Flash For Learning

Imagine if you had the means, the open-mindedness of the client and the management sponsorship to pull out all the stops and really produce a piece of learning that was fun, relevant and “just right” for the goals you were trying to meet with your learners? I’m at the end of such a project, on the eve of its launch, and I could not be more excited to predict a huge win for the first “serious” learning game in our organization.

I’ll be the first to admit, this project could’ve gone wrong from jump in so many ways. We had an internal client who, like many clients, was very risk-averse, so the thought of doing a “game” was a risky move and required a lot of handholding. They could have bailed at any time. We had an incredibly tight deadline for a project like this. Normally, a multimedia-heavy project like this one, you’d like a solid six months to develop it out. We gave our vendor three, and by a lucky break for all of us, the delivery was delayed by a month which was needed.

We used a brand new vendor who was brought to us initially by our CLO. I’ll be the first to admit based only on the sample products they provided that I would not have chosen them — mostly because they seemed more like an Agency than a game development house and the look and feel of the products I saw were similar in nature, and I felt their production would be a disconnect with our audience (and our internal client). When the project was emerging from the Instructional Designer on the project, I ballparked the project at a certain cost. I expected the vendor to come in high and then we’d have to haggle and negotiate. I expected that working with the vendor, like many vendors I’ve both worked for and worked with, would be a painful tug-of-war, followed by some finger pointing, followed by relief that the project just “got done.”

I could not have been more wrong about this vendor, and I’m very, very happy to say so. They came in so close to the number I ballparked, I began to think they were taking us seriously. I waited with baited breath to see their first draft of the storyboards indicating the look and feel for the game, and having taken the time to visit and talk with one of our branch stores close to their office, they produced storyboards that I felt so perfectly blended my expectations for how to be at once “cool” and at the same time “mindful” of the people we were looking to instruct, as well as the complexity of the subject matter we were looking to demystify. They made learning the material (and the subject itself) “fun” and still “tasteful.” I was very impressed, and I’m the kind of person (as you know on this blog) that doesn’t run out of opinions. I became hopeful that this really could work.

They created the project in a very complete Alpha state. We tested it in our network and found that the bandwidth required would be a major obstacle for the target audience. We talked with our vendor about reducing the audio and video quality a bit and retesting it in our network before doing any more work on integrating it with the LMS — because if it wouldn’t perform as “content” out of the LMS, there was no point on troubleshooting the LMS communication. They had new files to us in a matter of days. We retested and got a green light on performance.

Then we moved onto LMS integration. I put together the API Wrapper and the rest of the SCORM packaging for our vendor, because they had not built for an LMS deployment before, and it would be just silly to make them go through the learning curve when I could just do that heavy lifting with little effort. They were able to write and read from the LMS at the prototype level (we did a technical test before they even tried to get the real content working to debug the communication issues). Not looking at their ActionScript at all, when we noticed some issues with suspend_data not being sent to the LMS, even though the code was the same as the prototype. It turned out that the content was sending consecutive JavaScript calls, which goes back to the whole synchronous/asynchronous deal about ActionScript and JavaScript (we had to use Flash 7 Player because my organization had not upgraded to Flash 9 Player at the time). Moving the calls so they were separated and event-driven made a huge difference. I was on the phone for a day and a half with the vendor. In ten years, I never worked as, for or with a more willing partner.

For reasons I’m sure you can understand, I can’t show you the game. I probably can’t talk much about what the game is about or what we’re trying to teach. I probably can’t broadcast the vendor we’re working with (though if you ask me offline, depending on whom you work for, I’ll be happy to tell you).

The point of this posting is to get off my chest in as public a means as I can how happy I am to be able to help make the vision of one of our Instructional Designers a reality — even if all I am is the babelfish (Hitchhiker’s Guide reference). We have our foot in the door for serious gaming. I’m betting it’s going to be a smashing success and will usher in a shift in instructional approach, both as far as what we propose and what our internal clients will consider.

And… I’m just happy as hell that after years of producing cool and not-so-cool page turning stuff, I get to finally be part of something different. I worked with a fantastic Instructional Designer and a really incredible Project Manager (I actually am gushing over Project Management and Instructional Design) — both of whom really “get it.” I had a boss who was willing to take a chance and a CLO who was ready to be a sponsor on something different. Best yet: I had an internal client who, despite their concerns, was willing to trust us and get the job done right.

And one more thing: I’m very humbled that there are vendors out there that can really be a partner in making great learning experiences, on-time, on-budget and far-exceeding expectations.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I have a happy project story and it didn’t kill us.

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the age we’re living in, but I’m easily distracted. I have three screens during the day with which to do my digital work. I have two computers. I have virtual desktops that help me stay organized. Two main email accounts. Instant Messaging. Multiple Blogs to write for. About 50 RSS Feeds that I read regularly. Podcasts. Music.

That’s just the digital daily work environment. Couple that with working in a cubical and all the pop-ins that normally happen, and anyone with as many inputs as I have would be prone to distraction, too. I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t really shut off any input without mulling over the fact that it’s gone. But… I still need to tune things out once in a while. This probably sounds like it’s akin to leaving the TV on as background noise while you work, and to some extent that’s true. There are some tasks that require a greater level of concentration. Writing is up there.

As one of my development projects at work is winding down, I’m starting to pick up the organization’s learning standards revision work that I began back in November (funny how time flies). Unfortunately, unlike my email that I normally skim through, this requires me both to read what I’ve already written and make changes based on some feedback that I received — and now append new writing and some re-organization on the side. I can listen to music as I do this, but all the windows I have open on a regular basis make it very difficult to focus my attention. And, call me nitpick-y, even the various toolbars and formatting in all the different Word Processors and text editors I have available to me distract me as I worry about the presentation of the content rather than focus on the content itself.

A good programmer works on abstracting the “presentation” layer of things from everything else. That way, you can “skin” an application or a piece of content to look however you want it to look. I’m now writing with that in mind thanks to two different text editors for both Mac and PC.

On my PC, I’ve downloaded a very simple text editor called DarkRoom, which is basically all the power of Textpad — only it’s fullscreen text on black (instead of black text on white). There’s no spellcheck. There’s no grammar checking. There’s no formatting of the text. It’s simply the text, much like in the days prior to Windows. It blocks everything else out and allows you to just write and save as a .txt file. You can open it or copy-and-paste it into Word when you’re done and do all the formatting there. The software is free, and stable ‘enough’ to use.

This software was inspired by software for the Mac called WriteRoom, which does the same thing but is a bit more mature (and thus is an actual product you have to buy as shareware). WriteRoom allows you to modify a number of settings, including setting the background color. WriteRoom also has an auto-save function, which is always handy. WriteRoom is a joy to use on my Mac and now after trying both of these text editors, especially after reading so much about them on 43 Folders, I get why people love this way of writing.

So if you need to write AND you need to focus on writing, I highly recommend whichever of these runs on your desktop or laptop.

There’s been some fantastic writing of late in the realm of digital learning, education and training. I don’t know if I know about it more because the tools for sharing via RSS are more ubiquitous or there are just more people writing about it — but the point is that ten years ago, this was a professional field that didn’t even exist as its own discipline (but for the Authorware folks) and now we have hundreds of bloggers building up the calluses in their fingertips as they blog away about this domain, and that’s wonderful for everyone involved.

There are a couple of peers blogging who are fairly regular readers (and when the FFL discussion list is active, they also chime in), so I make it a point to follow what they do. One of those guys is Philip Hutchinson who I think writes very well in all things meta concerning E-Learning. Philip’s most recent post to Pipwerks is his take on choosing authoring tools for E-Learning, and I can’t find a single thing I disagree with in his post.

Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

I agree. Most of the authoring tools I’ve seen port right to Flash. I love Flash. It’s done me and my family well for many years now. But it’s not the most open of formats. It’s also not the most flexible of formats. It’s just about impossible to do anything with the published Flash content that any of the popular E-Learning tools on the market. And if you ever want to talk about reusability, there’s just about no easy-bake oven method available to make published Flash content look like something other than what it was published as unless you know a lot about the underlying code in the compiled file. Sure, the textual content of tools like Articulate is all extracted into XML, and theoretically you could use that XML as a basis to reformat content in a different medium, but again that work is highly prohibitive — as are any of the alternatives that actually work with web standards (at least the ones that might be released in the market today).

Philip writes more…

…not being tied to a particular tool or proprietary format means that practically anyone with general web development experience will be able to make edits to your course or even create new courses using your system. Millions of people around the world work with HTML, and hundreds of thousands work with JavaScript. I’m willing to bet that the number of people familiar with proprietary eLearning development tools is much smaller, probably numbering in the thousands. It’s a niche.

Okay, here’s where we part ways a little bit, I guess. Philip is absolutely correct that the shear number of “web developers” of which “E-Leanring developers” might be a subset in that they mingle in some of the same technologies is about, maybe, a 10,000:1 ratio. I’m not disputing that working with web standards wouldn’t significantly improve the likelihood of making revisions and edits faster and cheaper, let alone the opportunities for re-use.

I’d argue, though, that one of the reasons why authoring tools like Articulate, Captivate, Raptivity, Lectora, FlashForm, Adobe Presenter (we can go on) are so popular is specifically because, as Philip also writes…

…They’re geared towards users with little or no development expertise. Yes, they’re geared towards the PowerPoint crowd.

Couple that fact that learning, education and training budgets are smaller than just about every other department, at least in corporate America — and that’s if budgets for training even exist, and the likelihood of attracting and maintaining (or even contracting) qualified talent to work with tools from scratch make it prohibitive to work with what I call low-level authoring tools like Flash (as a tool) or Dreamweaver (as a tool) or even Textpad to produce standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

The trick is that these people will use a great authoring tool if it’s easy to use, and the use of any authoring tool is likely to be a trap in and of itself, because the designers and the engineers of a tool have their own assumptions about the nuances like class and id names in CSS — it’s still going to be difficult to translate this into reuse. And if you’re not talking about reusability, now that you’re going with CSS and JavaScript, you now have to contend with possibly making sure it presents and functions correctly across browsers, which was one of the biggest strengths for Flash-based platforms from jump.

And we’re still talking about single authors using tools, which works great if you’re a one-person army building E-Learning. But I know on my team, we’re already running into some pretty glaring issues of source portability with tools like Articulate, where we want to collaborate and have multiple people authoring — but have issues of losing our audio or embedded media paths, versioning, etc. If we want to discuss collaborative authoring, none of your big, popular authoring tools really cut the mustard (though I’m curious what Adobe and maybe Articulate has cooking in this regard).

So What’s the Answer?

Well, there is no one right answer at the moment for weening off the PowerPoint-to-Flash model, but I’ve heard about some interesting things from Eduworks. Robby Robson has been heavily involved with standards organizations from before I got into E-Learning and has brought up some interesting ideas in conversations over the last year that make me think they’re thinking about solutions for standards-based content development in the E-Learning realm.

There’s also a nifty open-source project called eXe that amazingly runs on both Mac, Linux and Windows, and purports to publish content as standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I don’t know if I’d say it’s ready for primetime, but it’s promising that there’s an open source tool that runs on all platforms and may get to being as user-friendly as any other given authoring tool.

My point is that Philip is absolutely correct that if we keep using the same authoring tools, we’re going to eventually be limited by design implications inherent in the technical constraints of the tools that we choose to use. The more flexible a tool is, the greater skill is needed to wield it.

But no matter what, to get to making it easier to edit or adapt learning content, we need to get out of published Flash to do that — and, oh by the way, we need to make the experience collaborative to take advantage of efficiencies that can be gained by having multiple contributors to projects and integrating QA into the workflow.

As Philip suggests, moving towards web standards should make all this much easier to do, but it will be the authoring tool, and not the technologies themselves, that will get corporate learning, education and training to jump to it.

This announcement just came off the wire announcing that the venerable simulation classic “SimCity” has now been open-sourced.

While there are some additional terms applied to the GPL used for Micropolis, these are supposedly to protect EA’s trademarks and don’t allow you to call derivative works SimCity or use any EA property.

This is potentially HUGE for the learning, education and training community because for years, simulation games have been banded about in brainstorming meetings around the world and undoubtedly, you’ve heard these words in one of them: like SimCity…

One of the issues that we all run into is the prohibitive cost of getting into gaming. Second Life’s biggest potential is as a common platform to create custom simulations and gaming environments. But Second Life is NOT open source. But creating a derivative Simulation Game from SimCity NOW is… and that means you apply and modify the logic in SimCity to accomodate a range of lateral and relational problem-solving scenarios.

All you need are a couple of people who are handy with C++ and Python, a talented designer and some idea of what you want the rules to be for the environment you want to create. This can turn a game that would have been a prohibitive $500K to produce down to $100K if you’re savvy, all because the engine and logic are already there (and even QA’d to a degree).

I received a Google Alert this morning from Al Moser’s blog where he basically states it’s time to blast our thoughts of reusability, in terms of reusing content objects into other contexts, and instead focus on reuse of content across learning environments. I urge you to read the original post, but let me riff on Mr. Moser’s thought:

The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled) content from one LMS to another; not from one COURSE to another, or from one authoring tool to another. Right now they are caught between trying to ensure that a course will work well on any LMS (therefore, it pretty much has to be static) and the Web 2.0 concepts of content aggregation in real time from multiple sources (thereby breaking LMS-independence)

I must admit I’m a little torn on the subject, because I don’t think that reusability of content into different contexts is impossible. I think it’s very difficult to pull off without the use of some aids in the form of applications, tools, search technologies and rigid presentation standards, admittedly none of which are used together today. But I can picture it. Others pictured it. Claude Ostyn and Phillip Dodds even pictured it. If you can see it, I’m tempted to believe you can build it when it comes to digital technology.

However, in stating this which I think is in direct opposition to Mr. Moser’s thought, I definitely agree that getting the E-Learning community over the hump of reusability is important, and this notion of redefining reusability by coupling it with “interoperability” isn’t a fragmentary notion. At the big SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, one of the ideas batted around for what to do next was to consider which “ilities” were really relevant.

I agree that it’s near impossible to reuse content in different contexts where we’re at now. We still can barely get tools we use all the time to work all the time. I mean, jeez… I defined Articulate and Quizmaker as a standard for my organization. And guess what? If you have special characters in your Quizmaker assessment, it can break your suspend data on closing the content, and thus it makes it look to the LMS like you didn’t complete content, even though you might have. So you work though that one issue and maybe you inserted a special character into the title of your content — which ends up as an attribute in your Metadata and in your Manifest — and that breaks your content. You fix that, but decide to put in multiple Quizmaker assessments into an Articulate Presentation, but you don’t want to use any of the assessments as a determining factor towards completion — which after much testing you find out will never leave a student’s enrollments because of some weird issue with how Quizmaker assessments are leveraged in Articulate Presenter.

I don’t mean to go off on a rant on issues Articulate has in Vendor X’s LMS. But I want to highlight the issues I see in just getting content from the same authoring tool, with the same code base, working in one LMS in a consistent manner with other pieces of content authored in the same tools and deployed to the same environment with the exact same code base.

See, my point is that as difficult as my scenario above is — I’m not trying to mix my content in with content possibly produced by somebody else — possibly not even built with Articulate. Even using certified SCORM products isn’t good enough. Articulate IS certified. Vendor X IS certified. But that doesn’t mean they work together out of the box.

So maybe for slightly different reasons, I agree with Al Moser about reusability. Because, from my vantage point, we can’t even talk about reusability — even at a technical level, until we can address interoperability. And frankly, we can’t talk about interoperability until we finally settle on compatibility.

Because at the end of the day, you just want the content you buy or build to work in the system you support. And if you’re building the content, this should be a science, not an art.

I’m on the Metra on my way home — yet another very late night of work.

Two posts back, I wrote about things crashing in Captivate 2 with larger simulations. While I’m sure this is not a solid rule, both a co-worker and I have now had four different simulations crash at 54 screens (I had three different simulations captured and worked on two different computers, my co-worker had one). 53 was just fine, and it honestly didn’t matter which slide I deleted — at 54 or more, the files all crashed Captivate 2.

Another weird thing for me, it didn’t even save iterative saves that I initiated after I opened the file. Three different files would crash and even though I did a Control-S with just about every change I did, when Captivate 2 would crash, I’d open up the file and none of the changes that happened prior to the crash were there.

Weird.

Good news, though, is that Captivate 3 seems to be immune to this weirdness, and it was installed AFTER I was starting to have these crashing issues in Captivate 2.

Anyone else ever deal with something like this?

So a few posts back, I talked about the Games, Gadgets and Gizmos book by Karl Kapp and it discussed the different types of gamers there are. I was a bit worried that my habits reflected a younger gamer, though my actual age puts me in a much more basic category of gamer.

A small online game, (if you can call it an actual game) that’s put out by Dr. Kapp will give you a little diagnostic on letting you know what kind of gamer you are.

It turns out that I’m in the Gamer 3.0 category, which is just fine with me. According to my results:

Individuals that fall into the “Gamer 3.0” category are typically born between 1981 and 1990. These individuals grew up playing games such as Zelda, Tomb Raider, and Super Mario 64.

This seems to counter what the book says, though. Gamer 3.0 in the book suggests that I’d be born in between 1990-2000, with gaming defined by Myst, Zelda, Manic Mansion, Tomb Raider, Diablo, EverQuest.

So maybe I’m in the middle? Gamer 2.5?

Well, I lost about three hours of work as Captivate 2 crashed on me (repeatedly) on a larger branching simulation I’m developing. This prompted me back to my personal Macbook Pro to work on my day-job project in Captivate 3.

Captivate 3 seems to be a bit better with memory management as an application and it “feels” more stable. I don’t know if it actually is or not, but I haven’t crashed yet, and I’m running via Parallels instead of native on my desktop. So that’s good for starters, right?

Turns out, importing Powerpoint has a minor, albeit interesting difference between Captivate 2 and 3, and that’s in how Captivate deals with any custom animation on a given PowerPoint slide. In Captivate 2, it ignores the animation so if you have a bunch of images stacked on top of each other with animations that make them appear and move (I don’t do it, but lot’s of other people do) — well, they’re just stuck there in a big glob when you import such a slide in Captivate 2. Not so with Captivate 3 — it actually respects your animations and your timing.

Now, the next question for me was working with Articulate. If you import audio via Articulate and then time animations to it using Articulate’s set of tools — and then import said slide into Captivate 3, Captivate 3 will ignore all custom timings you put in and it doesn’t import the audio.

I don’t know how much use people might have for this, but I often will create “Engage” type of activities with Captivate, importing slides from Powerpoint so that my Articulate projects have a unified User Interface — so the thought of being able to synchronize audio with animations in Articulate, to export to Captivate 2 to create tabbed interactions has been appealing.

But there are always slower, alternative ways of doing the same thing.