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.
Image via Wikipedia
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.
So, here I sit, in the Apple Store in South Portland, Maine, while my wife's new iPhone 3GS (we both had our 3GS phones replaced due to case cracking yesterday) continues to not work properly.
Upon replacing the phone and restoring it from the last backup, the phone (now iOS 4.01; the backup was iOS 4, and the phone was OS 3.x until a day or so before the swap.) exhibits the following symptoms:
- Safari crashes when visiting any site
- App Store crashes when updating the one app that needs updating
- We determined that other apps that depend on the network may or may not fail; there isn't a definite correlation between what makes them crash.
So, we restored the phone to factory new, and then synced it with her computer.
Initially, surfing the web crashed Safari, but we wiped out the bookmarks and the cached pages and cookies, and we could surf the web. Yay! Although we could surf the web, we couldn't set up any email accounts. Boo! Google Apps (gMail, actually) claimed that the password was wrong, but I was able to setup the same account on my iPhone without any trouble. Quite easily, in fact.
I then removed all of the apps from the phone in the hope that there was an app that was causing the conflict with iOS 4. That didn't do the job.
Out came another brand-new iPhone 3GS, and we moved the SIM card and began the restore process. Unfortunately, the phone was iOS 3, so it had to be upgraded to iOS4 before we could continue. Unfortunately, the phone failed the OS upgrade, with the ever helpful "Unknown error."
Moving the new new phone to another computer for restore, it failed, so we declared it DOA. Now, back to the one we got yesterday for another try.
After restoring it to factory new, we were unable to surf the web. So, now I have had three different iPhone geniuses poring over the phone, and all are puzzled.
Next, we take the new phone (not the DOA one from today, but the replacement from yesterday) and restore it to new phone state, without ever connecting it to my wife's computer. In this factory new state, the phone wouldn't run Safari! Now, we have at least a diagnosis: the new phone has some issue with its network hardware that prevents it from working properly. Unfortunately, between my wife and I, we have exhausted the on-hand phones, so there is no replacement phone available. One was ordered, and should arrive tomorrow or Wednesday.
All in all, we had three computers attached to several iPhones in different combinations for over three and a half hours with a diagnosis, but no satisfaction. Now, the new phone is back to its hobbled state, able to work as a phone and get email, but unable to surf the web.
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.
I took a trip to Boston yesterday, and decided to let the Garmin StreetPilot C340 and my iPhone 3GS with iOS4 and MotionX GPS Drive 5.0 go head to head.
MotionX GPS Drive features spoken turn by turn directions, but you must pay a fee to access them. The $3 per month or $25 per year access charge from FullPower is quite reasonable, considering the $10 per month from AT&T (discounted to $6.99 recently). The cost of the app is also quite reasonable, at $2.99 for iPad and $.99 for iPhone.
My Garmin requires periodic map updates, and I had purchased the NüMaps Lifetime Maps package over a year ago. I strongly recommend that to anyone who has a Garmin device. I had updated my device a few weeks ago, so I am confident that its maps are as current as they can be.
MotionX GPS Drive pulls its maps from the air via 3G or WiFi (if it has a connection), so if you have a 2GB data plan, you might want to watch your data usage come the end of the month if you rely on MotionX GPS Drive. Relying on cloud-based maps, though, make its maps theoretically more accurate than the Garmin's, especially as you near the end of the quarterly update cycle for the Garmin.
Operationally, Drive's interface is reasonable if a bit crowded. It has more options than the Garmin, and it features walking as well as driving directions. Other Garmin devices feature walking directions, but the C340 is intended as a driving only device. Drive can operate in Portrait or Landscape mode, and I recommend a window mount for anyone who will use Drive as a daily GPS device. I propped the iPhone on the dashboard near the Garmin, which has a dedicated charging stand.
The two systems began chatting at me almost simultaneously once I got moving, and provided similar instructions. While Drive gave me "get ready to turn" followed by "Turn now" instructions, the Garmin lets me know long in advance what's coming up, and then reminds me to "Turn right onto xxx Street" when it's time to turn. Since I was doing some in-town driving first, the "prepare to turn" messages from Drive got to be a little annoying, but they would be welcome in unfamiliar surroundings.
I intentionally left the programmed route to see how the devices would respond, and they both gave the same instructions to return to the desired route.
On the highway, I noticed that my iPhone battery was getting low. I had the iPhone plugged into my charger, and when I turned off Drive, the iPhone charged as expected. Hmm. This morning, I fired up Drive, set a route, and plugged the iPhone into my computer. Although I wasn't going anywhere, Drive gave me periodic reminders to get moving. While attached to the computer, however, the battery charged as expected. I will need to investigate this further, or get another charger. It could also be that the car 12V port can't push as much current as the computer can while charging, resulting in a net loss of charge in the battery in the car.
The position of the iPhone matters when driving. I put it in different positions on the dashboard and on the passenger's seat, and found that not all locations were favorable to GPS reception. While pulled over to take a call, for instance, the iPhone lost signal, but the Garmin kept right on tracking.
Background operation in iOS 4 is also nice. Rather than using the built-in iPod interface, you can use iPod to control your music. I am an audiobook listener, so I like having access to the chapter list in the built-in interface. Also, since Mail runs in the background, I was able to know when emails arrived that were pertinent to my trip.
Assuming that I can resolve the charging issue with the car, I believe that I could use Drive while traveling. The Garmin is certainly more battery-efficient, but toting two devices while traveling is a drag. I can't forget that I got the iPhone so I could combine my Palm T5 and my Motorola flip phone into one unit. I don't believe, however, that I'll toss the Garmin just yet.
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.
I tried out the new Photos app on my iPhone 3GS with its new iOS 4. Wow! It used to seem like an eternity between pushing the shutter button and the camera being ready for the next image. I was trying to take some photos of my son during dinner, and now, the camera resets very, very quickly. I surely wasn't expecting how responsive the camera is, but it is like having a whole new device. Good job on this part, Apple!
