Adobe Learning Suite – It's more than just Photoshop, Flash, and Captivate (Part 1)

Ever since Adobe bought Macromedia, it has been the big player in eLearning tools.  In addition to their major applications, they are providing a number of smaller helper apps.  Since there are plenty of reviews on the main tools, I wanted to investigate some of the more specialized eLearning support tools that Adobe provides.

SCORM Packager

I can’t help but think Adobe missed the mark on this one.  This tool is delivered as part of the Captivate 4 product, but doesn’t require Captivate (or any other Adobe products) to work.  It provides the ability to package multiple published Captivate, Presenter, or other SCORM-enabled courses (such as Articulate courses) and create a single multi-SCO course package from them.  At first glance, this seems like it would be a useful application, but it fails to deliver on one essential point: it doesn’t support the SCORM 2004 sequencing and navigation functionality.  If you don’t have the ability to set up prerequisites or determine how a user will access the different SCOs, why would you want a multi-sco course?  Most LMSes provide far better access and course structure controls than this packager has.  So until Adobe updates – and increase the features of – this tool, it isn’t really worth the time.

Dreamweaver CS4 with CourseBuilder Extensions

I had looked at CourseBuilder a number of years ago and decided that it wouldn’t fit into our production process at the time.  I figured the best starting point was to look at the help files and run through the tutorial.  This is where I started to get a little concerned.  The more I looked into the supporting documentation, the more I concerned I got: first, the tutorial seemed to be out of date for the version of Dreamweaver it accompanied; then I noticed that many of the pages on scoring and data-tracking seemed to be missing.  So I figured I would search online for Adobe and CourseBuilder – this brought up more pages that referenced Macromedia than Adobe, which is all that needs to be said about priority that Adobe gives to the tool. 

Aside from that, CourseBuilder seemed to work fine (although I did not actually integrate a scored assessment and import it an LMS).  The layout and configuration made it possible to create fairly complex assessments.  Personally, I would prefer to leverage other learning tools, such as Adobe Flash or Articulate Presenter, but if you do not have access to the Flash player, the CourseBuilder extensions may provide an acceptable alternative.

To be continued…