Google Classroom vs Adobe Captivate: Which is a better fit?

Ali A.: Hi, I'm Ali. I used Google Classroom for around four years before I stopped being an English teacher. And I have used Google Classroom through public schools, secondary schools and academies as well, English academies. I give Google Classroom five out of five. It make my life easier in a classroom and also online classes. Before Google Classroom, we only used Google Meet, but it was not as a classroom, it was just students coming online and just using their books, and I have my book in front of me and just showing them or guiding them through. But I haven't used any other software or application like Google Classroom. It's the first one that I have used and it really proved to be really, really easy and protective for my work. I chose to use Google Classroom, it became really necessary for me and for my school as well once the pandemic started and during the pandemic, the schools and everything became 100% remote. And the students could not stop studying, obviously, so that's why we had to bring everything to their homes using Google Classroom. And obviously there are other applications which have the same functionality, but in my case, I've used Google Classroom and I did not look for anything else because it was perfect for me and easy to use and I could not have any complaint about it. Right, getting started in Google Classroom. I'm an IT person, my major is in IT informatics, and so it was nothing difficult. Although I had some colleagues would have some questions about how the functions work and everything, but for me, overnight, I figure it out how it works and it was pretty simple to be honest, and it was nothing too complicated. Once I started using, just everything was smooth. If someone would like to start or thinking about using Google Classroom, I would advise, go ahead, obviously, because it made my life easier in the moment I really, really needed. I still use it from now and on, just not regularly as it was before. But someone who would like to start using Google Classroom, I would say, first, discover. You create classrooms and play around a little bit with it because you will learn a lot once you realize how much it can do for you. Creating classrooms, creating assignments, all those things. Because what I like about Google Classroom is it's connected. It's like everything is connected to Google, which is Google Drive is integrated as well, Google Meet, you can integrate in Google Meet as well. It's just everything is there, even the Google Calendar. So when you create classes online or in classrooms, you will see what classrooms are coming. It's just everything is there for you and you cannot miss it. I would say advice will be play around with it and just discover and you'll be grateful with it, seriously.

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.