Flash For Learning

At work we’re upgrading from an older, sunset-ed version of our LMS to the latest service pack of the more recent version. We’ve been going through the upgrade for Vendor X for the past eight weeks, and up until last Thursday it was like a dream — nary a glitch to be found. We started the move on our Production server to make the switch last Thursday night, and that is when our tune took a sour note.

We’ve been experiencing a host of content issues — not SCORM communication issues, mind you. Content. Like, the first time you launch a course, everything works just right. If you close a course and it bookmarks your progress, logging back in (depending on the content) you get the interface, but you don’t get the actual content. In some courses, this breaks the content outright and there’s no way of getting it back.

At first, we were (I was) thinking it was some weird kind of security issue where it was treating Flash content recently run as a security risk and locking it out on subsequent sessions — but this was quickly dispelled, since multiple users could log in after the initial blockage and see all the content the first time they would experience it in their own login. Then, we thought that the scope of it was contained inside our firewall, so we started to divert traffic to our external content server — but that, too, started showing the same issues. So while it’s not ruled out as a factor, our network environment isn’t the only factor involved.

Currently we have a theory that there’s a security setting that’s scrubbing data sent to the LMS by content, escaping characters and such. And it’s doing that on content that is, on its own, escaping characters (like what Articulate does). And that may be underneath whatever Tomcat or IIS is doing to filter data for malicious strings. So, perhaps with all this filtering of the data, something breaks down when the feed comes back. We can trace the string coming back on consecutive data transactions with SCORM content and that’s definitely going on — pipes (|) are being sent the first time. Then, when they’re coming back, they’re URL-encoded. Then it looks like the URL encoding is changing the Ampersand (&) into something else… so it’s being URL-encoded in one place and then that URL encoding is being treated as a straight-up string by something else.

Which for you non-technical types — is un-good.

Everyone is working very diligently to figure this out, but I predict quite a few help desk calls today (I don’t get them, but I know they come). And with members of the team having invested so much time and effort, it’s a drag to see the snags come in so late in process.

I’m pretty confident that everything will be fixed — it’s only a matter of time, as are all things digital. But it’s a drag, and that is no doubt. It’s not a matter of finger-pointing — it’s not Vendor X’s slip-up or anyone’s negligence — this is just a point of pain that comes with enterprise software, especially since enterprise software generally has to be configured specially for an enterprise’s unique needs.

I know I’m not the first (nor will I be the last) to witness it, but I feel horrible for other members of the team who have put in so much time — only to find out they’re going to put in a lot more time

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.

With a lousy left hand, I’ve been forced to innovate (or just accept the future) and use the toys available to me on my MacBook Pro — I took my outline, whittled it down to slides in Apple Keynote, exported them as PNG files and imported them into GarageBand to put together this first podcast, covering at a (hopefully coherent) high level what I pulled from the three days I attended the IMS Quarterly meeting, kicking off an official convergence between SCORM and IMS.

Click here to download or view the podcast yourself.

I’m beginning to love the challenges of this new job.� I hope the love affair lasts.

There’s a couple of things I’m digging about the new job.� One is that the more strategic role I have in the� new job’s� Learning Center provides me with the opportunity to blog professionally again.� When I’m thinking through some of the issues I’m working through (content life cycle strategy, repository management, rapid learning development, aligning learning objectives to business performance goals, etc), it helps a lot to have a place to journal.� Hopefully, my sharing helps other learning, training and performance peers (and peeps, yo) that are in the same spot as me, or even further down the long tail.

So yesterday I was assigned as the “designer” on two courses currently in the last throes of review.� What that means in this scenario is that I have to review the content as both an ISD and as a technical reviewer, making sure that the content works as intended.� We don’t have a process defined for this kind of review.� We don’t have specific criteria defined to base a review on.� We don’t have a format in which feedback from such a review should be in.� We don’t have post-review actions defined.� It’s not like this team has never reviewed courses for delivery before.� It’s just not a clean and consistent (or necessarily understood) methodology for producing consistent quality training.

Guess who’s job it is to set the process in place and get the stakeholders in such a process to take ownership of it? :)� I love it.� It’s a good challenge.� It’s a good place to see impact, both positive and negative, of what I’m bringing to the table.� I think it will be pretty validating (or a really powerful gut-check, but let’s be optimistic).

Admittedly, I was never interested much in process, or quality measures and things like that.� But I never understood the impact of QA like I do right now.� So, I’m going to start with what I know and rely on the better practices I saw at CTC (and specifically ADL, which has probably the strongest quality process I’ve ever seen).� The first thing I can do with minimal buy-in necessary is on the tech side.� I need to define a consistent methodology for tracking bugs and defects in these projects that can be shared, archived and searched quickly and easily.� So I’m going to evaluate BugZilla on my own this weekend, and if anyone has ideas on other tools that can be pretty much off-the-shelf, please comment on this post.� I can certainly build my own php/mysql bug tracking solution that will be adequate enough, but it’d sure save me some time if I didn’t have to build it.

Basically, what I need is to be able to track each page/screen of a content object, as well as global issues relating to the content object as a whole.� The range of issues can be technical (e.g. content not initializing the SCORM API) to grammatical issues to instructional (e.g. the branching of a given scenario needs to be redefined).� I also need to be able to organize people either around a tool, or customize the tool use around the QA team’s roles.

A must is a way to integrate into content so that each page can launch a contextually relevant feedback form, so any reviewer can enter and view tickets related to the current screen.