Purchasing eLearning Tools? Consider Adobe!

I'm writing you from the eLearning Guild's annual conference. I went to a session presented by Silke Fleischer and colleagues at Adobe and was blown away by the work Adobe is doing to create products that support learning and related efforts. I then asked a number of industry thought leaders who confirmed my interpretation: Adobe is now a 500-pound Gorilla, likely to continue out-investing their competitors and thus creating better and better products for folks like us to use.

If you're considering elearning tools, you owe it to your organization to consider Adobe products. I have no financial relationship with Adobe, by the way. This is not to say that other products aren't worthy and/or do some things better than Adobe products. My thinking is this: Companies who invest in their products are often more likely to be there for you in the years to come. I've seen many clients who started using a particular tool five-to-ten years ago, and they are basically stuck with it because of their large installed base of learning courses.

Here are a few of the things that made me wake up and take notice:

1. Adobe's update cycle on Captivate seems to be shrinking, as they are aggressively moving forward in the development of Captivate 4.
2. Captivate is being used for many purposes, including the development of Podcasts, Advertising, etc.
3. You can embed a working Captivate file into Adobe connect and then have webinar or online-learning participants each interact with Captivate objects.
4. PDF files can now include fully-functional interactive images. So documents are not static anymore!!
5. Adobe is working on a new platform called AIR, which will enable the compilation of many types of objects for display and interaction.

Comments

[Ernest Cherry]

Adobe does offer exceptional authoring tools for elearning. The issue which many users have with these authoring tools is the learning curve. When looking at Adobe products such as Flash, AIR and now Flex it is almost essential to have programming background to fully utilize the programs' capabilities. Captivate is one of few Adobe authoring tools that does not require programming skills.

There are other authoring tools available which do not require any programming background. Lectora and Articulate are two popular user friendly authoring tools. Subject Matter Experts (SME's) or Instructional Designers can easily add instructional content into templates thereby creating training modules. This eliminates the use of developers and save companies many and time.

[Kylie Hutchings Mangion]

I definately agree, Adobe appears to have a great range of elearning friendly products,however the likes of articulate are very easy in comparison,it doesnt solve the web building side of things,my question is as a freelance instructional designer which of the huge range of Adobe products do you use,Captivate is thew obvious one.???