Captivate Can Keep my Attention. Well, Sometimes.
December 19, 2018
Captivate Can Keep my Attention. Well, Sometimes.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate
My department is responsible for creating and managing training in the hospital. That includes in-class and online training. We use Captivate to create online tutorials and training materials for posting in our learning management system. Captivate is available to a limited number of employees in the hospital by request, but is primarily, if not exclusively, used by three members of our staff including me. We turn to Captivate as a rapid authoring tool for creating compelling and interactive courses.
- Adobe Captivate is a full-featured authoring tool, offering users a wide range of interactive and educational tools. Adobe Pro applications excel at providing you most of the options that you want and more than you need.
- Captivate offers live authoring in responsive design. This feature is essential as we look to develop more content for use across mobile devices.
- Captivate integrates seamlessly with the other Adobe Creative Suite tools that we use. We combine PhotoShop, Acrobat, and Captivate to create some amazing learning tools.
- Adobe struggles in its customer support. Knowledgeable Captivate support technicians to teach and troubleshoot would elevate this powerful tool.
- As mobile learning journeys away from Flash, developing strictly in HTML5 is a becoming a must. Captivate has an HTML5 inspector to review your project for potential flash-based issues, but development in HTML5 only is not as intuitive. I waste valuable time and effort making adjustments after the fact.
- Many of my SMEs (subject mater experts) submit drafts in PowerPoint. Captivate has a PowerPoint import option, but transforms each slide into an image, removing any ability to edit the content after import. The issue alone is enough to drive me to alternate authoring tools. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to distribute and teach all of our SMEs to use Captivate.
- Captivate has added more complications to workflow than benefits. We have had issues in integrating Captivate's publishing files to our LMS. I am often reluctant to use this tool with the knowledge that the published file may or may not be accepted by our LMS, and neither Adobe nor CornerstoneOnDemand has a consistent solution. I'm stuck with adjusting settings after multiple attempts until the upload is accepted without errors. The result is a slowing of my efficiency in completing projects.
- Captivate does offer us authoring options that don't exist in authoring alternatives that we use. The interactive learning capabilities that are experienced by our users make this tool useful.
- Captivate's direct integration with the rest of the Adobe family creates a seamless workflow in design to production.
Whereas Articulate offers previews of production slides for mobile screen size, Captivate lets you design and edit content in a simulated mobile display. The ability to decide how content will behave when it encounters a mobile screen is immeasurably valuable. This is the primary reason that I would use Captivate when Articulate is an option. However, because of the publishing issues and lack of true PowerPoint conversion that Captivate exhibits, I more often find myself leaning on Articulate.
Adobe Captivate Feature Ratings
Using Adobe Captivate
3 - Staff members that use Adobe Captivate generally use this tool for authoring training and orientation course for publication on our learning management system. These courses are generally for in-house use, but I recently used Captivate to help create a course for public release in collaboration with a collective of physicians.
5 - Generally the individuals supporting this tool in our organization are either IT department staff members that distribute the software or the training staff that use it for authoring.
- Online staff training through our LMS
- Department orientation and on-boarding
- Data collection
- I am currently developing a mobile experience focused on providing an checklist to be used by new nurses and interns.
- We typically do not create online learning for external use, but recent completed a series of courses that will be distributed for public consumption
- Captivate's widgets might help us with our gamification of our learning experience.
- Captivate may play a crucial part in the mobile design of our content.