New to eLearning Suite 2.5 (not new to DW and FL)

[houze]

As the title says, I am new to the eLearning Suite 2.5 but I have a few years under my belt with Dreamweaver and Flash.

My goal is to produce a simple, 3 lesson SCORM compliant course and I am uncertain how to begin the actual technical side of the production (I've already storyboarded, etc.), hence the few statements/questions below.

1. I think that I begin by creating the main contents page and the 3 lessons individually in Captivate (using whatever sources I create either in Powerpoint, Captivate, Flash, etc.).
2. Then I tie them together into a course using the Adobe Multi Sco Packager 2.
3. Finally I upload the package to my LMS.

Are these assumptions correct?

Where would Dreamweaver with its eLearning Templates and CourseBuilder interactions come in?

I guess I am in need of a step by step explanation and I am more than willing to buy a book(s) and/or read through a website that outlines the complete process from start to finish if they exist. I have been unable to find tutorials other than those which demonstrate the new things in Captivate 5.5, etc.

[houze]

I 'might' have found some answers here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/elearningsuite/

and here:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/captivate/cp/using/index.html

Still happy for any other help however.

Thanks.

[RodWard]

There are quite a few extra steps in between, but if you had to boil them all down to three then your list is about right.

If using Captivate to create your elearning courses you may not need Dreamweaver at all.  You'd only need Flash to create animations that Captivate could not manage on its own and then import these into your course project files.  You could also use Flash to write AS3 widgets for Captivate.

[houze]

Thanks Rod.

So Dreamweaver's role is more relevant if one is programming a course or lesson the hard way (so to speak)?

That is, non-Captivate or other course creator software.

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

In my view, yes, Dreamweaver is for web (or elearning course) development using HTML. CSS, JavaScript, and other related scripting languages.  It has no compiler for ActionScript like Flash does, so there's little point writing AS code there.

If you want to get into HTML5, then Dreamweaver is going to be very useful.

However, in several years of elearning development now, I've found Captivate and Flash are pretty much all I need.

[Lilybiri]

Hello,

I can confirm Rod's answer totally,having used eLearning Suite since it appeared (version 1), I only use Dreamweaver occasionally for creating a website, but never for an eLearning Course. Reason is that in the college we do have a LMS, so Captivate and Flash is what I'm using all the time, with Audition and Photoshop of course for the assets. If occasionally I have to distribute courses to externals that do  not have access to our LMS, I prefer to publish to PDF (Acrobat is also in the Suite) and prepare a PDF-portfolio for those trainees. It is much less work than having to redesign everything with Dreamweaver (and keep a website up to date).

Lilybiri

[houze]

Thanks to you both.

Last night I did a test course, solely in Captivate, which I published and uploaded to my LMS.

All seemed to work as expected.

I also found some more help docs and realized that the SCO packager creates a table of contents for me.

[RodWard]

The Multi-SCO packager doesn't actually create the Table of Contents for you.  But it writes the XML document (called imsmanifest.xml) that the LMS needs to find in order to create the Table of Contents in the SCORM Player.

[houze]

So the manifest is comprised of the various sections of content?

[RodWard]

The imsmanifest.xml lists the SCOs and any other assets that make up the entire SCORM course contained within the package.

[houze]

Thanks again. That was what I assumed and saw in the manifests of some of the courses I bought for our LMS.