E-Learning Development with Adobe Captivate 9

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When I was shopping around for e-learning authoring software, it came down to a contest between Adobe Captivate 9 and Articulate Storyline - two of the e-learning industry’s leading applications. While I was impressed with Articulate, I decided to go with Captivate because it integrates pretty seamlessly with other Adobe applications. I can edit audio with Audition, edit vector graphics with Illustrator, and upload learning modules directly to Captivate Prime, Adobe’s learning management system (LMS). ​

When creating a new project in Captivate 9, you are greeted with the interface shown above.

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​My first impression of this software was that it’s essentially PowerPoint on steroids (though one could say the same about Articulate). You can create reusable themes, customizable slideshows, and embed various forms of media. What makes Captivate so...captivating (sorry) is its interactive features. Buttons, variables, boolean logic, and much more allow you to create unique learning experiences that you can’t get out of a PowerPoint presentation. Features like hot spot interactions, heat maps, and software simulations make courses engaging for learners.

A hot-spot interaction in which the learner must click on a particular area of the image in order to proceed through the module.

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Captivate is capable of exporting projects to different outputs. One can publish projects to video, PDF, Flash, and HTML5. These days, HTML5 output is outrunning that of Flash because it’s mobile-responsive and, in my experience, seems to be less buggy. In fact, Captivate has mobile-responsive templates that allow you to customize the look of your project based on different screen sizes. A word of caution here: you constantly have to move objects around to fit each screen size when using this template or your graphics are going to look weird. That can be frustrating, but might be worth the headache if you want your projects to work well with different screen formats. ​

Customize graphics to fit the desired screen size.

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Are you going to put your course up on an LMS? Be sure to check off that your course is compliant with SCORM or xAPI to ensure that you can retrieve data, such as quiz scores, learning time spent, and other reporting measures. Captivate makes this easy by simply checking off a box in the Quiz Preferences. There, you can set the criteria for course completion and pass/fail.

Customize quiz preferences to fit your reporting criteria.

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 Depending on the LMS you use, all you have to do is publish the project to a .zip file in your desired format and upload it to your LMS. With Captivate Prime, I can do this with the click of a button.

Publishing options

When you Publish for Devices, you can configure Mobile Gestures, e-Learning Output, and other features.