2020. It’s been quite a year.
But if there’s one 2020 curveball that shouldn’t be a surprise...it’s the end of Adobe® Flash.
As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020.
“Open standards such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly have continually matured over the years and serve as viable alternatives for Flash content. Also, the major browser vendors are integrating these open standards into their browsers and deprecating most other plug-ins (like Adobe Flash Player).By announcing our business decision in 2017, with three years’ advance notice, we believed that would allow sufficient time for developers, designers, businesses, and other parties to migrate existing Flash content as needed to new, open standards.”
-End-of-life statement from Adobe.
Hopefully, you started preparing for this already. If you have any Flash elements in your training, you’ll need to update those courses and re-deploy them to your learners.
Updating eLearning Courses With Flash Content
As we learned from our resident Flash expert, James Kingsley, there is no "magic Flash conversion tool" out there.
The good news is that if you have the source files for your training content, you can open those up in the latest version of your authoring tool and republish to HTML5. (James highly recommends doing another round of quality assurance (QA) before you start delivering the re-published course to learners, of course.)
Lectora user? Get the scoop on converting Flash content in Lectora here.
If the courses still work “okay,” can you just leave the old Flash content in? Well… we don’t recommend that. You open yourself up to a lot of risks if you leave old, broken training up for your organization.
Risk Factors of Outdated Training
| REPUTATION | LEGAL | FINANCIAL |
|
Obsolete Technology Falling Behind |
Non-compliance Regulatory Audits Injuries & Violations Legal Fees & Fines |
Revenue Loss Lost Customers Fines & Penalties Unable to Compete |
However, if you do not have the source files in-house (or from a vendor), nor the team, time, or tools available, we can help.
Tap into the eLearning Brothers’ expertise to get your courses updated. Our award-winning custom design team is proficient with Lectora, Storyline, Captivate, and other widely used authoring tools. Plus, we’ve worked with many different LMS and pretty much rockstars at all things eLearning.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you say goodbye to Flash for good!