Graduate School, USDA Standardizes on Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro for E-learning

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 05/08/08

The Graduate School, USDA has standardized on Acrobat Connect Pro, a Web conferencing and e-learning platform from Adobe Systems. The school is a self-sustaining government entity created 87 years ago by the United States Department of Agriculture to provide adult continuing education.

"Acrobat Connect Pro continues to set the standard for ease of use and interactivity when it comes to eLearning," said Dr. Sharon Fratta-Hill, dean of IT. "And the latest release of the software further expands options for delivering rich online courses. With the newest version of Acrobat Connect Pro, our instructors and students have more flexibility to engage in interactive discussions. Instructors can easily transfer audio control to students, and students can jump in and ask questions and share their insights on topics in real time."

The courses delivered online focus on helping people develop process-oriented skills, such as accounting and auditing, human resources, leadership and management, and IT. With Connect Pro, the courses will be able to provide real-time meetings with instructors, real-time discussions, and interactive polls.

Adobe announced a new version of Connect Pro, which will be available at the end of May.

By using a new feature called breakout rooms, meeting organizers can have participants engage in smaller meetings to cover topics in more detail. Each breakout room includes its own private voice over IP or telephony audio. Instructors can monitor and move among breakout rooms and communicate with all participants across breakout room boundaries.

The Graduate School will use Adobe Presenter to develop courseware and create presentations from within Microsoft PowerPoint, adding content such as audio narration for slides, video, animations, quizzes and surveys, and then saving the presentations in the Adobe Flash format.