Adobe Captivate 7 – Best eLearning Authoring Tool (in my opinion!)

I’ve been using Adobe Captivate since version 3 and in every update there are more and more exciting features that make it easy to use, more effective, and well, simply put, an all around better product. I know, some of you might say that there are bugs and maybe there are features that you want that aren’t there… yet; but, every software has some issues, and you won’t find a better customer service and engineer team who are listening to your needs and work extremely hard to satisfy everyone’s wants and solve the issues. Not to mention the amazing power users who volunteer their time to help out in the Adobe Captivate community forums. That being said....

I’ve already started developing eLearning courses using Adobe Captivate 7 AND teaching it and I’m loving it! 

Here are some reasons why Adobe Captivate 7 is my top eLearning authoring tool.

Maybe my favorite is the Interactions. The interactions makes it easy for new developers (and seasoned developers!) to make eLearning courses more engaging using any one of the multiple new and updated Interactions. When you're inside Adobe Captivate, go to the Main toolbar at the top, and select Insert, then look toward the bottom and you'll see Interactions, when click that, a the new window pops up, you’ll see all the new and updated interactions that, not only make your eLearning course more interactive and fun, but are also HTLM5 compatible (mobile devices)!

Several of my favorite interactions are: Scrolling Text Interaction - your students can actually scroll through your text box. Another is the Notes interaction - your students can write notes directly in the course. I also love the YouTube Interaction - you can insert a YouTube video directly into your course so that your students never has to leave your course to go to an external link; likewise with the Web Object Interaction, There are also a plenty of others including games that make learning interesting and memorable.

Adobe Captivate already offered the ability to make your eLearning course accessible (508 compliant) but Adobe Captivate 7 does an even better job. Since I often teach Adobe Captivate to local and state government agencies, accessibility is a necessary and very important legal component in the development process. Adobe Captivate 7 offers improved compliance support by providing tab order on interactive objects in oder that your students, you can only use the 'tab' on their keyboard to advance through your course, can do so in the order you want them to.

Another new feature of Adobe Captivate 7 for the more advanced users is the Shared Advanced Actions.  In earlier versions of captivate you couldn’t save your advanced actions and reuse them in other projects, which made re-creating popular advanced actions tedious. In the Adobe Captivate 7 the advanced action dialog box there is a new button that allows you to save the action as a Shared Advanced Action and you can then either import or export from this box or go to the Library and import or export multiple shared actions. When you import a new Shared Advanced Action into a new project, it will automatically import your variables and all you have to do is change the parameters.

There's something for everyone using Adobe Captivate 7! Honestly, I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly explore all of the new features yet, but I am familiar with them and will describe some of the others as follows:

Recording System Audio, so now, in addition to recording narration, you can even record (and edit) the noises from your computer, simultaneously, if desired.

If you’re a math teacher or use quizzing a great deal, you’ll love these new features:

• Importing quiz questions using the GIFT format
• Drag and Drop quiz question
• Math Equation Editor to add complex math equations using symbols etc.

If you want to add social media/collaboration to your courses in Adobe Captivate 7, you can enable social conversations right inside your course using the Twitter widget.

When publishing your courses, Adobe Captivate 7 has more options now like publishing to Moodle, Tin Can, or other LMS’s.

And if you really want to publish your course as an App for mobile devices, Adobe Captivate 7 will allow you to do that too! (this does require a separate PhoneGap purchase).

To go to the Adobe Captivate 7 official web page with a full description and videos of the newer features or to buy or try Adobe Captivate 7 go to: http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html