Flash For Learning

Last Friday, I submitted two white papers forged with considerable ideas and suggestions from professional colleagues (Tom King), fellow professionals (Ethan Estes and Steve Flowers), and new colleagues from around the world (Martin Ebner).

Like Philip Hutchinson, I began the efforts with a serious attempt to produce a formal and very “serious” (read: academic) body of work. I additionally tried to take an informal, yet collaborative approach to writing the papers through the use of Google Docs. Like Philip, even though I turned in my papers on time, I don’t know that I got it all written exactly as I want to express my thoughts. Without ample review of the papers prior to their submission, I must accept that they’re conversation starters (hopefully), and that the discussion that should follow will take the initial ideas proposed and give them life and definition.

My papers are here:

• SCORM 2.0 Content Authoring Standards & Services
• Engagement, Collaboration and Community in SCORM 2.0

I would ask (beg) regular readers and other interested parties to read and discuss the papers on the LETSI pages. But if these papers don’t strike your fancy — there are plenty more to poke your sticks at. At the time of my writing this blog post, there are 70 papers submitted for review, and more are coming in as I write. To say the call for white papers is a success is underscored by the overwhelming (and seemingly unmanageable) response.

Ironically (or just coincidentally depending on whether you’re a fan of Alannis Morrisette or not), the transparent and completely open formation of what is to become SCORM 2.0 is happening at the same time as we learn about the dissolution of the ECMAScript group and the CSS-WG in the W3C. Plenty of good discussions of what went down here, here, here and here.

It’s pretty crazy to me that all the reasons being cited as to why these two groups fell apart all boil down to similar root causes:

1. Trying to take on too much by doing innovation by committee instead of codifying exemplars of best practice.
2. Working behind closed doors.
3. Losing the “vision.”

LETSI is starting off well. Everything is out in the open. You don’t need a login to read any of the goings on — it’s all there for the public interwebs to see. You can read the white papers. You can sign up on the site and add commentary and contribute your thoughts into the fold. You can blog about your opinions and just by mentioning SCORM or LETSI, someone is bound to pick it up with Google Alerts, and even in passing, your constructive feedback is going to get rolled in. Many of us are on Twitter (I’m @mrch0mp3rs). And look at the response so far: 75 white papers submitted for review. I don’t know how many submissions were expected — I figured ~30 would be a success, so the number we have (and more are coming in daily) is just a resounding signal of the interest and the resounding success of transparency.

At least, that’s how I see it.

Managing that level of response is proving to be challenging. The rewards, however, are so worthwhile. Each member of the Program Committee has a “Bird Dog” — which means we have a paper we’re going to actively promote and raise awareness to. I have ten (they’re small ones — like a page each). That also means ten times the discussion (suckas!!!)

We’re going to swipe at these white papers by tagging each of our bird dogs to help us wrangle them into the requirements that will ultimately come together at the SCORM 2.0 Workshop in October (see the LETSI site for details — I’ll be there). The first stab we’re going to take is tagging a paper as proposing a SCORM “evolution” or “revolution.” It may seem simplistic, but we have to get a handle on the wide scope of ideas by starting to categorize them.

• Evolution - SCORM looks like relatively the same animal as before. It has the about the same scope and it solves very similar problems, but perhaps in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Revolution - SCORM is a new beast entirely. It tackles new problems, increases the scope or completely changes the conceptual model.

The papers I’m particularly fielding are all by Yannck Warnier. I would encourage you to read them and discuss them (topics and links below):

Avoid SCORM Profiles

Cross Domain

Cross Platform Test Suite

Database Structure

Documentation License

Interactions Objectives Example

LMS SCORM Library

Not Exportable Type

Recommend SCORM API

Sequencing Examples

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, letsi, standards, css 3, ecmascript 4, w3c, white papers, transparency

Several weeks ago, a call for white papers was announced to provide the broadest possible input into shaping SCORM 2.0.

We have this framework that most E-Learning content and Learning Management Systems use as a basis for their data tracking, communication and delivery — it’s called SCORM. You may not know how SCORM works, but if you’re involved in any way with E-Learning, you must know that its very existence affects you; specifically in how it sets the parameters for the learning experience you can provide in Learning Management Systems and Learning Environments (like Moodle or Blackboard) that support the framework.

10 years ago, it was a sketch on a chalkboard (literally). Today it permeates every way in which organizations of all kinds approach distributed learning and its technologies.

And we’re going to do it again with SCORM 2.0. We’re willing to start from scratch and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.

Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater discussion about what people feel is wrong with E-Learning. What the community is missing are the solutions… how do we fix it? How do we transform the field into something better/appropriate/right/good?

This is the opportunity I present to you. SCORM affects you as a purveyor of E-Learning, whether you create it, manage it, believe in it or loathe it. There is a real honest-to-goodness effort to bring in voices from outside the mainstream of standards development and produce an open (read: source) model for how learning takes place.

I am chairing a Program Area for LETSI, which means I’ll be helping to field, promote and review ideas presented about Interaction, Collaboration and Community.

I ask you with the whole of my heart: if you have a gripe about E-Learning, write it down and send it on — that is the basis of a White Paper for our purposes. This is not the academic or government world “white paper” — you don’t even need to propose the solution — just help us define the particular problem you want solved.

If you have a solution (but can’t figure out the problem exactly) — at least capture your pondering about what scenarios your idea could address. Direct me to your blog post — that works, too.

Your voice NEEDS to be heard. I/we at LETSI need to hear it.

Please consider the following…

• State the business, learning, or technology problem you want to address.
• Identify an existing or new service, specification, model or standard that should be incorporated into SCORM 2.0 to solve your problem.
• Explain how the solution could be implemented and tested by early 2009.

There are no constraints on format. We’re calling this kind of briefing a “white paper” — but if you want to produce a video or audio podcast to get this information to us — hey, that’s awesome.

Please send your white paper to scorm2@letsi.org — and if you’d rather send it directly to me, I’ll be happy to handle it from there.

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, scorm, white paper, standards, letsi, interaction, collaboration, community

Summary: If you want the all open source (for reals) SCORM 2.0 to address something in particular, get it in a white paper to LETSI by August 15.

LETSI, Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability, the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology.

Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28th, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA.

The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI’s goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology.

Open standards reduce life cycle costs and risks, and promote innovation. SCORM allows content developed in one system to be shared and fully functional within any other SCORM-conformant system. SCORM has been successfully used to develop sharable content in self-paced military training; automobile sales force training; healthcare professional re-certification; K-12 after-school tutoring in South Korea; and many other types of e-learning applications. Over the last decade, SCORM has become the de facto international software standard for learning systems interoperability.

SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM.

“Given the demands for harmonization across international technical learning standards, Core SCORM will be based on unencumbered open standards to maximize market growth and global adoption and implementation.” — Paul Jesukiewicz, Deputy Director, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been the advocate and steward of the first ten years of SCORM’s development, will continue to support the SCORM community and will maintain the current version, SCORM 2004, 3rd Edition. LETSI was formed by the ADL and eleven other organizations to provide an international, balanced, open forum for SCORM development and to harmonize activity across the diverse communities that are investing in learning technology: public education, higher education, for-profit education, military training, professional development/certification, corporate training, and on-the-job performance support.

To accommodate these diverse market needs, SCORM 2.0 will have two components:

1. A general reference model, Core SCORM, based on widely adopted, accredited learning technology standards that support basic interoperability.
2. Additional components that support broadly applicable LET functionality and instructional capabilities based on specifications that are not yet standards.

SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.

In mid-October, LETSI will host a 3-day SCORM 2.0 Workshop where participants will discuss alternative future learning technology solutions. The results will be incorporated in the next release of SCORM, which LETSI will announce at year’s end. It is expected that new products that are SCORM 2.0 conformant will begin to appear in late 2009.

LETSI is sponsored by a dozen organizations with commitments to SCORM and to the development of open learning technology standards. LETSI is organized as a program under the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. For more information about LETSI, please visit: http://www.letsi.org.

LETSI’s White Paper Solicitation is available here.

For more information about the white paper solicitation and the SCORM 2.0 Workshop, visit: http://www.letsi.org/SCORM2/

Anyone hear about Adobe’s Open Screen Project? Well, good news if this is the first you’re hearing about it:

Basically, what’s happened is that Adobe wants Flash on as many screens and devices as possible. To do that, they’re pretty much COMPLETELY OPENING UP THE PLATFORM. What does “completely opening up the platform” actually mean?

• Removing restrictions on the use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Removing license fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and AMF protocol for robust data services

So what does this have to do with learning? I think it’s going to have a huge impact on creating all sorts of learning applications (content engines and assessment tools) that can play on lots of different devices. I think when you start rolling integrated content tools into your Learning Management Systems (if you really need to track the experience), the ability to throw in Flash Remoting via AMF becomes a VERY easy way to just track using methods that Flash developers know how to do — without the encumberance of necessary web services or JavaScript or whatever else. Adding to that — most organizations embrace Flash because it deploys the same regardless of browser… now imagine a world a few years from now where Flash deploys the same regardless of mobile device.

I’m glad I plunked down the cash for CS3….

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.

On the topic of Common Cartridge, I’m psyched to see that this little blog is actually a reference.

Here’s to hoping I’m right

I recognize for many of you, SCORM 2004 Sequencing and Navigation is impossible. My guess is that for most of you, it’s a jumbled problem that combines the complexities in understanding how to create a manifest that correctly interprets the intent of your instructional flow — and the problem of how an LMS actually interprets your sequencing instructions.

I’m pretty lucky to be able to narrow down the problem, because I spent many long days and nights side-by-side with Angelo at ADL, who’s the Godfather of Sequencing and Navigation (though I’m sure he’s loathe to go down in Wikipedia history for that effort in lieu of his Level 70 Shaman in WoW). In other words, my problem isn’t generally writing an effective manifest with Sequencing in it. All I want to do for my company right now is create a three-item tree for Pretest, Content and Posttest.

My problem is our LMS. I won’t name it, but it rhymes with “BaBa.” It’s a certified product that we’re upgrading to. It’s certified to SCORM 2004, 2nd Edition. I import content from ADL to run in its content administration. I can see from the debugging window that its handling the data model well (enough). But in between it redrawing the Table of Contents every time I navigate from one SCO to another and (what I think is happening with) the interpretation of what the rule is on the active node in the activity tree — I’m not being presented with any content as a result of passing or failing an objective. It’s recording the SCO itself as being passed or failed in the resulting transcript. But it’s not flowing on.

And that sucks. Bad. It makes me miserable. I have felt and feel for people dealing with these issues in our armed services and in all branches of government, where the decision is made to go with Vendor X for an LMS but the person who has to make the content work in the LMS has no say in the selection.

We talked at great length about this at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting last month. It will be discussed even more. There was talk at the time about the various vendors actually getting together with each other and figuring out how to share the interpretation of what a manifest is instructing a system to do. If you care about this… which is key to “interoperability” that many people are looking for… make it known to whoever your LMS Vendor is via their customer service or sales contacts with you and yours… and let them know that the next time you renew or upgrade, a factor in the decision to spend money with them is going to be how well they’re playing with others.

They won’t come to the same table by themselves, but they will if it means holding onto and growing the investment in YOU as a paying customer.

That’s my rant for the day.

EDIT: That’s not really fair of me to say at all. There were a handful of representatives from LMS Vendors large and small at the TWG. Several of them were very willing to “come together” and commit to working with a shared set of content packages as test cases to tweak their implementations to behave the same way. I won’t out them either at this point (I don’t want to be counter-productive). My main point is that if they’re going to do this, as customers we can hold a great amount of sway by encouraging this activity — either with the carrot or with the stick.

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 putting together my first comprehensive E-Learning standards guide for work. Â Last year, I revised it by cleaning it up and correcting the technical details the first week on the job. Â

Well, now it’s been a year, and I can count on one hand how many people have looked at that document, let alone actually read through it (that would be one other person).

With a learning organization made up of 46 other learning, education and training professionals, I’ve decided to take a break from the (ahem) “standard” and completely re-write the document to be more a guidebook than a standards document. Â I’m also injecting graphics, wit and narrative humor. Â So hopefully when people are digging into the guide for the nugget of information they need, they’re thrown off by the accessibility of it and maybe read on a little bit — and with any luck, they actually get the medicine with the spoonfuls of sugar I’m trying to put in it.

Comic Life on my renewed Macbook Pro is my friend.Â

So this morning I was reading Phillip Hutchinson’s post on pipwerks.com linking to video profiles of people with disabilities — mild to severe — using assistive technology to communicate, work and improve their lives.

When I worked as a contractor for DoD and Homeland Security, accessibility was given the due lip service, and that was about the extent to which content was made accessible for 508. Truth be told, most of the content I’ve worked on commercially has been much the same treatment, where we talk about the need to make things accessible but rarely is any effort put toward doing so.

But when I was at Learning 2007, I snuck into Tom King’s session on SCORM - 10 Years After and 10 Years Ahead. I got there right as he was winding up the session, and he said something that was remarkably profound and insightful — which was something to the effect that accessibility isn’t a problem of the disabled, but actually a tool that helps us improve our design for our own use. In interface design, I’d say that’s especially true.

If you think about the iPhone (and who doesn’t) — my kid can move pictures around and navigate the iPhone. There’s been plenty of YouTube videos of dogs pawing at the iPhone and their able to navigate it, as well (even if they don’t know what they’re actually doing more than at a Pavlovian level). That’s not an accident, folks — it’s an excellent study in accessible visual design. Now the iPhone is probably the least usable device for a blind person — but let’s think about web design then. People who have poor visual acuity need structured information in a web page, text that is large enough to read in clear areas that is unencumbered by distractors.

Guess what? We all benefit from clean design, too.

Phillip has some decent links to W3C’s accessibility guidelines, too.