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Adobe Captivate is an authoring tool developed to create and maintain e-learning projects, including courses, software demonstrations and simulations, as well as presentations and testing.
When I first started using adobe captivate it was purchased for me. I worked as an eLearning designer, developer and of course we used whatever software the company provided. Of course, then the decision isn’t yours to make and you have to use whatever software they give you. But I’ve found myself in different circumstances over the years and perhaps my experience can help you when it comes to making the decision for yourself.
In between jobs, I decided to go back to school and get my college certificate for teaching and training adults. While enrolled at the college I found out that I was eligible to purchase the Adobe eLearning Suite at a substantial discount. The eLearning Suite is no longer available, but at the time it was a really great value because it included several of the Creative Suite titles for a very reasonable price.
Adobe and other software developers offer student and teacher discounts because if you can get the next generation of future creative people using your software, you will likely get a surge in corporate sales in the next few years because of it.
The downside of student and teacher pricing is that they are not subscriptions and therefore will become obsolete at some point. Technically I could still use my copy of the Adobe eLearning Suite, however, all the software included is well over half a decade old. Many of the features I use today just aren’t included in the old versions.
Like the student and teacher pricing, a regular perpetual license is what you get when you pay a single lump sum for a software title. When Adobe Captivate 2017 Release came out, I saw many people on the Adobe eLearning Community and the forums complain that they had just purchased Adobe Captivate 9. These folks felt ripped off and I can’t say I blame them. Adobe and other software developers are between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they don’t want to reveal that new software is in pre-release because they need sales to continue to support their company. On the other hand, it does lead to disappointment. Adobe does offer complimentary upgrades for users who are usually within the 1 month period but if you fall outside that range you may be disappointed. Of course, this is why subscription can be so appealing.
If price and obsolescence are your concern, the subscription model is really the best bet. Subscription costs you a monthly fee but requires a commitment of time, usually a year. The individual payment is lower and in the case of Adobe Captivate, less expensive than a perpetual license, assuming you will always upgrade to the latest version. I prefer and of course, require the most up to date version. While many people still watch my tutorials on Adobe Captivate 8, the real demand for me is to teach about the new features in 2017 release.
While many believe that subscription is solely a response to piracy, it also makes it easier for a software developer to support the software. For example, the Creative Cloud software is only available on subscription. What this means is that the support team at Adobe really only needs to support one code base. It is doubtful that many users of the Creative Cloud are running anything other than the CC 2017. Besides, why would you not want all the new features?
The real advantage to Adobe Captivate users is that you will never find yourself in the situation where you are the upset customer who just purchased the previous edition two or three months ago.
Yes, you read that right. Why pay for it at all? At the present time, I am not paying for my subscription to Adobe Captivate 2017 Release. No I’m not stealing the software, nor have I installed some other software that tricks the activation servers into thinking I’m a paying customer when I’m not. What I’ve done is no different than what any of you can do. I’ll explain.
By participating in the Adobe eLearning Community, we can all accumulate points. You can exchange these points for complimentary licenses of your favorite eLearning software from Adobe. For example, if you downloaded the trial edition of Adobe Captivate, used it for one month and during that time wrote one blog post about your experience and wrote one testimonial about the product you would qualify for three months of complimentary license usage for Adobe Captivate. If you were like me and continued to post blogs and videos and answered people’s questions you might accumulate 1000 points and further extend your Captivate license for up to a year. In addition, you would also start to see other benefits in the form of being invited to various online and live events, get asked to be a speaker at one of the conferenced held by Adobe, and of course, other software would be provided to you as well.
For all the details on this program check out the page below that explains the badges and incentives, score information, and the rules around yearly points accumulation (yes there are some rules).
Before I tell you about the exciting eSeminar we had this week watch the video below. With nearly four million views on YouTube you may already have seen it. It’s a great introduction to the topic at hand. Which was essentially; why are students finding, using and innovating via products like Adobe Captivate 5.
The video above was created by students from the Kansas State University as a project for Dr. Michael Wesch’s Basic Anthropology course. In this amazing effort the students examined themselves and their situation and consolidated their findings into an incredibly popular YouTube video which resonates with Truth. Beginning with an appropriate nod to MacLuhanWasch’s student’s video expresses perfectly the ironic misalignment of 21st Century Students in an 18th Century educational system.
Our topic this week focused on the surge in students using Adobe Captivate for a wide variety of purposes. I carried through the narrative approach begun last week and introduced four representative students in order to summarize the personal accounts that i’ve gleaned from a variety of sources; Lab administrators with Captivate site licenses, educators, students, & personal observations.
You’ll find the slide deck for the presentation below. Or click the link to view it directly (notes included.) You’ll probably enjoy the presentation which begins to explore these issues and examines the question, “How and why are college students using Captivate?”
In order to explore the how and why for typical students I gave four examples of students in the arts, health, education and business. We began with a little context and then met the model students. Here are some highlights from the presentation in case you’re still debating whether or not to ‘check it out’;
It helps set the context to understand both how rapidly technology has permeated our culture, and how rapidly it continues to escalate. It also helps to understand how social and collegial interconnectedness influences daily life for college students in 2010.
They are always connected; to each other, to families, to the web, to information, to colleagues and to teachers. They connect with instant messages, text messaging, telephone calls, email, twitter, and a slew of social networks. They also continue to connect with face to face experiences in and out of class. They rely on their universal communication devices, especially their cell phones – and they likely don’t understand why their teachers freak out every time they see them using one in class.
Students of 2010 are very likely digital natives. Ask about their first computer experience and it was probably in their home and probably as a young child. They have had digital devices for entertainment and to supplement their education for their entire lives. They would be hard pressed to imagine a world without computers and more importantly, a world without multimedia. They likely have found text only textbooks dull and painful and struggle with the stark difference between the linear world of school, and the extra-linear world around them.
Marshal MacLuhan famously observed that every new media form initially takes on the properties of those forms which precede it, at least until the new media form can be allowed to come into its own through manipulation over time by those who don’t ‘know’ how to use media based on the earlier forms. A former mentor used to tell me that it was a pity the wheel had already been invented – because now all the darn wheels are round. The idea expressed here is that our prior-knowledge of media makes us the worst possible stewards of new forms of media. We always try to make it into old media instead of trying to let it ‘become’ new media – with its own unique properties. Today’s students are infinitely better equipped to manipulate new media, because they are less encumbered by old media.
They are therefore virtual explorers. The pioneers who will discover the possibilities of new media. It is in that spirit of exploration that we find todays students engaging with Adobe Captivate.
Today we’ll look at four ‘typical’ students. Well okay they aren’t real students, they are amalgams of the kind of students I have seen and the projects that they will show us are stereotypical of the ‘kind’ of projects that I have seen from students in these situations.