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

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.

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

ADL, IMS signed an agreement

• SCORM 2004 is free of IP encumbrances
• Â ADL will cooperate with IMS on Simple Sequencing 1.1

SCORM 2004 4th Edition

• Minor release scheduled for mid-2008
• Fix Simple Sequencing 1.1 and a few critical bug fixes - stable for 2-3 years
• Merge SCORM 3rd Edition Sequencing and make it IMS Simple Sequencing 1.1
  • Anything that needs to be fixed, we are allowed to fix (including changing the schema, which we could not change before)
    • Interoperability issues
    • Navigation and User Interface issues that are documented and wrong.
    • When a learner completes a SCORM content package, there may be a need to get a score or progress information on a content package - possibly require LMSs to provide some kind of system-level access to ensure that progress is being reported accurately across all LMSs (not an IMS issue — firmly a TWG decision to fix).

Scope must be defined TODAY (in the bucket or out of the bucket)

• Anything we decide to fix must be fixed by the community, resulting in a robust set of recommendations that can be asserted by ADL technical team…Â due December 10, 2007 (another TWG Status meeting that week).
• The options for Sequencing Scope of work for the TWG:
  • IMS SS 1.1 is simply the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition.
  • IMS SS 1.1 is the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition plus fixes to known interoperability issues.
  • IMS SS 1.1 is the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition plus fixes to known interoperability issues and minor enhancements/editions

Points of discussion

• Navigation interoperability issues
• Interoperable way to access course status and other information AFTER course completion

Three hours later (and much spirited debate over the magnitude and scope of the possible courses of actions), we’ve decided to further investigate the Sequencing AND the Navigation issues.

Angelo Panar is heading up the sub-committee on Sequencing. John Campbell and I are heading up the sub-committee on Navigation.

Folks, I generally try to keep this blog free of my more personal opinions, but a friend to the E-Learning community has passed, and it’s truly important that we take a pause to remember him.

Claude Ostyn was a pioneer with Phillip Dodds and a few others on developing the original specification for SCORM. His involvement as a consultant on SCORM since its inception was (and frankly, is) important and influential. For many years, Claude has been the strongest voice of implementors — sometimes his was the sole voice speaking out on behalf of developers and programmers of both content and learning systems on making SCORM easier and more accessible.

I have my own memories of Claude, having gotten to know him personally over the last four years. We first met pouring over the JavaScript and ActionScript of a Norweigan’s content at the tail-end of the first International Plugfest in Zurich. We spent hours and hours going line by line over the logic of the standard SCORM 1.2 code that published out of Flash MX 2004. It was only then that I realized that it was Claude who actually helped write that code with Tom King and Andrew Chemney. I was in awe, helping debug such widely distributed code with its author. Claude had a singular wit and a drive to be correct in all things. When we in fact discovered the flaw in the code logic (it kept recording interactions to an ID of “0″ if memory serves), it was after three hours of testing every imaginable assertion. Claude was relentless in helping this total stranger with his code, while almost everyone else was packing up and heading out of town, and that developer certainly got his money’s worth. Claude created a workaround, sharing it only after he tested it enough himself that he was convinced it really addressed the issue.

I was blown away from his dedication.

There are some people who only saw Claude in conferences, and without context they saw him as stubborn, maybe confrontational. Claude always made sense to me.

I admired his dedication to the many of us who have to just make things work and implement, as well as his tenacity in making sure his message was received — not just getting his voice heard. Claude often articulated concerns that I had but could not find the words to express clearly. I was often corrected by Claude, publicly, but I appreciated the wall of absolute candor that I could steady myself against.

Claude was the real deal. He’s written more articles and tutorials, patrolled the message boards and worked with so many communities in this trade than I could ever read up on, and he was doing it from the get-go.

His passing is our collective loss, and if there is any good to come from it, it will be that all of us involved in making E-Learning accessible for others to develop to step up, take the lead and share what we learn in his stead.

I was reminded once by a luminary in this field that we’re all new at this. We have a lot less to learn because of Claude, and I will miss that uniquely Belgian wit.