it was Created / Updated
• Keywords
• Abstract
• Description of the Tutorial
• File Type
• Optional Information such as Contact Information, Viewing Time and Intended Audience (i.e Undergrads)

DSpace will prompt you for most of this information whenever you upload your Tutorial and will also include a listing of the File Size. What it will not prompt you for is any Optional Information, Database/Collection Names and Vendor Information. Consequently, this information must be listed in the Abstract or Description Fields.

Optimizing your Adobe Captivate projects for use in the ANTS project

For use in the ANTS project, you'll need to create a single Shockwave Flash .SWF file that includes all the necessary content for your tutorial. However, I've noticed a couple default settings in Adobe Captivate that will result in multiple .SWF files when you publish your projects. These are summarized in the following post:

http://blogs.adobe.com/silke.fleischer/2007/08/creating_a_single_swf_with_ado.html

As alluded to in the post above, Captivate 3 records any scrolling of pages done with the mouse as a seperate Fullmotion .SWF file. For any of you who have updated from version 2 to version 3, you may have noticed this when you publish your projects. If you're capture lengthy web pages with lots of scrolling, then your published project can end up with many small Fullmotion .swf files. These Fullmotion .swf files are separate files that are called into the larger project at the appropriate places when they are viewed online. The advantage is that the core .SWF file and the Fullmotion .SWF files are split up, minimizing file size for enhanced streaming. But for the ANTS project, we ask that you supply us with a single, all inclusize .SWF file we can convert to other formats for distribution. So how can you publish a single .SWF file in Captivate 3:

1.) If you've selected to include playback controls for your tutorial, deselect the option to "Show Borders" under the Project -- Skin -- Borders menu. This will include the controls in the main .SWF file.

2.) instead of using the mouse to scroll up and down, use the keyoboard arrow keys instead. Click the scroll bars with the mouse to gain focus frist, but rather than click and drag, use the arrow keys. Captivate will capture this movement as typing instead of a separate Fullmotion video.

I've created a short screencast that walks through these steps:
Adobe Captivate and ANTS Opimization screencast

Of course, if you do not include playback controls, or you do not have any scrolling or fullmotion included in your project, then you do not need to make any adjustments. If you have any questions, you're also welcome to contact me at pbetty@regis.edu