Video.edu News: Adobe, Bucknell University
Here's the latest news from the world of educational video.
Adobe Announces eLearning Suite 2, Now for Mac, Too
Just a few weeks after announcing the CS5 version of its production applications, Adobe announced version 2 of its eLearning Suite. The first edition of the bundle debuted last year, with the company's longstanding eLearning authoring application Captivate as the centerpiece, paired with complementary products like Flash, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop.
Although most of Adobe's production applications have been available on both Windows and Mac OS, up to now Captivate has been Windows-only. The new version 5 of Captivate will be available on both platforms for the first time, as will the whole eLearning Suite 2 bundle.
Captivate started out as a screen capture utility that has grown into a way to create demos, interactive simulations and quizzes that can be deployed as Flash files. Version 5 adds richer animation and new workflows that allow smooth roundtripping with Soundbooth, Flash and Photoshop. On the video front Captivate 5 offers what Adobe calls "multivideo support and synchronization" which allows the user to import a wide variety of file formats--including AVI, MOV, FLV, and MPEG—and then synchronize that video with a project's elements, like slides or animations.
The Captivate 5 and the eLearning Sutie 2 are available for pre-order and will start shipping in June.
Bucknell University's Video-Rich Virtual Tour Wins a Webby
Thinking about attending Pennsylvania's Bucknell University? Before you apply you can take a rich virtual tour online at the university's website. While plenty of school's feature an online tour, Bucknell just won a Webby award in the school/university category for theirs.
Starting with an interactive aerial map of the campus the site prompts the user to complete a sentence like "I am ____" with words like "artistic," "ambitious" or "hands-on." Then places on campus that match these descriptions are marked for exploration.
The tour makes extensive use of video featuring pieces that appear to be gathered from a variety of on-campus sources. One might watch a video of an economics major who is also a singer-songwriter perform one of his songs, or a student news-style piece with an interview of a visiting author. This application demonstrates the effective reuse and aggregation of video content that is already being produced on most campuses.
This year marks the fourteenth edition of the Webby Awards since getting started in 1996, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The finalists for the best school/university website also included submissions from MIT, Point Park University, the University of Puget Sound and Wheaton College. Winners will be honored at the Webby Awards ceremony on June 14.
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