Adobe eLearning Suite 2 review

You can also output your entire Captivate 5 project to FLA format ready to be worked on in Flash Professional CS5. The difference between Flash Professional’s frame-based handling and Captivate’s slide-based approach means this integration certainly isn’t seamless or pain-free, but it does open up projects to more advanced animation and programming power. It also means you can output projects to AIR format for cross-platform playback offline and outside the browser. Alternatively, the inclusion of Acrobat 9 Professional enables similar delivery via interactive PDF Portfolios.

Most Captivate projects will be output as Flash SWFs designed for online delivery within the browser, and Captivate can handle the whole process. But if your remit goes further, perhaps to authoring the hosting web page too, the eLearning suite provides that facility too, including the market-leading web page authoring package, Dreamweaver CS5.

Also thrown in is the dedicated CourseBuilder extension that lets you add elearning-specific interactions to web pages that can relay results to AICC-compliant Learning Management Systems, from multiple choice to fill-in-the-blank questions.

The final application in the eLearning Suite 2 is Adobe Presenter 7. This is very different from the other components in that it isn't actually a standalone application, but rather acts as an Add-In for Microsoft PowerPoint (note, though, that it doesn't support the 2010 version yet).

Using it, you can quickly create animated presentations, enhance them by importing video and Flash content, add interactive quiz slides to assess your end users’ progress and then output to Flash format, complete with attractive tabbed player, for online use. It’s really surprising what you can achieve with Presenter and how quickly you can achieve it.

By providing market-leading applications in all possible areas of the eLearning workflow, eLearning Suite 2 seizes the functional high ground. For sheer power it’s impossible to argue with and, if you’ll actually use all the applications, it’s also good value.

But the multiple-application Captivate-centred workflow isn’t just a lot to get to grips with, it’s also unnecessary for most projects. As such, while eLearning Suite 2 would be the power user’s choice, the average user would do better with the simpler, and cheaper, Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio, which takes Presenter’s simple and integrated PowerPoint-based approach and runs with it.

Author: Tom Arah