Captivate for Teachers
With the roll out of Adobe software products across NSW schools and TAFEs in the last year, there is a wealth of e-learning solutions the education community can tap into.
Key in the roll out has been the appearance of Acrobat Pro and Adobe Connect on each netbook, staff, school and TAFE computer across NSW, as well as access to Flash Media Server.
"This combination truly opens NSW classrooms to the world. The distance education delivery tools of Captivate and Connect, the collaboration tools of Acrobat, combined with fast, streamed delivery of multimedia content with Flash Media Server supports the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (NSW DET) vision of a connected future," says Keith Garelja, Sales Director, APAC Education, Adobe.
Using Adobe Captivate, teachers can quickly create an engaging eLearning experience, without programming knowledge or multimedia skills. "The beauty of Captivate is that there is no code required, it is software 'for all of us'," says Garelja. "While Powerpoint has been traditionally popular, it is a presentation tool only. By using Captivate, teachers move from static presentation to interactive e-learning."
Adobe Captivate software allows teachers to:
- Utilise a friendly user interface and built-in tutorials for rapid content development.
- Create software training by recording any application, with endless options for engaging content such as animations, audio, and video.
- Create interaction and real-time feedback via capabilities such as quiz creation, scoring, and sophisticated assessment features
For example, Tumbi Umbi High School students conduct their Year 9 Geography quiz via an Adobe Captivate interactive presentation. And this downloadable example from Acrobat.com demonstrates how teachers/educators can use the recording feature of Captivate to demonstrate how to use another product, in this case, Google Sketch up.
"It is more efficient and more engaging to create a simulation that everyone can access and learn from, rather than demonstrate it repeatedly to each individual," says Garelja.
"Adobe Captivate enables teachers to add images, rich animation effects, videos, audio narrations, interactivity, and quizzes to turn their creative ideas and classroom content into high-impact tutorials that make students want to learn."
For further information and resources, visit the Adobe Captivate Blog. http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/.
Murdoch University gains deeper online insight and marketing efficiency with Adobe Omniture Online Marketing Suite
Increases Online Applications by over 23,000 percent
Murdoch University is recognised as one of Australia's leading research institutions, offering over 200 undergraduate and postgraduate courses to students from around the globe. A recent re-launch of its brand included a significant rebuild of its main Website, a site designed to effectively communicate with multiple online audiences consisting of: an external group of prospective students and an internal group of current students and staff. The University had also previously used a free analytics tool, which was limiting, because it could not adequately measure its core business objectives and gave only a partial view of online user behavior.
After using Google Analytics, the University realised it needed a more robust and customizable analytics solution to get a clearer view of engagement, conversion and abandonment. Understanding user behaviors, where visitors were coming from, what they interacted with on the site and from where and why they tended to leave, was paramount to success. Lastly, the online team wanted to improve its efficiency and responsiveness by having a single, fully integrated measurement platform for optimisation, natural and paid search, campaign activity, testing, targeting and email.
Integrated solution provides online marketing solution
Murdoch University selected the Adobe Omniture Online Marketing Suite as a fully integrated marketing solution for its online acquisition, analytics and conversion efforts. "It was important to find a solution provider that could meet our needs with multiple integrated products," says Tim Elleston, Senior eBusiness Manager for Murdoch University. "Although our site's main goal is to generate leads and drive conversions through submitted applications, a secondary goal is to ensure that relevant content is also available and easily accessible to our audiences. Omniture's integrated platform allows us to strategically optimise our site by measuring the audience needs against our business objectives, without losing focus on enhancing the user experience."
Omniture SearchCenter enables Murdoch University to efficiently manage its online advertising spend and increase performance of paid search marketing campaigns across multiple search platforms. SearchCenter also allows the University to easily measure the success of search marketing efforts by tracking the corresponding conversions on its site with SiteCatalyst.
Omniture SiteCatalyst and Discover provide Murdoch University with deep and relevant real-time analytics data about online visitors' activity and preferences.
"SiteCatalyst offers us valuable insight about our online presence and we decided to utilise Discover to drill down even deeper into this data," says Elleston. "Discover enables us to learn more about visitors' interactions with our course information - we can determine visitors by country, what search keywords actually brought them to that content on our site, which keywords make them convert better, and which particular course content they are interacting with the most. That helps us continually improve our content so we can provide an even better and more relevant site experience for subsequent and repeat visitors."
An Omniture Genesis integration with email marketing platform, ExactTarget, allows Murdoch University to easily measure email campaign performance through SiteCatalyst. It can monitor how email campaigns are performing by way of deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, subscription rates, as well as page views, conversion rates and subsequent revenue generated. The University can view this through a single interface to better understand what happens after a visitor clicks through to the site from an email, and therefore which email campaigns are driving the most conversions.
Omniture Test&Target offers Murdoch University the ability to quickly test, modify and target content to distinct audiences for maximum relevance. The University runs several undergraduate recruitment campaigns each year to drive new student applications. It decided to test sending prospective students to a campaign micro site with content addressing common hesitations vs. sending them directly to the online application form in order to see which route positively impacted application submission rates.
In years past, the University had developed a similar campaign micro site with a younger niche audience in mind. This time, based on previous metrics sourced from the Omniture Online Marketing Suite, the University decided to redesign the micro-site to appeal to a much broader audience. It addressed common hesitations and concerns voiced by prospective students in the past, which helped support their decision-making process to complete the online application.
In addition to the recruitment campaign, Murdoch University leveraged Test&Target to target content to different profiles identified in SiteCatalyst such as undergraduates, postgraduates, domestic students, international students, staff, researchers and prospective students. Murdoch University also gained the ability to effectively target content to returning visitors and those who showed initial interest in specific content, but eventually abandoned the site. "One of the most successful strategies we've employed is 're-engagement,'" explains Elleston. "We know if someone has abandoned our site, what they were looking at before they did so, and we know when they return. It is at that point that we can re-engage with them and try to convert them by displaying relevant or compelling content."
Online applications increase; re-engagement skyrockets
Murdoch University used Omniture Test&Target to test the new recruitment campaign micro-site which appealed to a broader audience and offered visitors more information and answers to common hesitations. As a result, the University increased online application completions by 28 percent compared to the standard application process.
"Test&Target revealed that although funneling visitors through our campaign micro site added a significant number of steps to the application process, more micro site visitors tended to complete an application because they felt more informed after viewing the content, vs. visitors who were sent directly to the application form and given no additional information," said Elleston.
Test&Target also enabled Murdoch to tailor content to different internal and external audiences via the home page to get visitors to the right Web site section faster. Murdoch can now re-engage with visitors based on prior site activity or affinity. For example, if a prospective graduate student started an application without completing it, if they return, the site prompts them to complete the unfinished application. After implementing the re-engagement messaging, Murdoch successfully re-engaged with and converted 34 percent of prospective graduate students who had not completed their application online. This represented a significant postgraduate revenue opportunity.
Murdoch University also leveraged SiteCatalyst data to make site navigation more efficient for visitors by way of the site's internal search box. As visitors began typing a new search term within the search box, a drop-down list of some the site's most popular search terms would appear. This helped visitors access the content they were seeking more quickly, right from within the search box, instead of scrolling and clicking through search results pages to find what they were looking for.
"Working with the Omniture Online Marketing Suite has become part of the foundation of our online strategy. The results we have achieved through testing and targeting content have been exceptionally successful and have also increased the efficiency and relevance of our site," adds Elleston. "Our organisation has a very user-centric philosophy and Omniture analytics data shows us where our users come from, what they do on our site and why they leave, which directly informs our business approach. We once completely changed direction about an online strategy after seeing counter-intuitive results within our data, which would not have been possible before working with Omniture."
