iSean

some folks in the blogging community are buzzing about the Adobe Learning Summit where Adobe apparently made it clear that they want to be players in eLearning. Ellen Wagner of Adobe even has a white paper (PDF, 199kb) where she describes Adobe role and vision in eLearning. i think the white paper is worth a read. let me first say that my sense of big corporations who jump on the eLearning bandwagon is that they tend to be behind the times when it comes to eLearning. you look at one of the biggest players, Blackboard (Bb), and it’s probably much easier to find critics than fans. my problem with Blackboard is that i can EASILY find similar tools from the open source community that are better than Blackboard in just about every aspect of their product. on the other hand, i have never been a big fan of software that tries to be everything for everyone. i never liked my browser to be everything (e.g., Netscape had the browser, email, calendar and all that jazz in some versions); rather, i wanted a browser to specialize in browsing and an email application to specialize in perfecting my email experience and i could pick the best apps for each task. so Bb being a jack of all trades never appealed to me. I get my content management from Drupal and my community forums from phpBB and Wordpress is great for blogging, etc . . . life is good. but part of this issue of being everything is that Bb is missing out on much of what is currently available. our students are big into Facebook and YouTube and Flickr and tools like this, yet these aren’t a part of Bb at all. Instead Bb is slowing adding new services (e.g., blogging) that are implemented poorly and can only really be used for class and not carried with the student once the class ends. yuck! but, for many instructors a tool like Bb does make it easier to shift to online learning so kudos to Bb for that.

back to Adobe . . . the Adobe corporation clearly has their pulse on the market. early in the white paper, they discuss YouTube and text messages and IMs and even smart phones. Adobe is a big player in the technology field; however, they haven’t traditionally been players in education — at least not with an eye on education even though they’ve had products used in education. the white paper does a good job of describing the eLearning market — we are a market after all. if we weren’t a market to be served then the business community would not deliver products to be bought. Adobe clearly has to see a way to benefit and make money before they jump in, so the white paper describe this market. of course, Adobe does not restrict their market to K-12 or even K-college; rather, they also identify the kinds of e-Learning that corporations engage in (e.g., they cite up to 40% of corporate education being offered via eLearning).

the white paper makes a case that Flash Professional is the number 1 application in eLearning. perhaps i’ve not paid attention well, but i learned to use Flash back in the 90s and i still have yet to actually use it in my teaching and i teach almost exclusively online these days. it’s far, far too cumbersome and time consuming for use in individual lessons, that’s for sure. but i digress. clearly, the biggest Adobe application in education is Adobe Acrobat and the Adobe Reader for creating and viewing PDFs. for the especially geeky (myself included) Adobe Dreamweaver is certainly near the top of the list, but most eTeachers are not using Dreamweaver, nor will they ever. most instructors are relegated to Bb-like tools. and Adobe recognizes the importance of Learning Management Systems (LMSs). Adobe is not making a decision to add a competitor in the LMS market . . . instead, Adobe wants to extend the LMS and online learning experience with their tools (remember BASF — “we don’t make the products you buy; we make the products you buy better”). i think this is a wise decision, but they don’t need to hear it from me as they’ve no doubt spent a lot of time trying to find their place in eLearning. i think their focus on making “just-in-time access” to online learning and e-Materials is a step in the right direction. i like that they want to extend rich and engaging learning experiences. i will patiently wait to see how this is carried out.

(moments later) if you explore the Adobe eLearning website you can get a feel for what they are working on. for example, i just mentioned that they want to help extend current tools like LMSs — Adobe already has a LMS Integration tool that fits into Bb, which allows for using the LMS to set up meetings. i checked out the PDF describing this tool and it looks just like a typical Bb add-on that will never get used and is more of a tool for an audience that does not yet exist — a solution looking for a problem. i hope this is not the direction Adobe is going with their eLearning focus. i generally like the Adobe applications that i use (e.g., Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, and Fireworks), so my hope is that the eLearning solutions that emerge are congruent with the products that Adobe has used to make their name and/or that Adobe is looking at web 2.0-like solutions (see, for e.g., Google’s online applications).

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