Flash For Learning

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.

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.

A thought just occurred to me, and I hope it spurs some discussion from the Flash coders that are among us.

So OpenDocument Format is an approved ISO standard for Office-type documents, including spreadsheets. In fact, ISO is in the process of moving the standard forward to version 1.2, where it’s expected that tables will be supported in the presentations created in ODF.

Lots of us who build custom courses are using our own XML Schema to fill-in the content of Flash-based online courses. But… what if a bunch of us used the same format for our XML? A little over a year ago, some of us got together via the os-flash.org project for “Edumatic” and after a couple of very nice “how do you do?” emails, it plain died. I was reminded of its existence yesterday when I got my automated notice about my subscription to the newsgroup in my email.

But back then, we were talking about how do we even write the XML format so it’s the same. Well… we have an open standard that’s not only approved and maintained internationally… but it’s freaking FREE. So here’s my thinking:

There’s no shortage of tools that can create an ODF presentation (OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice on the Mac are but a few). But Google is supporting ODF, also with their online GoogleDocs application. So the authoring tools are there. We just need a common way to support them.

That’s where some Flash scripting and graphic/multimedia design moxy comes in. Imagine a workflow where anyone can author the learning content anywhere on free-to-use tools that are also easy to use (in other words, not much change management needed to do it). Then with a little scripting savvy, a developer simply takes the ODF export of the presentation, uses it to populate a course and makes the tweaks required (goal state: none) to put it into an LMS.

Now you have an incredibly fast way to take the abundance of content in your organization and put it into a digestible format for online learning in current systems.

So if you’ve read this far, the next question is… who’s interested? Because this is definitely not a one-man job.

I’m at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting and the first exciting thing I’ve heard so far has come from Valerie Smothers with MedBiquitous, talking about Virtual Patients — a model for reusable case studies to be exchanged for medical simulations around the world. Each Virtual Patient has metadata describing their patient data, media resoures, model for data availability, activities and the player that’s needed to play the simulation — that connects to the user interface, the learner profile and tracking.

And they are working with universities in Sweden (I think — maybe Finland) and the US on having working prototypes — and they work in SCORM-based Learning Management Systems.

After about a full day’s worth of talking about cleaning SCORM’s past, we finally get a taste for the future.

I’m currently attending an IMS meeting that’s at the Oracle hq in Redwood Shores, CA (near San Fran). I’m here because I’m considering joining IMS in addition to joining the SCORM Technical Working Group (well, I’m going to joing the TWG for sure — I’m investigating IMS).

I sat in on the panel working on a charter for the next version of Tool Interoperability — offering a common set of tools available to launch from content within a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE, the new buzzword for LMS).

This chicken-scratch might be hard to decipher, so I’ll follow this up with a podcast. Due to some unfortunately placed fractured bones in my left hand, I can’t type nearly as much as it might take to put this all into context that makes sense for your smarter-than-average E-learning developer/designer.

Monday, February 5 - Tool Interoperability

• Introductions
  • Oracle 10g, Siebel, PeopleSoft | Oracle, The World’s Largest Enterprise Software Company
  • Blackboard » Educate. Innovate. Everywhere.
  • CETIS
  • ANGEL Learning
  • Microsoft
  • Sakai
  • ADL
  • Desire 2 Learn
  • Grainger
• Review Charter and current work status
  • Goal: get the charter into an actionable document by noon tomorrow.
• Review of use cases
• Use-cases for types of tools that could be made available via a VLE

To investigate:

• shibboleth.internet2.edu
• SAML - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Common Cartridge
• QTI Assessments
• Enterprise Services outcome service
• Boddington
• Deposit API
• CMI Data Model

Discussion of a registry hosted by iMS for a listing of tools and descriptor files that would be accessible via a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment).

• Web Meeting tools
  • Breeze, WebEx, etc.
• Synchronous collaboration tools
  • Blog, Wiki, Forums
• Tools using content embedded in a Common Cartridge
  • Sakai Video Report: IMS Common Cartridge Demonstration at Alt-I-Lab 2006
  • PR:IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Breakthrough Education Industry Standard for Digital Learning Content
• QTI Assessment Tool
  • QuestionMark, as an example
• Instructor grading tool
  • Gradebook
• Content Authoring tools publishing content to the VLE
• Adaptive Learning Tool accesses SCORM/CMI data model at the VLE
  • content delivered via the VLE that is not a scorm package, but wants to be tracked via the cmi data model
  • acts as a relay
• Learner launching TI Tool within VLE using 3rd party authentication
  • read: Shibboleth, HarvestRoad, Boddington
  • Federated authentication
  • meaning, you’re authorized in one context and as you extend your access beyond the realm of your own domain, your authentication persists across domains/apps that have agreed to accept such authentication protocol.
• Identity Management Tool controlling release of user attributes
• Administrative deployment of proxy tool through Common Cartridge
• Configuration of tool presentation
• Publisher assessment use case
• Rich media (podcasting) integration tool(s)
• Review of Requirements from Tool Interoperability 1.0
• Tool Catalog
  • issue of rights management
  • how to configure/control/limit access to a tool.
  • will be tabled after debate lasting over an hour
• Tool Presentation
  • Will enable a common presentation solution for tool that benefit from adopting the look and feel of the hosting VLE
• Web Services/Application Profiles
• Extend logical component interaction model
  • allow the outcome message to occur at an unspecified future time
  • allow web service communication between requests and outcome responses