Just a few weeks after writing up my recent experience with Adobe Captivate 2017, Adobe has announced and released Adobe Captivate 2019. I decided to download the trial and take a look at some of the new features.
Adobe Captivate 2019 is a very solid update that brings in some fantastic new features, updates some of the older features with better UI/UX, but still at times proves frustrating. That said, it is well worth the upgrade.
At the time of writing, I am over 10 months into an Instructional Design contract with a major New Zealand Government department (Accident Compensation Corporation) in a role that was heavily focused for the first 6 months on using Articulate Storyline to develop eLearning modules for use in their Totara LMS. I was hired despite the fact that I had never used Articulate before - something the people hiring me were aware of and not concerned about, given my background and experience.
The article is about using Articulate Storyline daily over those initial 6 months and on an ongoing occasional basis; of how easy it was to learn, create content and effective interactions; to produce dynamic HTML5 accessible resources...and to sometimes wish for more. It's also about my experience in relation to interaction and involvement with Articulate and its community website.
I confess that the very first thing that came to me when writing this article was the title. Now that I see the length of the article I have written (to be delivered in two parts) there's an unintended double meaning to the phrase "there's a lot to be said". But the title came about early on, because I can sum up my opinion of Storyline and what I want to discuss in this article in one word…Simplicity.
But simplicity in this instance is a double-edged sword.
During my time using Storyline, Articulate implemented a superb new feature to the software – the Media Library. I'd suggest you watch the introductory video here. I was incredibly impressed with what they had done when the library first came out. The ability to see all your assets in one location, to easily swap or amend images (without having to visit slides) was superb…and the team asset library features make it even more powerful. But they weren't done! And this is an example of the power of an agile, iterative approach to software development (that I'll touch on later) that shows how useful it can be for users. Articulate continued to refine and add superb new functionality to the Media Library over the next few months. One update in particular, caught my eye – "Enhanced: Use the media library to add alternate text to assets in your project and manage closed captions for videos and audio clips."
This means that you no longer have to visit each individual slide to check or add 'alt' text to an image. Even better, you can apply an 'alt' text for an image in the Media Library and have that 'alt' text applied across every instance in a project where that image is used (if you want). That is fantastic! I also suspect (in the future) that it will change the way I work on accessibility tags for a project. I suspect that from now on I will first go into the Media Library and add 'alt' text to the items I see there, and then secondly, visit each slide and use the "Tab Order" feature to then do a final check whilst removing or ordering the items that I want a user to tab through when using a screen reader.
Another nice touch in this area is the ability to add notes to the images, such as noting the original source of the image or publication limitations (for example, "For internal use only. Not to be used outside of the organisation.") or comments that would help when reviewing the project in the future. These notes don't get published but will prove remarkably handy for someone working on the file later on.
In 2009 I got the opportunity to spend a week at Adobe HQ as part of a Summer Institute for Adobe Education Leaders from around the world. It was a real honour to have been appointed the first Adobe Higher Education Leader in New Zealand and to be invited to their Summer Institute in San Jose. It was a fantastic week and a great opportunity to meet a lot of exceptionally talented people...both within Adobe and from the Adobe Education Leaders community. We were exceptionally well looked after and got to learn a lot about forthcoming releases from Adobe, as well as it being an opportunity for Adobe to listen to us about suggestions for future projects and how to support the education sector worldwide.
I did however come away with two frustrations - Firstly, I felt that Adobe didn't really appreciate the significance of the Moodle open source Learning Management System in the education sector, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region1. With the greatest respect to Adobe, I would say that I still don't think they have fully understood its importance within the e-Learning community. Secondly, at the end of a presentation and discussion about the next version of Adobe Connect, we moved on to a discussion about Adobe Captivate...and in particular, how many in the room felt that there was a need for a simplified version of Adobe Captivate...an "Adobe Captivate Lite" if you will, or as I outline here, a suggested Adobe Captivate Elements.
The reason I say this is that I believe that there is still the need for such an application and my reasoning stays much the same as it was in 2009. I shared some of that reasoning with the two Adobe staff immediately after the discussion had taken place at Adobe HQ and it goes along the lines of this....Adobe Captivate was (and is) a very powerful application that has tremendous use in the eLearning community. But it is an application that I don't often recommend depending upon the needs of the people that I am talking to. In many case, I recommend alternatives, despite Captivate being an absolutely superb product2.
I have used Adobe Captivate since it was first release in 2006 (technically that was in fact version 2, with version 1 being called Macromedia Captivate). However for various reasons I haven't had the opportunity to use Captivate with my work recently…although I have always kept an eye on each iteration that Adobe has released.
With a recent contract as an Instructional Designer/Trainer for the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, I was able to get back into Adobe Captivate for the first time in around 5 years. It was great to be using such a superb tool again, but also frustrating to find that many of the quirks of the program remain after all these years.
During the course of my work I spent some time noting down my frustrations, which I am going to discuss here.