Flash For Learning

From the LETSI Wiki…

“Our company is starting to venture into creating SCORM modules.
What is the Best Mac software for developing SCORM content?

One option was Lectora? Any good?”

SCORM on a Mac… it’s tough. I assume you’re looking for authoring tools. On a Mac, there aren’t a lot of options at the moment. There’s no Captivate for the Mac. There’s no Articulate Presenter, no Lectora or Adobe Presenter for the Mac either. The only authoring tool I’ve seen that works straightforward on the Mac is eXe - http://exelearning.org/ — which produces standards compliant XHTML/CSS and a SCORM 1.2 content package.

The other option if you’re using a Mac is… and it pains me to say this as a longtime Mac user and advocate — is to run Windows on your Mac, and install one of the content authoring tools of choice (I feel best about Articulate’s suite of products if you’re not into “coding”). If, however, you are into actually coding, there are lots of options that are Mac native for beautiful multimedia — and if you have the requisite ability to tie everything together with HTML, JavaScript and feel comfortable using a packaging tool like Reload – I’d be happy to direct you to some fantastic tools.

And what tools would I point you to? I’m glad you asked.

• ScreenFlow
• Snapz Pro
• Keynote
• iMovie

Or at least it starts to.

From the site:

“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services, and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices. Check out our web page enkin.net.

Charles Stross’ novel, Halting State is an interesting mystery/thriller recommended to me by Rovy Brannon back at Learning 2007, and the major technological device it employs is a world about 4 years away now where the phone is THE pre-eminent device that connects us to the internet. Bounded with glasses, the book shares an impressive vision of how Augmented Reality works in the context of gaming, commerce, recreation, work, productivity — everything.

Enkin looks a LOT like a predecessor to the vision Stross described.

Yahoo has a fantastic Design Stencil Kit in several formats, including OmniGraffle and Visio. I’ve recently started jumping on the Information Architecture bandwagon and found that visually planning out a web-based design with wireframes was not only helpful but saved me a bunch of time from the “let’s see what kind of layout I can code today” method.

As I continue to work on my pet project of building good SCORM content for the iPhone (just for kicks), this kit from Yahoo will be a big help.

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.

Adobe just released a free and open-source Java implementation of flash/flex remoting service called Blaze DS for Java.

This is pretty huge for people, as it supports remoting to the new AMF version (3) which just got documentation released, but it also supports remoting and polling over port 80 — so no more getting blocked out behind firewall constraints (a common theme today?). And, did I mention — it’s FREE?

So this will allow Flash and Flex developers to do realtime data manipulation with databases through this Java service — and you don’t have to run ColdFusion (or AMFPHP) to do it. I love remoting. I’ve loved it since I first played with it and Flash MX (6).

The impact of this and developing media-rich (or just plain pretty) performance support tools is a very positive one, especially for enterprise IT departments that may not know anything about PHP but will support Java.

Every now and then, I need to do some quick file conversions and I don’t have my Macbook Pro handy. Zamzar is a really nice web app (that’s free!!!) and it converts most everything to everything.

What I didn’t know, and just realized because I was asked to do it, was that it now takes YouTube URLs and will convert those movies into a variety of movie formats — and it works through my firewall.

So even when Masie sends out video URLs that I can’t see, I can still download them in a format that I can see.

Now if only Zamzar released an API…

I was watching South Park on Wednesday night where Stan relieves his anxiety over the pressures to reach a million points in Guitar Hero III with Heroin Hero (stay with me — I have a point). In the game, you continue to chase this cute flying dragon reminiscent of DragonTales (get it… “chase the dragon?”) and no matter how much you advance, you can never ever get the dragon.

I know it sounds odd to read about what I learned from watching South Park, but I’m not exactly normal.

In that South Park episode, Stan is trapped by the external pressures and succumbs to them. For many designers and developers, I get a lot of feedback and messaging about how you’re chasing after authoring tools with more bells and whistles to produce more engaging content.

Sound like you? I don’t know which step in a program is acknowledgement, but I need to tell you that you’re just chasing the dragon… because if you’re looking for a tool to make your content better, you’re missing the point. You’re addicted to the shiny objects and you’re (in effect) chasing the dragon.

Tools allow you to do a lot of things — some of them might be things you want to do for instructional intent. Some of them are things enabling an easier development of that which you think is cool (timed bullets to audio, templates for tabbed interfaces or slideshows, etc). Phillip Hutchinson commented on here just the other day about how XML templates in Flash ultimately constrain — and I think he has a point. Any tool you use that gives you wizard-like control is ultimately going to limit you to the initial design capabilities of its inventor. Tools sometimes also do things you find instructionally odd, maybe even wrong. They’re tools.

It’s not the hammer that builds a better house. It’s the carpenter who wields it.

Some authoring tools are more flexible than others. Captivate, Articulate or FlashForm all allow you to embed your own content — but at least with Captivate or Articulate, there are some caveats to that. Articulate has an API exposed so you can send navigational control or set completion status from your customized content… but you can only embed one Flash file per slide. Captivate doesn’t seem to care how many things you embed or where and it even allows you to branch pretty fluidly… but you can’t talk to the Captivate engine.

Point is… the limitations on how effective training can be are on you and your creative instructional instincts — the tools only help you expand that, and I would argue that you need to prioritize what’s most important to you and let that dictate your decision to use any tool (and that includes rolling your own set of templates). Code is cheap — it may not always be free, but there is so much code available to you off-the-shelf now compared a few years ago — that it’s closing in on ubiquity.

Anything technical — from figuring out how to make that cool activity in Flash you want to make all the way to figuring out how to report something to an LMS — can be bought, borrowed or lifted from someone. At the end of the day, what differentiates your E-Learning and makes it special is what you want to message to your learners. Figure out what you want to do first and THEN find the right combination of tools and technology to support the instruction.

Unless expediency and the notion of the 80% solution is more important… then go for the tool that affords that for you.

Bottom line: don’t be addicted to the tech. Don’t adopt the new toy to make your E-Learning better. Only you can make it better. The tool is only as good as the ideas that feed it. I’m as guilty as anyone on this, and it’s only through the pain of withdrawal from authoring tools that I start to see clearly that solid instructional vision is more powerful than the delivery mechanism.

My preaching is done for today

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.

Just a quick aside on the power of Feedburner: I was alerted by someone at Feedburner that my RSS feed wasn’t rendering the actual Feedburner layout and that my stats were probably off because of it. So, with a tiny bit of coaching, I got it right now (just click on the RSS icon in the sidebar to see for yourself). This morning I checked out my stats and they are through the freaking roof — On top of the 90+ people who actually visit the site, since yesterday afternoon alone I’ve had about 38 people who actively subscribe…. and that’s just since yesterday around 4:30pm until midnight last night.

If I look at the stats on the feed itself as far as live hits, I can see that there’s 25 hits from various news feed readers in the last hour alone. That’s WAY more readership than I ever thought, and most of the content on this site has not been (imho) the most consistent effort.

So thanks if you’re one of the silent masses who’ve been hitting this site and let me re-affirm that more good things are underway. I had no idea that so many people around the world (seriously — people from Athens, Greece and Riyadh??? Awesome) read up on my take on E-Learning, Flash and assorted technologies.

I feel like I owe you something more than the erratic posts you’ve had over the past two years. I’ll try and make your visits worthwhile.

With my 3G iPod nano, I’ve run the course on getting my learn on as far as adjusting my fantasy football team or catching up on political satire. This weekend I was getting jiggy with ActionScript 3 and actively sought out what podcasts might be available, video or otherwise, on the subject.

I didn’t find much. However, I found at least one use of podcasting that are extending the official knowledge out there. I’ve been reading the ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by Gary Rosenzweig off my Safari account to get a little more hands-on with the code. Turns out, Gary also has a podcast that extends the lessons in the book, complete with screen grabs (done on the Mac, just to needle it in for some of you) on how to further modify or extend the code examples detailed in some of the lessons. That’s pretty nifty from both a marketing and an educational perspective.

I’d love to find out more about podcasts centered around Flash, Actionscript 3 or scripting in general (for all my experimentations and tutorials, Ruby on Rails still isn’t taking for me — and neither is Flex).