Flash For Learning

I received an email the other day about Articulate:

If you have a few minutes, could you summarize for me the main ways Articulate fits into your purpose for it (ie., why Articulate versus something else)? Also, what were the main problems you ran into during your testing and what (if any) problems do you anticipate encountering in implementing and/or using Articulate?

I’ve been using Articulate since March of 2006. Up until last year the dearth of content development tools left me developing my own templates using XML and Flash in concert with each other.

I purchased Articulate to rapidly develop content for an external client, and as a straight-up tool for most individuals to use to develop training, it’s the best-in-class. I found some issues with it in the way that I was using it, though I’d guess that most users would not do the kinds of things I was doing.

Here are some examples of where Articulate is weak, if you’re going to be a heavy developer looking to see how far you can go:

Huge content

I used Articulate to produce content where there was heavy amounts of video and Flash interaction embedded on just about every slide for about 1.5 hours of training. Over a distributed network, it had the propensity to break often. So if you’re embedding lots of Flash or video in your content, know that there are going to be issues with the embedded content being available if there hasn’t been a sufficient amount of pre-loading time available. Often times, this is as much a system resource isssue (CPU on the client computer) as it is a system memory issue (RAM on the client computer) - as it is a bandwidth issue (your download speed, for example).

That said, any content heavy in multimedia could result in the same experience. It’s not endemic only to Articulate, and the engineers of the product have taken just about every reasonable precaution to circumvent those kind of issues (and as a power user, I would vouch for that).

Branching

There’s no real easy way to enforce branching sequences in your instructional content. Remember that this is all based on PowerPoint, so it’s linear, by nature. If you keep the side navigation available, it’s near impossible to keep users tracked in certain navigation schemes. Locking down or freeing navigation is also an all-or-nothing affair - you can’t just lock down certain slides. You lock everything, or you lock nothing.

Skinning

With a Flash decompiler and a sick knowledge/patience for ActionScript, you can really alter the default user interface to a point where a client wouldn’t know that it’s Articulate - but the product becomes highly unstable with any hacking (and it’s probably a sick violation of their IP, so it’s not good karma to do it for any other reason other than academic exercise).

Also, and this can’t be stressed enough, when you embed Flash media, you have to make sure that it never calls on the _root, or you risk breaking the interface.

Now all that said, most people wouldn’t do the things I did with Articulate. Most of its users know PowerPoint well enough to put together a presentation. It will produce as good a training piece as you are at putting together a good presentation. But technically, it’s easily the most accessible and timesaving tool for rapid development of training content. It’s much easier to use than Lectora, the LMS code that is included is the best in the industry (and as one of the technical contributors to SCORM, I personally endorse the code base they use). For a tool that auto-generates the training, it does a better job than other tools I’ve seen - as far as smart preloading, load balancing, etc. And, the entire suite of tools (Engage, Quizmaker) will greatly assist our ISDs in creating E-Learning without the fuss of having to figure out all the technical how-tos of E-Learning.

It’s as simple a path as I can get my ISDs from going from Point A (developing only ILT content) to Point B (developing E-Learning content).

Most of the issues I see in moving to Articulate are people-related - as far as now there’s an expectation to produce quality E-Learning. I plan on having in-house training for a week to get the core team gradually developing interdependence and ownership of how the tool helps them best. As with any tool or technology, you need to allow some time to get people successful at using the tool.