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.
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.
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.