Captivate 3
According to www.adobe.com this is their summary of what Adobe Captivate really is:
Adobe® Captivate® 3 software enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, scenario-based training, and robust quizzes without programming knowledge or multimedia skills.
That’s only a half-truth actually because Adobe Captivate is much much more. In my company we use Captivate to build entire E-learning courses from scratch. Basically we have adopted Captivate as the framework for our courses.
Why did we do that?
Well first of all Adobe Captivate is an extremely userfriendly application which allows most people to get started quickly and without too much effort. Adobe Captivate has allowed our E-learning designers to get much more involved in the production from start to finish. Previously we had our staff divided into two groups like this:
- Storyboarders / E-learning designers
- Programmers (all courses were developed in Adobe Flash)
After we found Adobe Captivate we are basically one big group now. Everyone in our department can use Adobe Captivate to make courses. This leaves our Flash Programmers with more time on their hands to create exiting content, simulations and other nerdy stuff since they don’t have to spend time creating basic courses from scratch in Flash anymore.
Another big advantage is the fact that content created with Adobe Captivate is extremely easy to update. We can update our courses 5 times faster now, which is really something that counts in this business.
Although our E-learning courses are created in Adobe Captivate we can still enhance them with rich media like video and sound or interactive content created in Adobe Flash. It’s never been easier to be honest.
Since we bought Captivate the production of our department has increased 400%. It’s not even a joke. Courses that took 1 month to create in Flash before takes perhaps a week or so in Captivate.
The simulation part of Captitvate is in a league of it’s own. It’s so easy to record interactive userguides of applications and the possibilities are endless.
If you haven’t tried Adobe Captivate 3 yet then I recommend you to download their 30-day trial version and try and make something with it.
Click on the icon below to go to the Captivate section on Adobe’s webpage
