What is Adobe Captivate Prime?

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.