Newcomer looking for direction

[Guest]

Hi everyone

I am absolute newcomer to many things online, including forums. I have been asked to look at a friends company website and suggest the best way to enhance their learning content, and how it is delivered to their customers. Essentially, the website is a way to access food safety training, specifically aimed at providing everyday people with food safety supervisor certificates, which are a government requirement in most states and territories. The hospitality industry relies on people being able to be quite hands on, and these courses are all delivered remotely, so the interaction and ability to demonstrate visual case samples where restaurants scrutinise the cleanliness of their kitchen, and an ability to engage a variety of people with food safety risks and hazard analysis is of extreme importance. What they are finding is two things - people do not know much about online training and that the customer expectations are not always being met, based on their prior expectations. They would like to do two things. 1) Embed a short introduction video on their website showing the range of 'bells and whistles' that online training can look like, regarding look/feel, and then to ideally use the same program to actually be in the background to construct and provide delivery mechanism for all their training services. The issue is on investigation, I can not seem to determine if the Adobe Captivate product is suited to doing both (i.e promo video and being a good training/content/assessment system), while also being a product that a team of training professionals who have not broached the online presence before would be able to get their head around.

I am basically looking for affirmation from the community that this is the right product to go with, given the context I have outlined, and if not, any suggestions of what other product to throw into the mix?

[RodWard]

Captivate is capable of allowing an author to design and construct a training 'video' which can consist of images, text, animations, and voiceover.  You can publish the output to a number of web-compatible formats, and you can also include quiz questions and other scored interactions to verify learner understanding of the content.  You can certainly upload these outputs to a web server and deliver them to end users anywhere in the world.

That takes care of ONE part of what you are asking. However, the other part of what you appear to need is a 'delivery mechanism' and I am assuming that you probably will be wanting to track what the end users are doing with this content and collect data about whether or not they pass the quizzes to be certified etc.  This type of system is called a Learning Management System  or LMS for short.

Adobe Captivate itself is just an authoring tool, not an LMS.  However, Adobe DOES have such a system and it happens to be called Captivate PRIME (though the two products are in fact not that closely related and they involve separate licensing).

There are over 600 LMS vendors in the world, so your client has plenty to choose from.

Whether Captivate is 'the best' product for your needs is however something only you and your client can determine.  You should be drawing up a far more extensive list of requirements than what you outline above. LMSs in particular can be very costly (hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to implement in the case of large corporations) so you need to have a very clear idea of  EXACTLY what you need before you select one.