Adobe has just released the latest version of its e-Learning Suite and it comes with a number of improvements and updates. The central focus of the Suite is Adobe Captivate 5, which I covered in detail in my last article. The complete Suite is available for both Windows and Macintosh and includes the following applications:
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Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
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Adobe Bridge CS5
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Adobe Captivate 5
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Adobe Device Central CS5
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Adobe Dreamweaver CS5
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Adobe Flash Professional CS5
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Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended
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Adobe Presenter 7 (Windows only)
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Adobe Soundbooth CS5
Note that CS5 stands for Creative Suite 5, which indicates that those products so designated are part of Adobe’s principal Creative Suite. The e-Learning Suite borrows some of the Creative Suite’s applications and adds Captivate to the mix. Along with the above applications, you’ll also find the following after installing the Suite:
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Adobe e-Learning Suite 2 Workflows
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Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit CS5
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Adobe Extension Manager CS5
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Adobe Media Encoder CS5
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Adobe Multi SCO Packager 2
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Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit 2
Why a Suite?
Before I discuss each of the above applications, let’s focus first on the purpose of the Suite. In short, it represents everything you should need, according to Adobe, to create the best possible e-Learning lessons.
Why have a Suite anyway? Isn’t Adobe Captivate or another authoring tool enough on its own? Simply stated, no, it’s not. No authoring tool can meet every instructional design need. Remember that e-Learning is almost always a custom affair. What Marriott needs is not the same as what the Mayo Clinic needs. In fact, within both Marriott and the Mayo Clinic there are many different learning needs so one authoring tool won’t suffice even for one organization.
Adobe recognizes this basic fact so it provides a suite of tools. You can use Adobe Captivate for many authoring needs, for instance, but you can’t use it manipulating and editing images. Adobe Photoshop is the answer to image editing needs. Captivate also has limited audio editing abilities, so Adobe Soundbooth comes into play whenever you have more advanced needs.
Captivate may be the center of the Suite, but sometimes you will need to have more advanced needs so Adobe includes Flash Professional to meet them. Perhaps you’ve chosen Adobe Flash to be your main authoring tool because you already have quite a bit of experience with that tool and you are comfortable with it. However, Adobe Flash is woefully inadequate to use when you need to create a software simulation, but Captivate makes it very easy. Why would you want to spend many hours manually creating a software simulation in Flash when you can create it in just a few minutes in Captivate? So even if you find yourself creating most of your e-Learning in Flash, you’ll find yourself jumping over to Captivate to create software simulations, using Photoshop for your image needs, and using Soundbooth to edit sound files.
Some of you will find that you will never use all the tools in the Suite, but over time you will find yourself using many or even most of them. You may also find yourself using tools that are not in the Adobe Suite to further enhance your e-Learning development. When doing so, you’ll want to make sure that all your tools play well with each other … that they are compatible, meaning that they can, to a degree, communicate with each other, or have the output of one be the input to another.
The major bits in the Suite, one at a time
Let’s now look at each of the key applications in turn.
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
Adobe introduced Acrobat 9 Pro and Standard in 2008, but most people still think of Acrobat as just a PDF editor. You export, save or print to a PDF file from within other applications, such as Microsoft Word, and then further edit that PDF file from within Acrobat. However, you can use Acrobat now in other ways as well.
Here are what I consider the top four features of Acrobat 9.
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The Flash player is now built into Adobe Reader!
Many still don’t realize that a PDF file now also can contain Flash content, content that is interactive and media rich. This is one of the obvious outcomes of the Macromedia / Adobe merger of 2005. Interestingly, some organization IT departments hesitate to support the Flash player from being installed on employee computers, but have no problem with Acrobat Reader, the free application Adobe provides that allows you to open and read a PDF file (and embedded Flash pieces). The important point here is that you can embed Flash content in a PDF file, greatly enhancing online training manuals, for instance. One of the biggest new adopters of Captivate and Flash, for example, are technical communicators, professional writers of manuals, help files, and other useful documentation. More and more, they are embedding SWF animations and even interactive elements into their manuals to help illustrate key concepts. Adobe Captivate and Flash have become hot topics at technical communication conferences.
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You can create a portfolio.
It’s so easy to create an organized and animated portfolio of images and other types of files in Acrobat 9. The steps, as can be seen in Figure 1, are fivefold:
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Choose a layout from several available
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If you choose, add a welcome screen and a header
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Choose from standard color schemes or create your own
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Specify file details (or accept the defaults)
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Publish your file
Figure 1. Acrobat 9 Pro gives users the ability to edit PDF documents.
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You have your own workspace on Acrobat.com.
This is probably one of the most underused new features of Acrobat and other Adobe tools – your own personal free workspace online where you can share resources with others to whom you give permission. What’s more, you can hold online meetings, allow reviewers to look at your work and access their comments, upload forms, collect the data from those who fill out your forms, and more. You definitely should take advantage of this feature.
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You can actually create e-Learning directly in Acrobat (more or less).
About a year ago, I decided to see how far I could push the envelope with Acrobat and found to my surprise that while Acrobat is no substitute for Captivate or other authoring tools, you can do much more with it than I had originally thought. You can embed Flash, sound, and video into your documents directly. (See Figure 2.) You can also include 3-D objects using standard Universal 3-D (.u3d) files.
Figure 2. In Acrobat Pro, you can embed multimedia in your PDF documents.
Since you can also embed buttons (see Figure 3), you can set up interactivity as well.
Figure 3. Acrobat Pro provides the capability to embed buttons in PDF documents.
When you insert one or more buttons on a page, you have several options for what happens when users click the buttons in the PDF file. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4. These are options that you can assign to buttons.
For instance, you can insert a multiple-choice question where buttons act as the distracters. Each of them can jump to another page.
If you’d like to see an example of such a document, e-mail me and I’ll be happy to provide it.
Adobe Bridge CS5
You can use Adobe Bridge to manage your media and allow your team to access your library of media elements. In addition, you have several options available, such as converting images and documents to JPEG format. Adobe Bridge has been available since the release of CS2 but has become more powerful over time. If you haven’t checked it out in a while, you should try it again.
Bridge does a phenomenal job of keeping all your resource files organized. You can detail each resource in various ways. For instance, you can see an image’s dimensions and other properties. You can also preview a file, be it an image, a video, or any other supported file type. (See Figure 5.)
Figure 5. Adobe Bridge provides some tremendous capabilities, especially for organizing resource files.
Most importantly, you can access Bridge assets from within Captivate, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Soundbooth. This helps to unify all of the major Adobe applications by giving each access to the same resources in Bridge. Artists and other media specialists can place their files in Bridge and have them accessible to everyone on the team, no matter which development tool they are using.
You can speed up your work quite a bit by using Bridge from within other applications. For instance, choosing File → Browse from within Captivate will bring you to Bridge, where you can choose elements you wish to use in Captivate. (See Figure 6.) Once you’ve chosen elements, choose from within Bridge File → Place → In Captivate to place the elements on the Captivate stage, quickly and easily! Alternatively, you can also drag elements from within Bridge and drop them into Captivate.
Figure 6. With Adobe Bridge, you can move elements into other Adobe applications.
Adobe Captivate 5
Please refer to my last article for a complete write-up of Captivate 5. This product has become extremely popular in the e-Learning world for excellent reasons. It is relatively easy to learn and use and you can use it to generate both software and soft skills simulations.
Adobe Device Central CS5
Device Central is an application that helps you create mobile applications, including mobile learning. It gives you options for different cell phones and other consumer devices that support HTML, the Flash player, or the Flash Lite player. It also gives you access to an online library on Adobe’s site that catalogs hundreds of devices. (See Figure 7.) On the site you can compare many devices at the same time, choose devices on which to test your learning applications, and even simulate display conditions so you can see how your learning will hold up when someone is viewing it in bright sunlight, for instance.
Figure 7. Device Central CS5 facilitates creating mobile applications tailored to many different devices.
Device Central is accessible from several different applications. For instance, Adobe Captivate lets you access Device Central by choosing File → New Mobile Project. Once you’ve taken this step, choose the device to target for your project and Captivate will assist you by choosing the correct size and other factors for you.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5
Dreamweaver has been available for years and with each new version have come features that keep it current and leading edge. It was one of the first and is still the leading tool for creating Websites that take advantage of leading technologies, including Ajax, PHP, ColdFusion, JavaScript, CSS, XML, HTML, and XHMTL. It creates some of the cleanest code and easiest-to-update code files possible. One of the hallmarks that Dreamweaver introduced was the ability to see the design of your site and the code at the same time, which was a huge boon to those who needed to see how code changes would affect the design, or vice-versa.
Recently, Adobe provided as a free download an HTML 5 Pack to assist developers who want to start creating HTM5 and CSS3 files, giving an immediate edge to those who need it. Dreamweaver is customizable and extendable by downloading new packs and extensions.
Adobe Flash Professional CS5
There is no question that Flash has become the tour-de-force tool over time for creating rich media interactive applications, especially on the Web. As such, it is an application with so many rich features and is so powerful that people use it in many different ways. The two principal camps of users are the animators and the coders. The animators tend to use the timeline in Flash extensively, whereas often when you open a Flash file created by a coder you will see few frames and lots of ActionScript.
ActionScript is the main scripting language in Flash and is now in its third version. It has tightened up many elements that previously were more flexible but easily led to more errors. Those who were ActionScript 2 coders have found that they need to forget some of what they knew about ActionScript coding and learn instead new methods. However, the benefits of tighter, more legible and maintainable code makes it worth learning ActionScript 3.
There are several new features in Flash CS5 that are worth considering:
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It’s important to note (while we’re on the subject of ActionScript coding) that Flash CS5 now contains code snippets, prebuilt code segments that you can use directly.
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In addition, Adobe has improved the ActionScript editor, allowing for hints and code completion, thus making for faster coding.
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The resulting source files, those that have the FLA extension, now are XML based, opening new possibilities for team collaboration and easier source control system use.
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The new Text Layout Framework finally gives you the control you need to perform many functions on text. This has been a weakness in Flash in the past and CS5 has moved to remedy it.
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Yes, Adobe has made it possible now to create Flash applications for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad, though, for the time being, Apple will not allow installation of these applications. Adobe is working with Google to target the Android phones now, and will likely be making an announcement sometime this year.
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Further improvements were made to several areas in Flash including video features, drawing tools, and more.
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended
Just as Flash has become the power tool for developers, Photoshop has, for a long time, been considered the central focus of any artist’s set of tools. Note that there are several other applications that give you focused tools that are part of the Photoshop family, including Photoshop Lightroom, which focuses on editing photographs, and Photoshop Elements, used to create Web experiences and results you can print.
Just as is true of Flash, Photoshop has so many features now that it’s rare to find someone who is an expert in every feature. So many different people can use it, in so many different ways, that it has become a product that personalizes itself to your needs.
Adobe has updated Photoshop CS5 with some features that have wowed audiences:
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The Content Aware Fill feature is, in short, phenomenal. Let’s say you have a photograph of a room in your house that has clutter and an ugly piece of furniture. Using Content Aware, you can erase those elements and Photoshop will fill in the space left behind with the background surrounding in a way that makes it appear that those deleted objects were never there. In a word, it is magical. I can only imagine the intense math that Adobe’s engineers had to apply to make this new feature work.
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The Puppet Warp option is also new and lets you fix elements of your image by moving them seamlessly. In effect, it uses the Content Aware Fill feature to fill in the space left behind by the object that you moved. You can use Puppet Warp to reposition people in a photograph to make them look more natural, straighten crooked elements, and more.
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When you take a photograph with a digital camera, the camera information saves with the photograph identifying elements such as the type of camera and lens used, along with date and time information and more. Using this information, the new Automatic Lens Correction will allow for quicker adjustments based on the type of lens used.
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New Painting Effects let you take photographs and turn them into digital paintings. You can choose the type of brush and bristle tips, and let Photoshop do the rest.
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Other new features include better solicitation and inclusion of Review Comments, Workspace Switching, and features that take advantage of GPU functions.
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Adobe has also enhanced or improved many features that were already in Photoshop.
Adobe Presenter 7
Presenter integrates directly into Microsoft PowerPoint but only on Windows machines. It gives you the ability to create Flash files based first on the PowerPoint presentation itself, and then greatly enhanced with the inclusion of several features, as Figure 8 shows.
Figure 8. Presenter enhances the ability to create Flash files from PowerPoint and adds important features. (Windows only)
Though the product is now two years old, it is included in e-Learning Suite v2 because of its important place in the training universe. In fact, this latest version enhances several features. If you are still using an earlier version, consider:
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They have enhanced Quizzing quite a bit. For instance, you can create question pools and then have Presenter choose a random number from different pools, giving each learner a unique quiz. You can create pools by subject area or question difficulty level.
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You can now deliver to mobile devices and to PDF documents with any Flash elements, such as animations, included.
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You now have the ability to determine what options learners will have available to navigate, rather than using the prior one-size-fits-all navigation model. This lets you set up true tests, for instance.
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They have also enhanced a number of other features in Presenter, increasing productivity levels.
Adobe Soundbooth CS5
Soundbooth is Adobe’s very powerful and rich audio editor application. Video editors and other media specialists use it extensively for the audio tracks in video. You can also use it to edit and create sound tracks for your learning applications. These may include music, sound effects, and most commonly, narration files.
Figure 9. Soundbooth CS5 now offers much more precise control when editing multiple audio tracks.
Soundbooth CS5 introduced two important new features:
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They have enhanced the editing of multiple tracks. You can now perform a number of actions that give you much more precise control over the different elements of your audio tracks. (See Figure 9.)
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They have expanded the library of royalty-free music and sound effects to give you many more resources.
Conclusion
Adobe has chosen its e-Learning Suite products wisely. It has also created a very attractive price point. The price of an upgrade is $699 and a new license costs $1,799. When you consider that Flash CS5 by itself costs $699, Captivate costs $799, and Photoshop costs $999, you can quickly see what a tremendous bargain the e-Learning suite is, even when you don’t include the remaining product costs. However, it’s only a bargain if you use more than one or two of the Suite tools. Consider, though, how you can use each of the tools in your workflow and you’ll see that for creating e-Learning applications, the e-Learning Suite quickly pays for itself in increased productivity and results.
