Learn how to use Acrobat.com as a Learning Management System for Captivate 5 projects. It's a great way to get started with eLearning without a huge investment in an LMS.
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eLearning courses require a learning management system to keep track of who's taken what part of a course and who's passed or failed the assessments. What if you want to offer eLearning, however, but don't have an LMS? Enter Adobe Captivate 5 and its new integration with acrobat.com.
With Captivate 5, you can connect your assessment results to any SCORM or AICC compliant LMS and also to the Adobe Connect Enterprise LMS, now referred to as Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro in the prefs (which is interesting, since the product is now called simply Adobe Connect, but who's being picky...). New in Captivate 5 is the ability to report results to an acrobat.com account or to your own internal server. Of course, your own server would need a means of capturing the results, so you'd have to write a PHP, Cold Fusion or some other script to capture and record the results. We'll take a look at acrobat.com reporting in this post.
Take the quiz here to help me test the limits of the system. It's only four questions, so it won't take long.
Reporting to acrobat.com is easy. Open Preferences, then choose Reporting under the Quiz area. Enable reporting for this project, and then choose Acrobat.com. Click Configure... and enter your Acrobat.com credentials and the Company, Department and Course that define this project. Courses might have several parts, so you can aggregate several different assessments and projects into one course for reporting.
Once you click Save, Captivate will talk to acrobat.com and build the database to store the incoming quiz results.
The results are easy to get out with the Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer, an AIR app that comes with Captivate but which is also available for free at adobe.com. Results can be viewed directly in the Quiz Analyzer or downloaded as CSV or as raw XML. CSV can then be opened in Excel or another database, while the XML download contains a file for each response. These can be parsed individually or as a whole.
The Quiz Analyzer asks you to choose a server then enter your credentials for that server. The Quiz Analyzer can look into Acrobat.com and other servers that you configure in the preferences panel under the Options button. Once you enter your Acrobat.com credentials, it allows you to select projects by company, department and course. Once you have set these three selectors, click Generate Report, and the lessons will then appear in the detail panel below.
Double click the project to see the overall results per learner. Double click the learner to see the results per question. The CSV reports reflect the currently visible data, so you will need to export to CSV several times to get the full data for each learner. Consider using the SQLite DB file that coordinates the XML export, or importing the XML into your favorite database application or spreadsheet.
When I do my monthly talks about Adobe Connect for eLearning and Rapid Training (second Tuesdays of each month usually; check for actual schedule), I often get asked how to get the data after the fact. Now, you can use acrobat.com to get the data. Of course, a robust LMS will make it easier to manage large numbers of courses and learners, but if you're just getting started, this is a great way to get into the eLearning game.
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While it's Windows only for now, it shows that Adobe is committed to DAM and Versioning, despite its decision not to continue development of Version Cue. When CS5 was announced, I got a lot of negative feedback from my customers who depend on Version Cue for project versioning and PDF review management. The killing of VC left them wondering where to turn for version control in the creative space as they transitioned to CS5.
While tools like Subversion and Git are popular in the software development arenas, there aren't integrated solutions for the graphics community to those repositories. Other DAMs and VC platforms exist, but their interfaces are often clunky and require several steps to check parts of a project in and out.
Version Cue provided in-app support for version inspection and reordering, allowing the user to promote a previous version to the current one without losing the current version. This would send a signal to everyone working on the project that the asset had changed, and that they needed to update it. VC also prevented simultaneous editing of graphics (Illustrator and Photoshop) and documents (InDesign and InCopy).
This quiet revelation has me itching to see the released product. I am eager to see whether it will include Git and/or Subversion connectors as well.
Here's the second in a series of short videos featuring Flash Catalyst. It talks about buttons and how to reuse and style them.
In this teaser, we convert an Illustrator file to Flash Catalyst. The project is an e-book reader made specifically for Alice in Wonderland. Learn more at cs-magic.com
Adobe pushed out updates to Flash Builder CS5 and made available the Flex 4.1 SDK the other day. #AdobeCP
This release updates the Rapid Application Development environment to Flash Player 10.1, which opens the door for mobile Flex development. According to Adobe, some of the improvements include:
- The new Layout Mirroring feature for repurposing Flex UIs for deployment in right-to-left locales
- Native support for Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 in the Flex SDK
- Native support in Flash Builder 4.0.1 for building apps targeting SDK 4.1, AIR 2 or FP 10.1
- Many critical bugfixes and enhancement requests for both Flex SDK and Flash Builder
Adobe also released Hero, its latest iteration of the Flex SDK. Read about it here. It is intended to unify the development paths for desktop and mobile, and provides a single framework for developing Rich Internet Applications as well as desktop applications based on AIR2.
I am in the midst of creating a mobile application, and we have been complaining internally about how easy it would be if only Flex (Flash Builder) supported Flash Player 10.1. Targeting Android and Blackberry devices, we now can create one app using Flex and AIR rather than several different apps with different development kits. It is true that the player isn't ready on the devices, but by the time we're done with the App, Flash Player 10.1 should be widely deployed on Android and RIM as well as Palm and others.
One of the missing links in the Adobe production workflow on a Mac is professional audio editing software. Today, Adobe announced that Audition would be available on a Mac in a future release. #AdobeCP
Visit the Audition page on Adobe Labs.
The prerelease is scheduled to open in the Winter of 2010. According to the page, Audition for Mac will offer:
- Powerful audio editing and multitrack mixing views
- Superior noise reduction capabilities
- Native 5.1 Surround support and multi-channel effects, plus other new effects
- Optimized audio post-production workflows
- Fast start-up, high performance multi-threaded processing, and parallel workflows
It's about time that Apple's Logic has some competition. Of course, Audition has been on Windows for years.
After the iOS 4 update, I received several calls today that went to voice mail, but I wasn't notified of the voicemail. When I went to Phone, then selected Voicemail, I was prompted to enter my voicemail password. Not thinking anything of it, I skipped that step and moved on to something else. I got an email message from a client much later in the day saying that she had left me a voicemail in the morning, but I had gotten no notification on the phone. Yikes!
I returned to Phone this evening and then entered my voicemail password. There were two unheard messages from today, about which I was very unhappy. Moral of the story: be sure to visit Voicemail immediately after updating the iPhone, or you'll never know it when you get a message.
Adobe announced the availability of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile platforms such as Android and WebOS. #AdobeCP
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201006/06222010FlashPlayerAvailability.html
When we talk about web events and web meetings, more and more we are asked about how mobile customers can participate. While there is a Connect app for iPhone, other platforms have been lagging. Now, with FP 10.1, many of the other platforms suddenly become viable web event viewers, and the reach of web events has just exploded.
I just finished delivering a Connect session on Connect for Web Events (Recording: Webinars that Wow! with Adobe Connect), and when I mentioned that Flash Player 10.1 was announced and that smartphones would be able to participate in Connect meetings (Connect is a Flash-based platform), there was a very positive reaction.
"THIS IS HUGE!" says one attendee (his capitals).
"Did you REALLY say that smartphones could attend Connect meetings?" asked another. "Yes, I did," was my reply. "WOW!" came the response.
Other responses were equally enthusiastic. While the Connect app for iPhone has been available for months, there is a huge pent-up demand for other smartphones to be able to attend web meetings, and with Flash Player 10.1 in the mobile marketplace, Adobe Connect becomes more relevant than ever before.
Adobe is expected to post better than expected numbers for Q2 on the strength of strong CS5 sales. #AdobeCP
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gS1sMma-MF0sB24LEgoId8zWO2vwD9GFRKTO0
The article states that "Creative Suite is used by small businesses such as design firms and advertising agencies." The analysts seem to miss the fact that Creative Suite is also used by giant media companies, global publishers, architectural firms, engineering companies, manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, film and television studios, web designers, desktop and mobile application developers and more. It is also used by Fortune 100 businesses to create portals and manage access to business critical data. I assume that savvy financial researchers look at these other verticals when making their predictions.
This will be welcome news, as CS4 results weren't as strong as Adobe had hoped. I know that I still see a lot of CS3 and CS2 out there, but new hardware and operating systems will require a software update for many, many people and companies. The CS2 and CS3 users who held off will now be able to take advantage of 64 bit versions of Photoshop and the video tools, for instance, which increase productivity substantially on large files. As video moves to very high resolution capture, it is essential to have 64 bit apps and tons of RAM, and CS5 makes those hardware investments pay off in short order.
