Section 1: Publishing Learning Content
To begin with, you will activate your Captivate Prime trial account and perform basic configuration tasks. Then, you will upload various types of learning content to the platform and arrange this content into courses.
This section comprises the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, Introduction to Adobe Captivate Prime
- Chapter 2, Customize the Look and Feel of Captivate Prime
- Chapter 3, Uploading Learning Content and Managing the Content Library
- Chapter 4, Creating Skills and Courses
Chapter 1: Introduction to Adobe Captivate Prime
Welcome to Enterprise LMS with Adobe Captivate Prime. Adobe Captivate Prime was released for the first time in 2015, so it is a relative newcomer on the LMS landscape. Despite its youth, Captivate Prime has already built a solid reputation as one of the best corporate LMSes out there, as outlined by the numerous awards it has received throughout its young career.
Just like any other LMS, you can use Captivate Prime to host eLearning content, arrange that content into courses, maintain a list of users and trainers, enroll learners into courses, track user progress, and more. But Captivate Prime is far more than that! It has some unique features such as a powerful gamification engine, built-in social learning activities, and an AI-powered recommendation engine. This makes Captivate Prime a pioneer of the next generation of enterprise LMS.
You can further expand the power of Captivate Prime by leveraging numerous integrations between Prime and other enterprise-grade systems, such as directory services, marketing automation tools, content management systems (CMSes), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, and more. This allows organizations to go far beyond the traditional learning management system and design truly comprehensive learning experiences that are consistent with their corporate graphic identity and aligned with other marketing efforts. This enhanced set of functionalities allows Captivate Prime to deliver customized learning content that fits the needs of every learner individually. This is why more and more people consider Captivate Prime a Learning eXperience Platform (LXP) rather than an LMS.
You will explore all these features and functionalities throughout this book. You will start by exploring the basic LMS features of Captivate Prime. To achieve this goal, you will upload training modules to the system, arrange these modules into courses, create various types of users, and assign learners to courses. Then, you will enhance the learner experience by turning on advanced features such as gamification and social learning. Finally, you will add a touch of artificial intelligence to provide personalized recommendations to your learners and integrate Captivate Prime into the other systems of the organization. This will help you build a full-blown learning experience for your employees, partners, and customers.
This makes for a lot of exciting features to discover and use cases to discuss, so let's start with the basics. In this first chapter, you will learn about the following topics:
- Discovering what Captivate Prime is and how it fits in the LMS landscape.
- Learning about where Captivate Prime fits in the Adobe ecosystem of applications and services.
- Activating your Captivate Prime trial account.
- Touring the Captivate Prime application and the main roles available in the system.
What is Adobe Captivate Prime?
Before going any deeper into Captivate Prime specifics, it is important to have a high-level understanding of what Captivate Prime is and where it fits, both in the LMS landscape and in the Adobe ecosystem of applications and services.
At its most basic level, Adobe Captivate Prime is a Learning Management System (LMS). An LMS is a web application that's used for hosting, delivering, administrating, tracking, and reporting learning activities, among other things. The concept of LMS dates back to the middle of the 1990s and first appeared in the higher education sector. Since then, LMSes have evolved, integrating features such as collaborative learning, social learning, gamification, mobile learning, and more. They have contributed to the advent of new instructional design strategies (such as the flipped classroom) and have moved beyond the tight boundaries of the education sector to venture into corporate training. Nowadays, LMSes can be found in a very large variety of organizations. From educational institutions to large business corporations, from primary schools to government agencies, the LMS has become the central component of the learning and development strategy of a growing number of organizations.
To understand the basic functionalities of an LMS, let's imagine a person (a student or an employee, for example) wanting to take a course:
- First, that person logs into the LMS and is identified by the system as a learner.
- The LMS presents that learner with a list of courses he/she is enrolled in.
- The learner chooses the course he/she wants to take and the LMS starts delivering the content. The learning material is usually made up of a list of course modules of different types. These can be video tutorials to watch, PDF files to read, quizzes to take, surveys to complete, assessments to upload, and more.
- As the learner progresses into his/her course, the LMS records every single interaction, such as the course modules that have been viewed, the time spent going through the modules, the outcome of the quizzes, the responses to the surveys, the submitted assignments, and more.
- Based on this data, the LMS can make some decisions automatically, such as granting the user access to the next module or redirecting the user to additional remediation material when appropriate. The LMS can also automatically deliver badges or certificates upon course completion.
This makes for a great basic user experience. But the LMS is also useful for the teacher (also known as the coach, the instructor, and so on). So, let's imagine another person logging into the system. This time, the person is recognized as an instructor:
- The LMS presents a list of courses the person is an instructor of.
- The instructor is then able to generate reports regarding the progression of each student in the courses. For example, the instructor can review the scores of the students, the answers given to the questions of the quizzes, the messages left on forums, the questions asked by the students, the assignments that have been uploaded by the students, and more.
- If needed, the instructor can send reminders about upcoming deadlines or other course-related messages to the students.
- Of course, the instructor can also modify the course's content or create brand-new courses altogether.
The data that's gathered by the LMS can be used by the Human Resources (HR) or Learning and Development (L&D) departments of the organization to implement and follow the general learning and development strategy. For example, the LMS can be used by a compliance officer to prove that required education hours/units have been completed, that training has been taken, that new employees have been enrolled in onboarding courses, that partners, suppliers, and freelancers have been trained properly, and more.
These are the basic features that every LMS should provide. These tasks fall under the following basic categories:
- Managing and delivering courses
- Managing users and roles
- Online assessments and tracking the students
- Automating various tasks (such as delivering badges and certificates)
- Reporting and analytics
Since Captivate Prime is an LMS, these features represent the basic toolset of the Prime system itself. But Prime has a lot more to offer. So,...
