Flash For Learning

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.

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.

So, I bet you thought I was going dark again since it’s been almost a month without a post.

Actually, there’s been some moderate activity on the Flash For Learning grouplist. Not a ton of activity, but while there are many Flash developers and designers doing E-Learning, there’s probably not too many who are vocal. In the first month since the list was launched, we’ve got about 25 subscribers and maybe six people who post so far. Everyone’s in the same boat, realizing that there isn’t much out in the wild web on gearing Flash and related products for E-Learning. One of the members of the group is working on a full-on ActionScript class to handle the API communicaiton with SCORM. I’ve been hard at work doing something pressing that I’ll open up when I have it working.

Remember a few months back when I wrote about QA? I got a QA entry linking to a database working right out of Articulate Presenter as a tool in the upper right-hand corner. Honestly, it’s just a link to a URL, so it could be linked to anything, but the point is I have it working out of Articulate, using the LMS to provide your name when you enter a bug and Articulate to auto-fill the slide number you’re on, so all you have to do is tag what the problem is with keywords and then write a detailed description of the problem, and submit. The last week or two, I’ve been working on the management system to handle all that QA data, and I’m using it as an excuse to learn Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2.0 (currently in 1.9 beta 2). It’s fast, it’s effective, it’s efficient, it’s clean and neat — I’m surprised at how easy the combination of Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2 are to develop with. If I had tools like these when I was knocking out my first e-learning apps in 2001… well probably nothing would be different, but it sure would’ve been easier.

I’m currently gathering requirements to produce a learning game for my company. I won’t be developing it myself as the scope is just way too large for one guy to tackle. Right now we’re buying some serious games and we’re going to play and evaluate them at the same time we build the momentum from the businesses that will be served by this learning game for championing the project and get stakeholders identified and on-board. If anyone has experiences they’d like to share on the learning gaming front, I’d love to talk to you, as it’s completely foreign to me which makes it interesting to sell the idea of it to more conservative corporate types.

So this post isn’t really saying much except I’m alive, I’m active and communicating and there’s some pretty cool stuff going on that I’ll post here and on the Flash for Learning group.

Well, this beats the hell out of my reverse-engineering solution.

Last year when I picked up Articulate Presenter, we were awfully annoyed that even though we bought the mongo-license that included the SDK for Articulate AND paid the extra $500 to remove the “Powered by Articulate” logo on the bottom left of the screen, I still had that logo in there and there was no easy way to get rid of it.

A couple hours with SoThink did the trick and I was able to identify the exact movieclip to unload by importing a flash object into the first slide (and creating a custom background for Articulate slides in a vector format, but that’s another story).

But I was very happy to find after surfing around their support area that Articulate actually supports an official patch now to remove that “Powered by Articulate” logo, allowing you to create content that’s free and clear of their branding.

http://www.articulate.com/support/kb/000837.php

Hope this helps someone.

Ever need to launch several files out of one slide as a pop-up window in Articulate Presenter? I have that need and so do a few of the Instructional Designers I work with. So after some research and review, I’ve modified the player.html file in C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\players 5.0\core and I can now publish content with abandon with custom flash pieces that can launch nice, clean pop-up windows.

When creating your Flash content, you’ll call a popup like this:

getURL( "javascript:popUpWindow('your_file.html',left,top,width,height);" );

where…

• left = a number indicating how many pixels off the left edge of the screen you want the popup to be placed (use 0 for the edge)
• top = a number indicating how many pixels off the top edge of the screen you want the popup to be placed (use 0 for the edge)
• width = a number indicating how wide you want the popup
• height = a number indicating how tall you want the popup.

You can download the modified player.html file here.

A helpful tip, courtesy of my man, Ted.

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.