The Adobe eLearning Community website was updated earlier this year. After several months of using it, I decided to write a review of the community website.

When Adobe told many of us about the concept of the community website at the Adobe eLearning Conference in Washington DC several years ago, I was excited. I was looking forward to seeing something very similar to what the Articulate community had in their eLearning Heroes website. At first, it was good. It was a place where people could ask and answer questions about software that sometimes is difficult to find. It was a place where I and others could write articles or post videos, and while it wasn't perfect, it was better than just having the Adobe eLearning forums.

This latest update to the community site, in my opinion, is not an improvement for the end-user. The first issue is the layout. Across the top, you have the following sections.

Blogs
Webinar
Tutorials
Certificate Program
Quick Start Assets
Discussions
Post here
Search
Notifications
and your profile icon

Adobe has further subdivided the Blogs section into the following subcategories:

Virtual Reality
Video-based Learning
Screen Capture
Interactive eLearning
Accessibility
eLearning Resources
Events and Announcements
Captivate Prime

And if that were not confusing enough, there is a third layer of subcategories. I won't list them all, but just virtual reality alone has seven subcategories below it.

Having choices where to put content is crucial if you want a blog post to stand out from the hundreds of options, but there is such a thing as having too much choice. For example, if I created a blog post about a virtual reality project that included both 360-degree video and images, it potentially could apply to six of the seven subcategories in Virtual Reality. As a test, I went to find several of my recent posts, and I had trouble finding them.

I'd also like to point out that Adobe has also further divided the subcategories into the type of content. First, are video tutorials, but not like the ones I create. These are tutorials exclusively designed by the Adobe eLearning team. Some of them are quite good, but many seem to be trying to convince you that creating an eLearning course only requires 30 minutes of your time and is as easy as counting to three or four. Once you scroll past the Adobe built content, you see a list of upcoming Webinars. Wait, I thought we were in the Blog section.

Webinars that appear in the blogs section for some reason

Then if you scroll down a little more, you will finally see the user-created content. It's easy to miss, though, as you might give up looking for such content after seeing all the marketing hype.

A small point of contention with me is the thumbnails for the user-generated content. As a blogger to this space, I used to be able to upload my thumbnails for my blogs. Using my thumbnails was great because I could add my branding directly from my YouTube videos. It made it easy to find my content later, but it also made it easy for my followers to see my material as well.

So now that we have gone down the rabbit hole that is blogs, let's look at the Webinar section. I feel I've already seen it because it was buried inside the blog section as well. The webinar section is okay. However, there are no opportunities to post user webinars. These webinars are the ones sponsored by Adobe. You might see a webinar hosted by me someday in the future, but only if I was invited by Adobe to run such an event. Below the upcoming webinar section, are the recordings of past webinars. Webinar Recordings are welcome as I often find out about a particularly useful webinar only after the event has passed.

The next section is the Tutorials section. The first of these is a series of marketing videos designed to promote the sales of Adobe Captivate. Most are one or two minutes long, and if you are considering purchasing Adobe Captivate, these are great. If you are expecting to learn the actual procedures on how to use Adobe Captivate, you will be disappointed. If you scroll further down the page, you will see some useful tutorials like the ones created by Pooja Jaisingh. This section can be expanded to see all the videos available in this category.

Tutorials that are actually marketing materials

Next is the section for the Certificate Program, which covers everything you need to help you decide if you would like to attend an upcoming Adobe Captivate Specialist Certification session. At the time I'm writing this, there are no future sessions. However, the page is still promoting the Las Vegas, Seattle, New York and Chicago sessions. It's been at least two weeks since any of these sessions occurred. If you click on register, Adobe thanks you for your interest, but there is nothing for you to do. Hopefully, they will start to plan more upcoming sessions in the future.

Past sessions of the Adobe Captivate Specialist Certification

The next tab brings you to a page about the Quick Start Assets. Clicking on the thumbnails that represent each of these Quick Start Assets will show three icons. The icons are View slides, Preview Project and Download. View slides will show you a thumbnail of all the slides included in the Quick-Start-Projects, The preview project shows you a published version of that project and the download saves a copy of the project file to your computer. All these project files are available directly from Adobe Captivate 2019 Update 2 or newer. Since these files are not compatible with any previous version of Adobe Captivate, my guess is the purpose is to create envy for users of earlier versions of Adobe Captivate. Perhaps this might convince more users to upgrade or subscribe to Captivate as a monthly service.

Showing Captivate users on prior versions what they’re missing

The next and final section before your ability to post and search through all the content is the Discussions section. Here is where Captivate users ask the questions in the hopes of getting answers to their challenges. Before this update, If a user had a problem they needed solving, the same question was posted to the more traditional Adobe User Forum for Adobe Captivate. Alternatively, questions asked on the forum were duplicated here also. As a person who frequently answers user questions, I could choose the platform I wished to monitor and do my best to help as many people as I could. Not so anymore. The two sites are no longer linked. Users who decide to try and help other users need to monitor both locations since Adobe no longer keep these two sites linked.

Furthermore, when compared to the Articulate eLearning Heroes site, Adobe relies on users like you and me to answer the questions about Adobe Captivate for fellow users. While regular users can answer questions on the Articulate eLearning Heroes site, they have a dedicated team of employees whose job it is just to help users with problems out. You might be thinking that Adobe doesn't have these people on staff. That would be incorrect. By my count, there are as many people from Adobe with similar roles as the folks over at Articulate.

Change Doesn't Always Equal Improvement

Ask Me Anything (About Adobe Captivate) Recorded Session.

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