Many Learning Management Systems are online systems that are essentially cloud-based. Some do this better than others, but most have some sort of cloud-based system for e-learning development and delivery.
What many do not have is a cloud-based e-learning development tool. When it comes to developing your e-learning content, most systems rely on standard software that you install on your computer to develop content, which is then loaded in the LMS.
One example of a system that includes a cloud-based development platform is EZ LCMS. Their developer role allows you to create your entire course from start to finish, online. This tool has been available for quite some time.
Be on the lookout for more and more cloud-based e-learning development system in the near future.
Last week I helped another client avert a major catastrophe. This client has a Learning Management System (EZ LCMS) and thousands of student that use Google Chrome. Then one day, Google Chrome releases version 7, which essentially makes the courses (developed in Articulate) not functional. These are courses that have worked for years in multiple browsers in multiple, and then one day they stop working.
Add to this the fact that Google Chrome Automatically updated itself (you have no choice, your browser updates whetheryou like it or not) and my client thought she was about to go out of business. She had thousands of students who could not view a single course. After lots of digging, we finally found an article in the Google support forum refering to why Flash “FSCOMMANDS” no longer worked. Having worked with Articulate quite a bit, I knew that Articulate uses flash FSCOMMANDS to communicate information with the LMS.
The good news: google provided a “workaround” that we could use to make the courses work. The bad news: we had to make a change to a javascript file in ALL of her 225 courses. But we did it and the crisis was averted. Since this adventure, more and more people are becoming aware of the issue and Articulate has a full forum topic you can read about the issue here: http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter/19848-bug-chrome-7-can-cause-issues-published-courses.html .
The point of this post is, no matter how confident you are that everything you have in place is solid, don’t be surprised if a new browser release brings you unexpected sleepless nights. It did to us.
So a lot of Buzz is starting to occur on this subject. Not a day has gone by in the past few weeks where I have not had a discussion on the subject of “What do we do to get our flash training on the iPad?”.
“It can’t be done” is just not an acceptable answer. People are NOT going to just say “Oh, OK” and go about thier business. Companies and individuals are starting to buy iPads by the truckload, and discovering that for training, they are essentially a fancy paperweight.
A few options are starting to pop up. There is HTML 5, which we have already talked about. I have personally done some more research into HTML 5, and I think it will be a good solution for 80 percent of what is currently done in flash as far as interactivity, but I’m not sure it will ever be a full replacement.
Probably the most interesting recent possibility is that Apple has opened up the app store to apps built with 3rd paty tools. Check out some info about that here. This does not mean that a flash plugin will work, BUT you may be able to publish your flash content FOR the iPhone. So If adobe impliments a platform and flash has a “publish for iphone” button in it, we may be getting somewhere. Still not a solution, but a step in the right direction.
Stay tuned…
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 →
