There are always lessons learned when tackling a new eLearning project or challenge. Now that the deadline for Adobe Flash to go dark is getting closer and closer, developers are looking for alternatives and ways to recreate their old Flash content.
Our Senior Technology Architect James Kingsley recently tackled some old courses—about 100 hours of training—and completely rebuilt them using HTML5 and Captivate responsive design.
Why James is embracing the bright side of Flash’s demise:
“Now we have all these great opportunities! When your course publishes to HTML5, that’s the same technology that the rest of the web is using, which makes it a lot easier for us to dive in and start to do fun, cool things. It’s also a lot easier to learn more about it too. If you go on Stack Overflow to look for eLearning questions, you might not find anything, but if you look for HTML5 questions, you’ll find a lot of people answering questions.”
-James Kingsley
In this webinar, he shared several examples of eLearning interactions that needed to be rebuilt without Flash and how he did it.
You’ll find links to all his demos below the webinar recording.
Making use of Chrome’s developer console:
One of the many tips James shared in the webinar was about using Chrome’s developer console (F12 opens this) to mimic a mobile view when previewing courses. You can resize the developer console by dragging it over and it will force your Captivate course preview to resize to accommodate the developer panel, giving you a look at how your content will adjust on a mobile device. This is a great quick way if you’re testing locally to see if you have too much content on a slide.
How to figure out which of your past courses still contain Flash content and need to be updated:
eLearning Brothers Custom Solutions has a great solution to tracking down Flash files on your LMS. Flash Finder™ connects to your LMS, scans through all your files and generates a report with information like 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. Armed with this info, you can make a plan to update the most important courses first—and even take time to refresh any content that’s become outdated.
Watch all of Jame’s HTML5 and responsive design development tips in the recording now:
Links & Resources
- View Example Demos
- Connect With James on LinkedIn
- Check Out ReviewMyElearning
Contact eLearning Brothers Custom Solutions to schedule a free consultation. We'll show you how Flash Finder works and talk about how we can help you update your Flash training content.
