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, in the next few sections, we will explore some of the things that set Captivate Prime apart from other tools.

Captivate Prime is an enterprise LMS

Captivate Prime has been developed from scratch by Adobe. It has not been purchased or acquired. One of the key aspects that makes Captivate Prime different from other Learning Management Systems is the fact that Prime has been designed, right from the start, as an enterprise LMS. So, even though you can use Captivate Prime in a school or university, it is in the corporate environment – more precisely, in large organizations with lots of course material and learners – that the unique features of Adobe Captivate Prime make the most sense.

Some of the features that establish Captivate Prime as an enterprise LMS include the following:

• A dedicated manager view to help managers enroll team members into courses and track their learning progress.
• The ability to integrate off-the-shelf learning content from other Prime accounts or third-party providers.
• Extensive reporting capabilities.
• Integration with other Adobe enterprise-grade services or with the existing ecosystem of tools used in your company (such as user directory services, virtual classroom tools, CRM, CMS, ERP, and more).
• The ability for learners to self-enroll in courses they deem relevant and an integrated AI-powered recommendation engine to help learners make their way through massive course catalogs.
• Etc.

Captivate Prime is a cloud-based LMS

There are hundreds of learning management systems out there! Some of them are proprietary software, while others are freely available open source systems developed by communities of users. Captivate Prime falls into the former category. It is a closed source proprietary software developed by Adobe.

Some learning management systems can be self-hosted. This means that you can download the system and install it on your own servers. Other LMSes, such as Captivate Prime, are cloud-based. This means that Adobe Captivate Prime is entirely deployed on Adobe servers and that all of the hosting and IT-related burdens are managed for you by Adobe. In other words, you cannot download and install Captivate Prime server yourself on your infrastructure. This cloud-based approach is in line with the growing trend that's been observed in recent years, as more and more companies decide to move a growing portion of their tools and services to the cloud. This is also one of the reasons why Adobe has entered the LMS business in the first place.

A word on the infrastructure

Adobe Captivate Prime is deployed on Amazon Web Services with other cloud partners, such as Brightcove, which offers industry-leading video content delivery. This also allows Captivate Prime to scale up to very large deployments, sometimes involving tens of thousands of regular users.

This model is known as the Software-as-a-Service model, also known under its acronym SaaS.

Updating Captivate Prime LMS

One of the main advantages of the SaaS model is how the system is updated. Since Prime is entirely hosted and managed by Adobe, all updates are directly deployed by Adobe on the server and are immediately available to all Prime customers.

Adobe constantly updates Adobe Captivate Prime and, as a Prime customer, there is nothing to do on your side to benefit from the latest update.

Note

You can find information about the latest updates at https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate-prime/user-guide.html/captivate-prime/whats-new.ug.html.

The release notes of all past updates can be found at https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate-prime/user-guide.html/captivate-prime/release-note/release-notes.ug.html.

At the time of writing, the latest available update was deployed in August 2021. The main new features that have been introduced by this update are a brand-new content marketplace, a new star rating system for courses, and support for Badgr badges.

Captivate Prime is a learner-centric LMS

Captivate Prime's primary purpose is to support lifelong learners working in a wide range of organizations covering virtually every sector of the economy. That is why Captivate Prime is built around Learning Catalogs, in which learners can search for courses they want to self-enroll in. In other words, Captivate Prime offers a Netflix-like experience: a large number of courses are available for learners to choose from, just as if you were browsing Netflix's extensive catalog for your favorite movies or series!

This is in sharp contrast to most LMSes that are used in the education sector, which are designed to help teachers implement their instructional strategies. While it is certainly possible for organizations to implement their training strategy using Adobe Captivate Prime, the overall experience relies on the learner being in the driver's seat.

You should now have a high-level understanding of what Captivate Prime is and how it differs from other LMS platforms. In the next section, you will explore where Captivate Prime fits in the other solutions provided by Adobe. You will discover that a lot of extra power can be harnessed when Captivate Prime works hand-in-hand with other Enterprise systems.

Captivate Prime is one of three eLearning-related products developed by Adobe. The other two are:

• Adobe Captivate
• Adobe Connect

Of course, Adobe has developed tight integrations between these three products, so customers using all three of them have some added benefit. That being said, Adobe has taken great care of developing these applications around well-established industry standards such as HTML5, SCORM, xAPI, and more. This means that Adobe Digital Learning Solutions seamlessly integrates with any third-party authoring tool, application, or service, not only with other Adobe branded solutions.

In this section, you will explore the Adobe digital learning tools and services in more detail to better understand how they fit into one another.

More information

More information on Adobe Digital Learning Solutions can be found at https://www.adobe.com/elearning.html.

Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate is an award-winning eLearning authoring tool. You can use Adobe Captivate to create various types of interactive eLearning content, such as compliance training, interactive videos, highly engaging quizzes, virtual reality training, software demonstrations and simulations, and more.

The content that's created with Adobe Captivate must be deployed on an LMS to be delivered to students and tracked by the system. That LMS can be Captivate Prime, but it can also be any other LMS system.

This is an important aspect, given that the resemblance of the name generates a lot of confusion for many users. Some users believe that the content hosted in Captivate Prime must be generated by Adobe Captivate and that the content generated by Adobe Captivate can only be uploaded to Captivate Prime. Despite the name of the two systems being similar, both of these statements are entirely false:

• The content generated by Adobe Captivate can be uploaded to any AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant LMS.
• The content hosted on Adobe Captivate Prime can be generated by any authoring tool, providing that the authoring tool can generate an AICC-, SCORM-, or XAPI-compliant package.

The only benefit you have when creating the content with Adobe Captivate is that you have a direct publishing mechanism from Adobe Captivate to Captivate Prime, as well as some additional pieces of data available in the training reports. Other than that, both systems are entirely separate.

Note

AICC, SCORM, and xAPI are three standards that are used in the eLearning industry to enable communication between the learning content and the LMS it is hosted on.

There are three main takeaways regarding this section:

• Despite their names being similar, Captivate and Captivate Prime are two completely different things that can be used separately from one other.
• Adobe Captivate can generate AICC-, SCORM-, and xAPI-compliant packages that can be hosted in any AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant LMS.
• Adobe Captivate Prime complies with the AICC, SCORM, and xAPI standards. As such, it can host content generated by any AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant authoring tool.

To summarize this section, just remember that Adobe Captivate is used to create learning content, while Adobe Captivate Prime is used to host, deliver, and track learning content.

More Information

More information about Adobe Captivate can be found at https://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html.

Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect is an award-winning video conferencing software that can be used to deliver remote virtual classes. The learning activities that are delivered by Adobe connect are said to be synchronous, versus the asynchronous content generated by Adobe Captivate:

• A synchronous learning activity is an activity where all the learners are connected at the same time. The typical synchronous learning activity is the virtual class, but a webinar or a live stream can also be considered a synchronous activity. The advantage of synchronous activities is that the learners can interact directly since they are all connected to the same activity at the same time. Note that a traditional instructor-led live class that's delivered in an actual classroom or lecture hall can also be considered a synchronous learning activity.
• An asynchronous learning activity is a course module that's published on an LMS. Each learner is free to visit the content at their convenience. Typical asynchronous learning activities include instructional videos, online quizzes, PDF files, or PowerPoint presentations that are hosted on an LMS.

An online course can include both synchronous and asynchronous activities. For example, you can ask students to review a series of instructional videos posted online before attending an instructor-led live or virtual class. Mixing techniques in such ways is often called blended learning. The overall learning experience that you offer your learners is a blend of asynchronous and synchronous activities.

The learning engineers

I often refer to instructional designers and teachers as engineers or architects of learning. What I like in this metaphor is that, just like an architect or a construction engineer, teachers need to assemble basic elements to build experiences. If you think of each type of learning activity as a building block, the overall experience you offer to your learners depends on how you assemble these building blocks, just as the final building depends on how engineers and architects assemble simple shapes. When it comes to learning, these building blocks are all the synchronous, asynchronous, distant, and live learning activities you can dream of. From this perspective, eLearning techniques simply bring additional building blocks into our teachers' toolbox. And additional building blocks means more opportunities to combine these blocks. This is exactly the spirit of the blended learning concept discussed in this section.

In Chapter 4, Creating Skills and Courses, you will learn how to assemble various types of learning activities into courses. For the moment, it is enough to say that Adobe Captivate Prime supports blending synchronous and asynchronous activities in the same course. You can even use Captivate Prime to manage the registrations, waiting lists, and attendance sheets of traditional instructor-led live classes (taking place in an actual classroom or lecture hall).

When it comes to adding a synchronous virtual class activity to a course, a large array of virtual class tools and platforms can be used, with the most popular being Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts. Adobe Connect is just one of the available solutions.

Captivate Prime supports any virtual class platform, but if you're using Adobe Connect, you have some additional benefits. Prime can automatically retrieve information (such as the room name, the room URL, scheduled meetings, the list of authorized teachers, and more) from your connect account, making it easy to add an Adobe Connect-powered virtual class to your Prime courses.

The main takeaways of this section are as follows:

• A Prime course can be made of a blend of synchronous, asynchronous, remote, and live learning activities.
• There are many tools to conduct synchronous virtual classes. Adobe Connect is just one of them.
• You can use any virtual class platform with Adobe Captivate Prime, but if you're using Adobe Connect, you can leverage the tight integration that exists between the two systems.

  More information

  For more information on Adobe Connect, you can browse the official Adobe Connect home page at https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html.

Conclusion

With Adobe Captivate, Adobe Connect, and Adobe Captivate Prime, Adobe has a very powerful ecosystem of services and applications that allow you to conduct virtually any kind of online learning activity:

• You can create a wide range of asynchronous learning content with Adobe Captivate.
• You can conduct very effective synchronous virtual classes with Adobe Connect.
• Finally, you can assemble these building blocks into courses and deliver the content to the right students using Adobe Captivate Prime LMS.

But even though this ecosystem is very powerful and efficient, Adobe does not force you to use all three of these applications together.

Adobe Captivate Prime seamlessly integrates with any asynchronous eLearning authoring tool, providing the chosen tool can generate AICC-, SCORM-, or xAPI-compliant packages (which is something they should all be able to do). Adobe Captivate Prime also supports any synchronous virtual class solution, not just Adobe Connect. So, you are free to mix and match any solutions from any vendor when building online courses with Adobe Captivate Prime.

That being said, if you decide to stick with the Adobe solutions, you will be able to leverage some nice integrations that streamline your workflows and make your life easier.

But Adobe offers many more solutions than the three eLearning products discussed in this section. In the next section, you will discover that Captivate Prime can be integrated with the solutions included in Adobe Experience Cloud. This will allow you to unleash even more power and provide more opportunities for your business.

Products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, Acrobat, and so on have brought the Adobe brand to fame. But do you know about Adobe Experience Cloud?

Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) (formerly known as Adobe Marketing Cloud) is a collection of integrated applications and services for online marketing, web analytics, content management, e-commerce, and more. AEC is used by a wide and growing range of large organizations. It is not as widely known by the general public as the Creative Cloud, but it is one of the world leaders in its own field.

One of the things that makes Adobe Captivate Prime truly unique is the integrations that exist between the Prime systems and two of the main services of the Adobe Experience Cloud:

• Adobe Experience Manager
• Marketo Engage

In this section, you will explore these integrations to understand how Captivate Prime fits into the broader Adobe ecosystem, and how these integrations make Captivate Prime a truly unique enterprise solution in today's LMS landscape.

While doing so, keep in mind that these integrations are completely optional. You can use Captivate Prime on its own as a powerful standalone LMS. You can also integrate Captivate Prime with other third-party marketing and CMS solutions.

More information on AEC

For more information about Adobe Experience Cloud and its components, you can browse the official AEC page on the Adobe website at https://business.adobe.com/.

Prime and Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system (CMS) coupled with a powerful digital asset management (DAM) platform that allows you to deliver custom content to your target audience. One of the key components of AEM is called Sites.

Sites is the CMS component of AEM. It allows companies to create various types of websites, including the main website of the company in different languages, product sites, microsites for events or special promotions, and more.

AEM is a tool for marketers, not developers, so building these websites is made easy by using templates and page components that can be dragged and dropped by the page creator. No coding is involved!

AEM now has a new learning component that allows you to integrate Captivate Prime content (including, but not limited to, courses) right within your Adobe experience manager site. This makes it easy to control the look and feel of the learning experience and integrate it into the broader online experience you provide to your employees, users, learners, and customers.

More information on AEM

Don't hesitate to browse the official Adobe Experience Manager page for more information: https://business.adobe.com/products/experience-manager/adobe-experience-manager.html.

Prime and Marketo Engage

Marketo Engage is the marketing automation tool of Adobe Experience Cloud. It allows organizations to market their products on multiple channels more effectively, including email, social media, websites, and more.

To do that, Marketo Engage collects data about your users, their behaviors on your applications, their intent, how they responded to previous marketing efforts, and more. Thanks to that data and a clever layer of artificial intelligence (AI), the marketing team of your company can segment customers and deliver personalized marketing campaigns that increase lead conversion and business revenues.

With the Marketo Engage connector for Captivate Prime, you can feed the data from your learning platform (such as user addition, course enrollment, course completion, and more) into your marketing automation system, which allows you to drive marketing campaigns based on learning data coming from Captivate Prime LMS.

For example, you can create a marketing campaign that targets all users that have completed a certain course, all learners that have shown interest in a specific subject matter, or users that have acquired a specific badge or completed a certification path. The possibilities are endless...

The data flow between Marketo Engage and Captivate Prime also goes the other way. For example, you can recommend a course to all customers that bought a certain product, you can cross-sell learning material to all customers that have subscribed to your services or even to users that have shared a page on your social media channels, and so on.

With such integration, your learning material becomes an integral part of your marketing and customer education toolset. This is where Captivate Prime starts to overcome the traditional LMS paradigm to become the cornerstone of your LXP.

More information on Marketo Engage

You can browse the official Marketo Engage page on the Adobe website for more information: https://business.adobe.com/products/marketo/adobe-marketo.html.

Selling Captivate Prime content

Although Captivate Prime does not contain a built-in shopping cart solution at the time of writing, it is easy to integrate it with virtually any e-commerce platform available using the Captivate Prime API. It is worth mentioning that Adobe Experience Cloud proposes its own e-commerce solution called Magento Commerce.

More information

More information on Magento Commerce can be found at https://business.adobe.com/products/magento/magento-commerce.html.

Conclusion

Although Captivate Prime can be used standalone as a simple (yet powerful) LMS, you can also integrate it with the other systems of the company. This includes your Content Management System (CMS), your marketing automation tool, and your e-commerce solution. This is something that clearly sets Captivate Prime apart in today's LMS landscape:

• First, it establishes Prime as an enterprise LMS, whereas many other LMS solutions focus on the education market.
• It also allows companies to include their learning strategy in their broader marketing, brand awareness, and customer education strategies. That alone is a revolution that establishes Captivate Prime as one of the first learning experience platform (LXP).

Of course, access to these extra services is not included in Captivate Prime's price tag, but the connectors and APIs that allow you to leverage the integrations with these extra services is a standard, out-of-the-box feature of Prime that is available to all customers at no extra cost.

Once again, you can integrate Captivate Prime with any CMS, any marketing automation tool, and any e-commerce solution, not only those developed by Adobe. However, if you decide to use the Adobe solutions, you have access to specific connectors that make these integrations super easy to implement.

Throughout this section, one of the main keywords has been experience. As learners and consumers, we are all looking for experiences when we browse the internet, use mobile applications, or walk into a store. Nowadays, experiences are what we expect brands and companies to deliver. We want these experiences to be consistent across devices and channels, and, above all, we want them to be personalized and relevant.

That is exactly the spirit that the Adobe Experience Cloud and Captivate Prime's integrations within AEC have been designed for.

By now, you should have a good idea of what Captivate Prime is and how it fits into the Adobe ecosystem. If you're like me, I bet that makes you eager to learn about the platform hands-on! Well, that's exactly what you're going to do, starting with the following section.