CANVAS vs Adobe Captivate: Which is a better fit?

Jose : My name is Jose. I'm an inside sales transferring to outside salesman at an industrial distributor company for all types of industrial parts, mainly conveyor parts for the agriculture industry. And I would rate Canvas a five out of five. So the other software or company I've used before is Blackboard. I used it for when I was at Cal State University. And the reason why we... Actually, [inaudible 00:00:28] we were only using that company for I think for one semester, and then it was always down. It always had technical issues, people [inaudible 00:00:36]. It was hard to onboard students, and that's basically why the university basically decided to ditch Blackboard and start using Canvas. And they've been using it. That's when I was a freshman. I'm already graduated, so they only use it for about one semester and they've been on Canvas for the past five years. I like Canvas because it's really easy the way it's laid out, whether you have your different courses, and then you get the link to your different courses and it shows you basically all the homework that's due or all the assignments that you still need to do. And I really like how everything's in one spot, so you literally just hit your class and then it shows you your grades, your assignments that you still have to do. And then what I really like about it is the fact that you're able to view old assignments. So it basically saves it onto its database. So if you ever want to look at an old assignment, you could just hit that assignment and then hit what you submitted so you could always see what you submitted. And instead of most companies where you submit something, and that's it. It's just like, "Thank you," and you can never really go back to what you submitted. So that's probably the biggest thing that I really like about Canvas. I think it's pretty easy to start using Canvas because like I said, everything's there, so it's not like you have to go looking for anything. It's all laid out. You hit the class link. Well, most [inaudible 00:02:01] professors will send you a link. You use the link and then it automatically signs you up to their course. You don't have to have a sign-up a code or anything like that. You can just hit the link, you're in the class, you've hit your class, and then everything is laid out to my grades, my assignments, to the [inaudible 00:02:21] that shows you what's going to be due within the next... Basically the whole semester, you just hit the week that you're in and it shows you is due that week. And then if you want to see what's going to be doing three weeks, or you can also check that. So I think it's really easy. One recommendation I would have for anybody that's going to be using Canvas is always double check your work because sometimes you might've forgot to attach a link or something and it'll still let you submit an assignment. So you always want to check that you actually submitted something because I know a few students who something would happen with their computer. I know it wasn't Canvas because it never happened to me, but they would submit an assignment and they would find out that they never attached the PDF or the link, so then there would... It still lets you submit an assignment, but you wouldn't have anything there. And I would just say double check your work because the one thing I really like about Canvas, too, is you can always go back and resubmit. So you can always resubmit an assignment. So you're not stuck where it's like most companies, you submit something, and then that's it. There's no... Can't even view what you submitted and you can't resubmit. So Canvas, really like that about Canvas where it's like you messed up, but you still have time where your assignment's due, you can still submit something else. That's what I really like about it.

Mark: My name is Mark and I run an organization that does videos for nonprofits. I am rating Adobe Captivate, and I rate it four stars. And for more reviews you can click below. I had a job for a client where they needed a digital learning course authored in the SCORM 1.2 format. And I had never specifically done that before, but I did some searching online and found that it was relatively an easy process to do. So as I was looking around for what software I would use to create a SCORM course, Captivate seemed to be the best choice for me for its cost and all of the different things that it could do, as well as I was familiar with Adobe's other products that I use for other jobs. So I chose Adobe Captivate for the first time that I've ever created a digital SCORM course, because it looked easy enough to use, the price was right, and I knew they had great customer support. And so that's the main reason I chose Adobe over all the competitors as well. Plus they had flexible pricing. I could pay month to month instead of having to just buy a whole software. So the main reasons that I chose Adobe Captivate were first, the ease of download and installation and the price. But then very specifically, my project required taking a bunch of pre-produced videos and programming them into a SCORM course type of project. And I saw that Adobe Captivate was pretty easy to import all the videos in. As well, my client had some PowerPoint slides that needed to be incorporated into the project, and I chose Captivate because I saw that you could bring in and put in all your own videos and then export them out in the SCORM format as well as incorporate previously existing PowerPoint slides. So for me, it was the fact that the multimedia components that needed to be in my project could be taken that already existed and easily put in. And then third, because the exporting out of the project into the SCORM compatible format that my client needed was easy as well. There were multiple ways you could preview it before exporting it and multiple ways you could redo it again if you needed to change something. So it was the way that it managed multimedia in the project that I was doing that were the most helpful features for me. Once I got Adobe captivate downloaded and installed, it opened right up and was pretty easy to use. The only trickiness to it was it's separately billed from Adobe Creative Cloud. So if you have other Adobe services, when I specifically signed up, it was a different billing structure and setup from that. So that was a little confusing at first, but then I figured it out. And then once I got it loaded, it was pretty easy to get started. And I figured it out on my own. I will say, I then got an email that first week from Adobe customer support, asking if I needed help in case I had problems using it. But I didn't need help because I'd already figured it out, but it was nice to know that someone was there offering assistance if it was needed. So relatively simple to get started if you can figure out new softwares, it wasn't that hard to start just a little, a little tricky on the billing part right at the beginning. But that's about it. The advice that I would have to someone who is considering Adobe Captivate is first, if you've never done anything that requires the SCORM format before, then I think it's a good place to start. I had never done anything at all. And so it was a good, easy, early learning step. My course did not require much interaction with quizzes or surveys or tracking time in the course, it was mainly just putting videos in there. And so for a beginner like myself in this, it was really easy to use. If you're more advanced and know more about the different SCORM formats, you might want to look a little more in detail about all the specific things that it does because I didn't use a lot of those different available assets within the program. I do know that it hasn't been updated since 2019, I think, or the most new version is 2019. So you'll want to double check to make sure everything you are using is compatible, if you have done a lot more of this than I had. But for me it was a great fit. And I would just say, know what your output needs to be and make sure Captivate can do it, and that's the main thing I'd look out for.