In case you did not know, Steve Jobs hates Flash. The master of the Apple iPhone/iPad platform, Steve Jobs, has some kind of personal vendetta against adobe’s Flash product (which used to be Macromedia pre-adobe-buyout).
So why is this a problem for us elearning developers? Well this means that the most prolific web (and elearning) technology will not play on the most prolific smartphone/mobile operating system (iphone/ipad).
I actually went out and bought an ipad when they first came out, thinking that there had to be a way to get my flash-based PowerPoint courses converted with EZ LCMS’s PowerPoint plug-in, and my Flash-Based Articulate courses to run on the iPad. I am here to tell you today, there is NOT. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like it is just not going to happen. I am now so certain of this that I have sold my iPad to the nearest Apple sheep I could find. Without flash and any ability to display any kind of interesting, engaging elearning products, it is a virtual useless piece of tech to me.
The only possible light at the end of the tunnel may be HTML5. HTML5 promises to provide a lot of the interactive characteristics that are embedded in the flash plugin, so it it possible that in the near future, tools like EZ LCMS and Articulate will convert to HTML5 and Mr. Jobs will allow us to participate in our courses on his devices. We can only hope.
When computer-based and web-based training products first started to become popular, professional narration was almost required. Every course was looked on as if it were a television commercial, and the voice narration quality had to be top notch.
As you know, voice narration can be very expensive. Professional talent rates are usually high, along with studio equipment time etc. With sites like Voices.com, professional narration has been made a bit more accessible, but still somewhat pricey, especially when you consider the fact that you will probably go through several narration changes during the process. Continue reading →
I was recently privy to a LMS vendor addressing a customer complaint. The complaint was “Your system is very slow and unresponsive”. This was a very reliable LMS vendor who had really never had this complaint before. They had very adequate server resources dedicated to this customer, and their system was not known to be “slow”.
Upon investigation, it turns out that the customer had created a course that consisted of one page with video embedded on the page. The video was full screen resolution (1024×768), 30 frames per second, and about 40 minutes long, in wmv (window media) format. I never found out what the actual file size of the file was, but it had to be huge. This was a tutorial using some screen capture software with everything set to the highest quality possible. A bolwing ball in a paper bag. Continue reading →
We all know that PowerPoint is a major force in Instructor Led Training, but is PowerPoint a viable online elearning tool? I say absolutely!
Many eLearning elitists will say that PowerPoint belongs in the classroom, not the LMS. These are usually also the folks spending countless hours and dollars developing courseware in some very-proprietary toolset, with a rediculous learning curve. These folks spend 10 times longer developing courses that are only slightly better than what can be built in PowerPoint (if at all).
If you think about it, there are really a large number of reasons to use PowerPoint: Continue reading →
I know, I know. Not another LMS comparison, please. There are many, many LMS comparisons out there. Trust me, we know. There are some that are free, some that you have to pay for, some that you have to sign-up for newsletters to receive, and some that only come with some sort of membership.
We have read many of these. Heck, we may have read all of them, its impossible to know. But what we have found lacking in this sea of comparisons is one that focuses on our three primary interests: Continue reading →
