Flash For Learning

Have you looked at the Stock Market lately? You don’t have to be in the United States to appreciate the situation. We’re in for a bumpy ride. It may not be the end-of-days scenario that noted economists, politicos and pundits predict, but it’s obvious to me here in Chicago that the market is going to be turbulent, which is undoubtedly going to affect what people, organizations and governments spend money on — and that’s going to affect corporate, academic and government budgets… and as far as it impacts corporate budgets, it’s definitely going to impact me and my work. Here’s how I see it rolling.

How solid are those plans for upgrading your LMS? Chances are you won’t unless there are technical reasons that make it an imperative. It might have been difficult last year to make the business case to upgrade a piece of enterprise software last year when the market was still good, but this year with the coffers tightening, dropping another couple hundred thousand (or a couple of million depending on your scale) is just not likely. Big ticket items like LMSs and LCMSs are probably going to be on=hold for acquisition unless you can show without a doubt how what you buy will a) save the organization a ton of cash in other ways, thus reducing costs overall; and/or b) improve productivity in measurable ways, thus reducing your operating costs overall.

In fact, let’s make that the common theme for this post. See, when budgets are just the “normal” kind of tight for learning, education and training, you have the opportunity for doing small Research and Development projects (not like there’s lots of official time for those, but you can fly some pet projects under the radar until you’re ready to show them off). When there’s a promise that next month will be another record breaking milestone, you can get that expansion or that new acquisition through a little easier. But when times get tight, you need to really be concerned about the bottom line — but you also need to focus on infrastructure. You want to be able to do more with less — but you also don’t want the people or the services you rely on to get destroyed in the process of running lean.

Your budget was probably set in stone (concrete, maybe?) before the start of this year. Use it to train your people in a variety of needed skills so that an Instructional Designer or a Content Developer can do a lot more than they could before. Use it to upgrade the authoring tools you use. Use it develop those reusable templates you’re going to need next year.

If your organization hasn’t gone mobile yet, you’re likely not going to in the next two years. Keep reading what other organizations are doing with mobile, because discussing and designing the future is very important — but not as important as being able to squeeze the most value you can right now.

If I was to weigh in on how we’d spend what money we have this year, I’d advise the following:

Definitely

• Transition our main authoring tool to something collaborative.
• Upgrade our simulation capturing tool to make sure it’s as robust and stable as it can be.
• Invent or Acquire a means to manage media assets, learning objectives, competencies and how content maps to and with these things.
• Pick up some media software (Flash, maybe something for digital video)
• Code for custom E-Learning content (for those custom jobs or content upgrades from years ago that all of the sudden just stop working)
• Train the tech savvy on Flash, HTML and JavaScript; train the Instructional Design-savvy on Graphic Design principles. Train everyone on curriculum development, project management and personal productivity skills, because when organizations make due with less, that usually means people who do — do more.

Maybe

• Upgrade hardware to mobile equipment to go to where the internal client is
• Push out collaborative authoring tools to Subject Matter Experts.

I’d welcome any questions or input on this topic, because I think we’re going to see a shift similar to what the commercial sector saw in 2002 and 2003 when the dot-com bubble burst. For government, this will be the first time in a very long time experiencing this. For you folks in the acaedmic sector, this is old hat to you

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.

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.

Inspired a bit by Tom King’s article on authoring tools, I started playing with Google Trends and was a little interested in how E-Learning is faring against the notion of Performance Support — my idea being that E-Learning is stuff we have to evaluate, manage and track the learner’s interaction with — and performance support being, perhaps, not so rigid.

Here’s my not-so-scientific report:

E-Learning is by far more popular in searches, though the volume of searches definitely has dropped from 2004 (which we can discuss by itself ad nauseum as far as reasons why people are searching less for E-Learning). But in 2007, in particular, the notion of “Performance Support” has gained much more buzz in news references. Now, this can mean a lot of things, but the fact that E-Learning never makes a blip in the news probably says something, too.

As we make E-Learning smaller and more granular… are we naturally evolving a model of instruction to something more like Performance Support?

By the way — as an interesting post-script to this, the top 10 regions, in order, who are literally looking for Performance Support, are…

1. South Korea
2. India
3. Singapore
4. Australia
5. Taiwan
6. United Kingdom
7. Canada
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. China

Anyone want to take a stab at how employee productivity by nation matches up with this ranking for a search?

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

After an incredibly passionate and spirited discussion on Tuesday and Wednesday, the SCORM Technical Working Group made very few firm decisions about the scope of what we were going to do. Despite this, I would say that the meeting was by far one of the most enlightening, productive and I would argue “pivotal” TWG meetings since my initial involvement with ADL four years ago.

The world has changed since the merry band in the SCORM TWG assembled to cook up SCORM 2004 back in 2002. Back then, there was no YouTube. No Facebook. No MySpace. The iPod was a baby and hardly a product priced for the masses. Cellphones that had cameras were not at all ubiquitous in the US. Text messaging and web browsing certainly were not commonplace on mobile devices. WiFi was hard to find. People only played video games at work if they worked for a dotCom.

And, to be perfectly candid in my opinion, SCORM 2004 wasn’t so much about the way forward as it was fixing what everyone knew was still not right with SCORM 1.2.

It was pretty evident to me, at least, that this SCORM TWG meeting was as much about tidying up the loose ends still connected to SCORM 2004 as it was to start really thinking about what’s next for us in E-Learning. Should we do more of the same, but continue to make things more stable? How important is reusability of learning objects, or anything else we’ve been preaching for the past four years? This was the first SCORM TWG meeting that I attended in-person, and it was the largest attended meeting that I can remember, with the most diverse audience ever assembled. And the question that we’re all left to answer from this meeting isn’t so much “What are we saying to each other?” (We miss you P.D.), so much as it was….

“What do we want to do?”

The passing of both Phillip Dodds and Claude Ostyn this year is very sad, but the timing could not be more impactful (I don’t want to say ironic, but I don’t have a better word to describe it). With the IP issues as resovled as they’re going to be between ADL and IMS and the timetable so tight in order to resolve Simple Sequencing with IMS — we are all presented with a mission and an opportunity now that probably would not exist with the same shining lights leading us before. There were voices heard in this last meeting that have been largely silent before, and it’s a change that everyone has to get used to — but it’s a very good change.

The meeting highlighted how important the framers of online learning believe SCORM is, as it is. But I spoke about (and heard from many others), that there’s more to this picture — and that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to hold on to the past. We may not need to start from the ground up and press the “Reset” button on SCORM, but we also shouldn’t be afraid to do it, either.

We need to figure out what problems educators and learners are trying to work through, and what e-learning looks like in the near and longer-term. And… quite frankly, we need to figure out if that vision can be commercial enough for everyone involved to profit. The government is turning SCORM over to the community that uses it. It’ll be up to all of us to support it in some way. And while it’s a little scary, I think it’s an AWESOME thing. Because when that happens, everyone has ownership. Everyone has skin in the game to be committed to putting out the best specification we can open up to the world. And everyone has a voice in what the future of online learning can be.

I’m much more empowered now than I was before. I’m excited and humbled to be able to work with so many passionate and brilliant people on this. And I’m going to be reflecting quite a bit on how I see the future taking shape.

But the most important thing that all of us involved with SCORM need to know is what YOU think learning should be like. If you could wave the magic wand and participate (or simply consume) your training or learning however you wanted… what would it be? Please feel free to comment.

Well, this beats the hell out of my reverse-engineering solution.

Last year when I picked up Articulate Presenter, we were awfully annoyed that even though we bought the mongo-license that included the SDK for Articulate AND paid the extra $500 to remove the “Powered by Articulate” logo on the bottom left of the screen, I still had that logo in there and there was no easy way to get rid of it.

A couple hours with SoThink did the trick and I was able to identify the exact movieclip to unload by importing a flash object into the first slide (and creating a custom background for Articulate slides in a vector format, but that’s another story).

But I was very happy to find after surfing around their support area that Articulate actually supports an official patch now to remove that “Powered by Articulate” logo, allowing you to create content that’s free and clear of their branding.

http://www.articulate.com/support/kb/000837.php

Hope this helps someone.

I’ve tried this before, but there’s been a pretty significant uptick in the amount of email and activity on the blog related to Flash and SCORM. I thought maybe it’d be useful to have a more collaborative knowledge share. So I’m inviting friends, readers, developers and designers who are involved in E-learning projects and are using Flash to join up with the Flash For Learning group.