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Adobe Provides Thorough Online Instruction at No CostBy Dr. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Student Computing Services ManagerThe use of Adobe products - especially Acrobat - has become ubiquitous on the UNT campus with most of the General Access Computer Labs featuring applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator on their desktops and the inclusion of duties requiring digital editing and publishing in almost every facet of staff and faculty work. As coordinator of computer-based training on campus, I am continuously getting requests for training in these often very 'dense' applications and their use. Unfortunately, traditional online learning companies often take several months (and sometimes years) after a product's release date to provide training in that particular version of the application. Adobe has attempted to mitigate this problem by providing a market-savvy free training solution which helps current and potential customers become more familiar and more comfortable with their products while giving almost instantaneous training reinforcement in the newest versions of applications to coincide with their release. Fortunately, this is one commercial solution which has the happy result of helping the company AND the customer at the same time.
The extensive free training in Adobe products offered at http://www.adobe.com/education/ gives a user every tool he or she will need to make use of these applications. I personally have pretty extensively 'vetted' the site and am also continuing to have members of the UNT CITC Helpdesk go through the materials to test their usability for the campus community. So far we have all be pretty impressed so I want to describe how to access and use the training. The majority of useful training can be found under the Curriculum heading (indicated in the picture above). One can also find materials under the Training heading (also indicated) but they are little bit harder to search for. After you click on Curriculum you will get a general table of contents page which allows you to pick courses emphasizing web development or video applications etc. After choosing one of those you DO, unfortunately, find the one 'gotcha' page - yep, you've got to register! Oh well, the Adobe spam just goes into my GroupWise spam filter along with all the Rolex and Viagra ads!
After you register, you get a Table of Contents page - be sure to save that in your Bookmarks - then you can just click on the bookmark next time and avoid having to register again.
You will notice that you can choose from older, original courses or ones that have been updated to include items pertinent to the current CS versions of Adobe products. You are also able to scroll through the Table of Contents of all the courses located on this same page. After that you simply click on the link to the info you need and start accessing courses. If you are looking for a particular solution to a question (ex. "How to use paths in Photoshop CS?"), simply use the Search engine provided on the Adobe site. The training and instructions are thorough and well-illustrated:
These training resources should be quite helpful for students, faculty, and staff looking to begin using Adobe products or to update their knowledge about them. These are a great supplement to hands-on classroom training and courses also. Tom Dent, our sales rep for Adobe also points out the following regarding the popular, long-running Adobe Classroom in a Book series: "For every Classroom in a Book for every product, all chapters are downloadable FREE from our Education web site at: http://www.adobe.com/education/curriculum/classroominabook.html All you need is one hard copy that has a CD in the back with the exercises. Schools use these all the time for their classroom training." If you have any questions about accessing the Adobe online training please contact the CBT coordinator at ehinkle@unt.edu. Now - I am off to learn more about those paths in Photoshop which I NEVER have understood! My thanks to Mike Wright for his initial research about this valuable resource.
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