Flash For Learning

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?

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.

Currently playing in iTunes: Howl (Extended Version) by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Southland Tales soundtrack

I upgraded to Captivate 3 personally today to gear up to take on some contract work, and I’m exploring a couple of things. Months ago, when Captivate 3 was released, I downloaded the demo and thought it was overall a little cleaner and snappier, but I didn’t notice a whole lot that really made me pluck down the $300 for the upgrade.

However, looking around now, even the interface improvements by themselves in the Branching section make it a viable way to work in the tool. More than just a pretty layout of how the branching should work in your content, now you can actually edit button and navigation actions from this interface, which is much better than having to constantly find where you’re supposed to be in the regular Edit area. This alone helps me in wanting to work with Captivate more now, because in version 2 (and in regular ol’ RoboDemo), this was damn near impossible to work with to do anything but a linear piece of content.

Another feature that’s been introduced in Captivate 3 is the ability to develop question pooling. Now Quizmaker offers this already in their assessments so that learners don’t necessarily have the same assessment as the person next to them. Captivate 3 takes this a step further by allowing you to have Question Slides interjected at different places in your content and the questions presented to the learner can pull from a common pool — this means that if you want a small interaction slide for the learner every three pages or so, you can put in such a slide and the experience will be a little different each time a learner encounters the same spot in the content, because the questions will be pooled (randomized) instead of being a fixed question. Don’t exactly know how instructionally useful this will be, but I like it from a development perspective.

I haven’t had to do a lot with porting out our content in Captivate to other languages, but now that the textual content in Captivate 3 is in XML, this will make internationalization of this content a possibility we can use when we need to. I’ve done this a bit with Articulate and it was easy as pie to translate, plug and play. Now that I can do the same thing with simulation content may/may not be very useful.

Since I have some contracting work coming up that calls for Captivate 3, I’ll be sure to share any learnings and frustrations along the way.

This is going to be a major topic of discussion for the next several weeks, so hopefully here, among other places, we’ll have some solid answers to questions on how to best work with Flash Player 8 and your SCORM-conformant projects.

Josh wrote on the ADL Forums:

>My concern about the new security model is more based on the fact that I cannot test my SCORM courses for compliancy using the SCORM conformance test suite. I have a Flash course that communicates to the API wrapper using the Flash/Javascript Integration Kit. The Test Suite requires that it test a course that is running on the local file system, which is now restricted by Macromedia from making Javascript calls from Flash. > >When my course is running on a server, I can make all the JS to Flash calls I need, but if the course is running from the file system, I can’t make any if I use the Flash 8 plugin. So, I’m stuck in a cyclical bind where my courses work from a server, but I can’t test them in the Test Suite to verify that they are conformant. > >Does anybody know of a workaround for this?

My short answer is to downgrade the Flash Player to 7.0.19 to test your Flash 7 and below content, but that doesn’t necessarily undo the problems that a learner might have with the Flash Player 8 installed and the potential for your content to break.

Please comment here or in the ADL Forums to discuss this further…

flash, security, scorm, flash player, macromedia, e-learning, development, javascript

There appears to be a leading book on Captivate for anyone who’s new or a little uncertain of what all you can do with the program. The book is called Essentials of Macromedia Captivate: Skills and Drills Workbook (Spiral-bound), and it’s available for $35 on Amazon. I halfway trust Amazon reviews, and this book is very well reviewed.

captivate

Tom King put out some pretty helpful tips to help you shrink down Captivate files. This came up in both my sessions at MAX 2005, so it bears the reprint here, especially since Tom was citing work by Dave Mozealous:

• Troubleshooting movie file size
• Recording Tricks and Tips

Tom also suggests that when conditions warrant you can take these extra steps:

• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and deselect 508 and Include Breeze metadata (if not publishing to Breeze).
• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select ‘Advanced Movie Compression’.
• Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select ‘Compress compiled SWF file’.
• Select Movie>Preferences>Start and End and deselect the option for a loading screen, this should make the svelte SWF play ASAP.

Tom also notes that the most likely culprit for file bloat is audio. So to reiterate what Tom spells out on his blog, if you’re deploying for the web, go for the smallest/lowest practical audio rate you can get away with.

captivate

Alan and I wanted to share our general thanks to Macromedia, as well as everyone who came to our sessions on SCORM, Flash and Captivate — and a huge thanks to the other developers and designers who contributed some excellent dialogue to our sessions, as well as those who gave some excellent presentations that we were fortunate enough to attend.

Between watching my White Sox clinch the World Series berth on Sunday, the great discussions with Director folks, putting names to faces on the Open Source Flash mailing list and getting to talk shop with so many of you in the E-learning sector who are succeeding and struggling in similar ways to what we go through in our daily trade — this was an excellent experience for us and it’s all due to you.

MAX 2005, flash, e-learning, captivate, scorm

It may not be clear on how to contact me if you’ve attended MAX 2005 (or even if you haven’t).

Email me at aaron.silvers [at] gmail [dot] com

Obviously, this is slightly obfuscated so that I don’t get a ton of automated spam. You can also register for this site and include your e-mail address if you’d like me to contact you directly, either for answers on SCORM and your specific needs, or any consulting you need in that space if you need more in-depth help.

Thanks to the fine folks at Macromedia, my outline for MAX 2005 was approved (and I’m currently half-way to completing the first draft of the presentation).

• Introduction
• Biography
• What does SCORM mean to a content developer?
  • The SCORM 2004 library
  • ADL’s goals for SCORM (the “-iliities”)
  • View the information flow
  • Data Model – allows tracking of the learner
  • API Instance – allows interoperable communication between content and the Learning Management System (LMS)
• Making your content sharable and communicative
  • Minimum requirements to create a SCO
  • Find the LMS’s API
  • Initialize communication
  • Terminate communication
  • Interactivity and tracking are optional (from a SCORM perspective)
  • Packaging for distribution
  • Flash – DIY
  • Captivate – “It’s in there.”
• What Captivate does for you…
  • Easy Bake E-Learning Content
  • How to package
  • Remember: Captivate requires at least one interaction
  • What’s an interaction?
  • Let’s make one.
  • Exporting for an LMS
• What Flash can do for you
  • Roll your own E-Learning content
  • The Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit
  • Exposing the SCORM API to your Flash content
  • Packaging your sharable content for Learning Management Systems
  • The Manifest
  • 3rd Party Tools you can use
  • What can you do with Flash if you develop this way?
  • Inter-content navigation control
  • Sending user information to the LMS
  • Presenting information from the LMS
  • All your other JavaScript goodness
• Testing any content for SCORM-conformance
  • Debugging? SCORM 2004 Sample Run-Time Environment
  • Validating? SCORM 2004 Conformance Test Suite
• Questions?
• Downloads
• Thank You

It’s been confirmed that I will be presenting at this year’s MAX 2005 conference, hosted by Macromedia. Here’s the info I can confirm right now (I’m very psyched).

From Macromedia:

Title: Robust SCORM-Compliant eLearning Content with Flash and Captivate

This session will include tricks to synchronizing communication with JavaScript from Flash, building familiarity with the SCORM Run-Time data model and testing content with the ADL SCORM 2004 Test Suite. We will also address best practices when creating interactions in a Captivate movie (and what they mean with an LMS), and debugging help.

More news coming as to what the plans are, but I promise you that my partner Alan and I are going to make developing SCORM-conformant content with plain ol’ Flash WAY easier than it’s ever been — you might even think it to be (dare I say it)… easy.