Adobe Rolls Out eLearning Suite

• By David Nagel
• 01/20/09

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Adobe has debuted its new eLearning Suite, a system designed to facilitate courseware authoring, media editing, and the creation of other learning materials. The company has also launched Captivate 4, an upgrade to its eLearning content authoring tool.

The eLearning Suite is a collection of applications designed for developing learning applications for Web, mobile devices, and other destinations. These include several Applications from Creative Suite 4 and others, as well as extensions specific to electronic learning:

• Acrobat Pro
• Captivate (the latest release, also introduced today)
• Dreamweaver CS4
• Flash CS4
• Photoshop CS4 Extended
• Presenter 7
• Soundbooth CS4.

It also includes the Bridge and Device Central components of Creative Suite 4, along with eLearning extensions for Flash and Dreamweaver, such as Dreamweaver CS4 CourseBuilder and the Shared Courseware Object Reference (SCORM) packager.

Captivate 4, included with the eLearning Suite or as a stand-alone package, is an application for creating eLearning content and courseware. In information released by Adobe today, the company described it as the "cornerstone of the suite" with its focus on "simulations, scenario-based training, quizzing, rich media and interactivity."

The latest release has received several feature enhancements and new workflow tools, including:

• Support for importing and editing PowerPoint slides with audio and interactivity;
• Support for Photoshop layers;
• Single SWF file publishing;
• Text-to-speech conversion;
• A drawing toolbar;
• New project templates;
• PDF publishing;
• AVI output capabilities (in addition to others);
• Support for customizable, dynamic TOCs; and
• A new AIR application that allows reviewers to insert comments into Adobe Captivate SWF file.

The Adobe eLearning Suite is available now for $1,799. The stand-alone version of Captivate 4 is also available now for $799. Both support Windows systems only. Upgrades are available for both packages from existing Adobe software and software suites. Further information on the eLearning Suite can be found here. Further information on Captivate 4 can be found here.