Adobe Captivate Prime LMS Vs. Conventional Learning Management Systems
What more does Adobe Captivate Prime LMS have to offer than conventional Learning Management Systems? Let us see:
1. Adobe’s Fluidic Player, The Big Differentiator
The experience of using Adobe Captivate Prime LMS vs. old age Learning Management Systems like Saba, Sumtotal, Successfactor, Litmos, and Cornerstone LMS is very different. One of the biggest differentiator is Adobe Captivate Prime’s Fluidic Player which makes the learning experience exciting. The Fluidic Player is one of the key features that places Adobe Captivate Prime at a higher echelon than any other conventional LMS.
So, what does the Fluidic Player offer?
The Fluidic Player is a universal course player for all types of eLearning content in Adobe Captivate Prime. The content can be either interactive or non-interactive, including but not limited to, MP3, MP4, PPTXs, DOCX, PDF, Adobe Captivate, or Adobe Presenter projects, HTLM5, SCORM, or AICC packages, and xAPI-compliant content. The Fluidic player offers seamless content play on both desktop and mobile-device browsers. Depending on the type of content being played, the controls on the screen change dynamically. The Fluidic Player comes with a bookmark feature which enables learners to bookmark any section of the course and take notes within the player. The Table-of-Contents appears on the left side of the player and can be closed to enable a wider view of the content.
Cornerstone-LMS and Saba also play a wide range of content types; however, the experience provided by the Fluidic Player is unparalleled. Most of the old Learning Management Systems do not fully support HTML5, making the content consumption experience disjointed and hateful.
2. Integration
Cornerstone and some of other integrated HRMS offer tighter integration, provided you buy their entire suite that includes Learning Management System, Human Resource Management System, and Talent Management System.
Integration of these services enables some good features. For example, the software can automatically suggest filling of vacancies within the organization based on the learning, performance, and other such parameters. However, it is expensive, time-consuming, and inconvenient for organizations to transition from their exiting HRMS systems to Cornerstone’s.
Quoting Gary Keller, “You need to be doing fewer things for effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”
Conventional Learning Management Systems like Saba and Cornerstone LMS appear to have bit more than they can chew by doing many things at the same-time and missing out on key essentials such as ease-of-use, intuitiveness, inbuilt gamification, rating of course content, etc. Also, the user-interface is not based on modern principles. For example, the UI makes customization difficult and features are hard to change, navigate, and view.
Adobe Captivate Prime LMS on the other hand, has focused on taking the learning experience up a notch with its learner-first-approach and ease-of-use centered design. All the users, managers, administrators, and authors benefit from the simplicity of the design. Adobe-Captivate-Prime provides reports such as course effectiveness based on real world performance parameters, for example by placing less emphasis on test performance and greater emphasis on managers’ feedback.
Adobe has done extensive analysis on learning requirements and learning processes for both classroom and self-paced.
3. Cost, Support, And Quality
LMS vendors charge anything from USD 4,000 to USD 7,000 for setting up an organization on a SaaS LMS. That only includes training and basic level of support (most likely email or limited phone hours). For a client side hosted Learning Management System (i.e. it sits on your own servers) the implementation cost could go up to $25,000.
Important
Most of the LMS vendors like Talent LMS and Litmos do not have phone support. Adobe give free 24X5 LMS support and also, if you are a reasonable sized customer, you get assigned a customer success manager to help you onboard. These customer success manager can onboard clients in an average of 41 days. Which is unheard of as far as LMS onboarding is concerned.
Adobe has done a great job in balancing the cost and quality of Captivate Prime. Adobe Captivate Prime has no hidden cost of implementation, or setup and infrastructure. Adobe offers clean and transparent pricing. The implementation of training program is easy and can be set up within 90 minutes. It requires no third party experts to set up the system. The Administrators need not be subject matter experts which is not the case in Cornerstone LMS.
Adobe Captivate Prime is priced at $4 a month per registered user and offers a discounted price if there are more than 500 users. The minimum number of users is 10. All facts considering, Adobe Captivate Prime has one of the lowest Total cost of ownership for a Learning Management System.
4. User-Centric Design
Adobe Captivate Prime has the advantage of a simple design. Adobe’s design enhances user experience by only displaying role-based, context sensitive information. Nevertheless, it has the sophistication of modern user interfaces that are seen in Facebook, LinkedIn etc. This enhances familiarity and an engaged experience to the user.
Conventional Learning Management Systems like Saba, Sumtotal, and Cornerstone LMS were designed on the foundations of traditional design principles. Although the interface is being enhanced, it isn’t fully adapted to the modern users’ expectations of UI design.
In Adobe Captivate Prime the User Interface is intuitive for all roles including authors, managers, administrators, and learners. There are even plans of a new instructor lead role. Course content is developed as modules which enables rapid assembly of modules to form courses and subsequent assembly of courses to form a learning plan.
5. Gamification
“It is play that helps us do serious things better.” Adobe has included gamification in Adobe Captivate Prime where learners are kept entertained while going through courses and the entire learning plan. Learners accumulate points for being first to complete a course, points for self-enrollment without being enrolled by admin or manager, etc. A learner can see how he/she fares among a group of learners, or choose a co-learner to pit against and tap into their competitive nature. Learners can get badges on completion of milestones; these badges are compatible to the Open-badge standards and can be shared on the learner’s social networks. The feature also facilitates internal and external certifications.
Axonify is possibly the best Learning Management System for gamification but it lacks most of the important LMS features. Adobe Captivate Prime is possibly the most robust Learning Management System with inbuilt and easy to implement gamification, Docebo has a separate app for gamification, while Cornerstone LMS currently has limited gamification features.
6. Security And Disaster Management
Internet is not a safe place anymore.
“Successful emergency management relies upon experience and expertise”. Adobe has better expertise with disaster management.
In case of a disaster or an act of nature in the server location, all the content created, course history, and status may be lost or interrupted. To avoid such inconvenience, Adobe has a solid Backup-and-Recovery plan where all the content and databases are stored in multiple Availability-Zones and synced at least every 24 hours. In case of a disaster affecting the servers, Adobe will recover it to the last sync point which is at the most 24 hours. Adobe can be trusted for Backup-Recovery and Security. Adobe-Captivate-Prime guarantees 99.5% availability.
Third party tools perform constant health checks and send timely emails to Adobe’s team, the team monitors emails 24/7. If a server goes down, the team can immediately get into action and ensure uptime.
Adobe Captivate Prime LMS is designed to be a cloud-based service that is hosted using Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, which is the gold standard as far as cloud infrastructure is concerned.
Cornerstone LMS also has a backup and recovery plan. However, it is up to the customer to choose a storage location (US or Europe) to store all their data and backup. Most of the vendors do not match Adobe when it comes to providing clustering, fail over, auto scaling, backup storage, and edge server delivery, making Adobe a more reliable and high performance platform.
In Adobe Captivate Prime, all instances of data including course content and database backup are encrypted. All software code in Adobe Captivate Prime LMS is thoroughly reviewed for security loopholes. SQL-Injection attacks and Cross Site Scripting attacks are avoided with the help of various security measures and third party software tools which perform vulnerability checks. Thus, organizations can confidently use Adobe Captivate Prime for all their training requirements without worrying about security risks or loss of data.
Conclusion
Though conventional Learning Management Systems like Cornerstone, Saba, etc. offer some good features when purchased as a bundle with other services, Adobe Captivate Prime ranks higher than most Learning Management Systems on key parameters. Adobe Captivate Prime provides its users an exciting and interesting experience. Adobe Captivate Prime ranks better because of its extensive care in UX, UI, a good backup-and-recovery plan and an extensive security-centered design. Adobe’s LMS has taken measures to ensure an intuitive Learner-First Approach.
