At one time it was estimated that nearly 75% of animation and video content found on the Internet was reliant on Flash technology to some extent.
But the golden age of Flash is ending—and you need to ready your training content for the next era.
Why is Flash going away?
Adobe has chosen to stop supporting Flash, not because everyone was so annoyed by those “Please enable Flash Player to view this content” popups, but because it was a huge security risk.
Malware developers use Flash as an easy tool to create attacks (sometimes clicking that enable Flash popup had very bad results…). Many developers were already turning to new, more secure solutions like HTML5 to produce the same results.
But what really signaled the future demise of Flash was the 2010 declaration that Apple would not install or support Flash player on any iOS devices. Steve Jobs cited these reasons:
- Incompatibility with touchscreen devices
- Poor security
- Resource hog
What does the end of Flash mean for online training and eLearning games?
Flash games were big! You could do so much cool-looking animation and of course, many eLearning developers utilized those capabilities for their content.
Unfortunately, any content created using Flash will no longer play after the end of this year. Which means NOW is the time to start updating your training.
In some cases, if you have the original files and software used to create the content, it may be as simple as re-exporting the content as HTML5 files. Depending on how big your training program is, you may need a little help tracking down each instance of Flash being used in your courses.
eLearning Brothers Flash Finder™ can help with that.
Flash Finder acts as your own personal assistant—sifting through the years and years of courses on your LMS to identify any Flash-related files that will no longer work. You’ll receive a robust report including when the courses were originally uploaded, who uploaded them, course ID numbers, the last time the courses were accessed, the authoring tool they were created with, and more.
From there you can easily identify which courses are the highest priority to update, whether that’s a simple re-export to HTML5 or a bigger content refresh.
Because why not take this opportunity to improve upon past training courses?
Flash is going away, there’s no doubt about it. Since you HAVE to go through all your courses and update them anyway, why not take the time to reconsider the content.
Ask yourself, could this be more interactive? Is this content still reflective of current policies and procedures? Is this up to our brand standards?
I know that this might seem a little overwhelming.
The good news is, you still have the rest of the year to work on updating your content from Flash.
The even better news is, our custom solutions team can help!
Whether you just need an extra set of hands to help update some courses here and there, or you want to completely revamp your training program, our experienced team of experts can help get you ready for the demise of Flash. Start by using Flash Finder to find out just how many courses have Flash content and then work with our experts to prioritize and plan out your updates.
Schedule a free consultation today and get your training ready for the end of Flash.
