On Authoring Tools…
There’s been some fantastic writing of late in the realm of digital learning, education and training. I don’t know if I know about it more because the tools for sharing via RSS are more ubiquitous or there are just more people writing about it — but the point is that ten years ago, this was a professional field that didn’t even exist as its own discipline (but for the Authorware folks) and now we have hundreds of bloggers building up the calluses in their fingertips as they blog away about this domain, and that’s wonderful for everyone involved.
There are a couple of peers blogging who are fairly regular readers (and when the [FFL discussion list](http://groups.google.com/group/flashforlearning) is active, they also chime in), so I make it a point to follow what they do. One of those guys is Philip Hutchinson who I think writes very well in all things meta concerning E-Learning. Philip’s most recent post to [Pipwerks](http://pipwerks.com/) is [his take on choosing authoring tools for E-Learning](http://pipwerks.com/journal/2008/01/20/how-i-build-my-elearning-courses/), and I can’t find a single thing I disagree with in his post.
> Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.
I agree. Most of the authoring tools I’ve seen port right to Flash. I love Flash. It’s done me and my family well for many years now. But it’s not the most open of formats. It’s also not the most flexible of formats. It’s just about impossible to do anything with the published Flash content that any of the popular E-Learning tools on the market. And if you ever want to talk about [reusability](http://flashforlearning.com/2008/01/16/redefining-reusability/), there’s just about no easy-bake oven method available to make published Flash content look like something other than what it was published as unless you know a lot about the underlying code in the compiled file. Sure, the textual content of tools like Articulate is all extracted into XML, and theoretically you could use that XML as a basis to reformat content in a different medium, but again that work is highly prohibitive — as are any of the alternatives that actually work with web standards (at least the ones that might be released in the market today).
Philip writes more…
> …not being tied to a particular tool or proprietary format means that practically anyone with general web development experience will be able to make edits to your course or even create new courses using your system. Millions of people around the world work with HTML, and hundreds of thousands work with JavaScript. I’m willing to bet that the number of people familiar with proprietary eLearning development tools is much smaller, probably numbering in the thousands. It’s a niche.
Okay, here’s where we part ways a little bit, I guess. Philip is absolutely correct that the shear number of “web developers” of which “E-Leanring developers” might be a subset in that they mingle in some of the same technologies is about, maybe, a 10,000:1 ratio. I’m not disputing that working with web standards wouldn’t significantly improve the likelihood of making revisions and edits faster and cheaper, let alone the opportunities for re-use.
I’d argue, though, that one of the reasons why authoring tools like Articulate, Captivate, Raptivity, Lectora, FlashForm, Adobe Presenter (we can go on) are so popular is specifically because, as Philip also writes…
> …They’re geared towards users with little or no development expertise. Yes, they’re geared towards the PowerPoint crowd.
Couple that fact that learning, education and training budgets are smaller than just about every other department, at least in corporate America — and that’s if budgets for training even exist, and the likelihood of attracting and maintaining (or even contracting) qualified talent to work with tools from scratch make it prohibitive to work with what I call low-level authoring tools like Flash (as a tool) or Dreamweaver (as a tool) or even Textpad to produce standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The trick is that these people will use a great authoring tool if it’s easy to use, and the use of any authoring tool is likely to be a trap in and of itself, because the designers and the engineers of a tool have their own assumptions about the nuances like class and id names in CSS — it’s still going to be difficult to translate this into reuse. And if you’re not talking about reusability, now that you’re going with CSS and JavaScript, you now have to contend with possibly making sure it presents and functions correctly across browsers, which was one of the biggest strengths for Flash-based platforms from jump.
And we’re still talking about single authors using tools, which works great if you’re a one-person army building E-Learning. But I know on my team, we’re already running into some pretty glaring issues of source portability with tools like Articulate, where we want to collaborate and have multiple people authoring — but have issues of losing our audio or embedded media paths, versioning, etc. If we want to discuss collaborative authoring, none of your big, popular authoring tools really cut the mustard (though I’m curious what Adobe and maybe Articulate has cooking in this regard).
So What’s the Answer?
Well, there is no one right answer at the moment for weening off the PowerPoint-to-Flash model, but I’ve heard about some interesting things from [Eduworks](http://eduworks.com/). Robby Robson has been heavily involved with standards organizations from before I got into E-Learning and has brought up some interesting ideas in conversations over the last year that make me think they’re thinking about solutions for standards-based content development in the E-Learning realm.
There’s also a nifty open-source project called [eXe](http://exelearning.org/) that amazingly runs on both Mac, Linux and Windows, and purports to publish content as standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I don’t know if I’d say it’s ready for primetime, but it’s promising that there’s an open source tool that runs on all platforms and may get to being as user-friendly as any other given authoring tool.
My point is that Philip is absolutely correct that if we keep using the same authoring tools, we’re going to eventually be limited by design implications inherent in the technical constraints of the tools that we choose to use. The more flexible a tool is, the greater skill is needed to wield it.
But no matter what, to get to making it easier to edit or adapt learning content, we need to get out of published Flash to do that — and, oh by the way, we need to make the experience collaborative to take advantage of efficiencies that can be gained by having multiple contributors to projects and integrating QA into the workflow.
As Philip suggests, moving towards web standards should make all this much easier to do, but it will be the authoring tool, and not the technologies themselves, that will get corporate learning, education and training to jump to it.
Related posts:
on our team we use flash for development mainly because of the flexibility and the precedent we’ve set for rich content. during a recent company-wide rebranding, i took the opportunity to create an AS3 framework for all of our standard course documents, buttons, popups, design elements, quizzes, tests, etc.. doing so has decreased our development time significantly, even where we believed ourselves to be somewhat streamlined already.
in the past we’ve allowed the content developers (course writers) to use breeze and we’re looking into allowing them to use captivate in a limited capacity, but i’ve yet to be convinced that any of these lower-learning-curve authoring applications can offer the quality or flexibility that we achieve developing in flash. that said, i was impressed with how far captivate has come since my last encounter with it.
finally, while i completely support web standards, i think i would shoot myself if i had take courses developed in html and javascript, much less develop them all day every day.
[quote]finally, while i completely support web standards, i think i would shoot myself if i had take courses developed in html and javascript, much less develop them all day every day.[/quote]
Ian, I would never suggest that we never ever use Flash elements in my courses, but like building your own custom AS3 framework, there’s something to be said for breaking out of the off-the-shelf solutions for authoring E-Learning content.
You’re doing what works for your organization and you obviously have the skillset internally to support and maintain it. Looking broader, I see a lot of organizations that don’t have that internal asset and that’s the appeal of the authoring tools.
I agree with you on developing standards-compliant courses all day, everyday, though. I’m really pretty much done with correcting CSS. Some people love it. I don’t.
i can certainly see where they’d be helpful. especially the new captivate, which again is an impressive app.
the maintainability of our courses is certainly an issue. when i first signed up to do elearning five years ago, we were uploading swfs into a basic frameset using iauthor at 5k/month, which i despised. knowing absolutely nothing about the scorm, i made the mistake of telling my boss that we didn’t need iauthor. he told his boss and i was given a week to come up with a proof of concept. at the time, there was absolutely no openness regarding elearning whatsoever – it was so new that the people who were hip to it kept it to themselves so that they could make an easy buck. since then i’ve razed and rebuilt our framework no less than 5 times, each time getting a little closer to my personal ideal of ease of use and functionality.
in the meantime we have the scattered remains of discarded frameworks over hundreds of courses. frameworks which only i know the ins-and-outs of – which is great for job security but a bit of a nightmare for updates and revisions.
with this most recent framework i set out to make as modular and decoupled as possible so that even if everything changes in a year, the development process will remain the same.
thanks for the site and thanks for the link to pipwerks – both of you have great articles.
i’m just asking questions, stirring up the pot a bit. in the words of the illustrious Chuck D, “Fight the Power” …or something like that.
you know what I think would have a HUGE impact on elearning? the ability to use standard HTML in flash. Adobe has said they’ll never add that functionality (something to the effect of ‘why turn Flash into a web browser?’), but as a flash developer, the #1 thing i get hung up on is presentation of text.
on the flipside you can embed Flash into HTML. RE: ian’s comment about having to take courses made in HTML, that presupposes an HTML course is boring and static. i’m currently using Flash and Captivate SWFs in one of my HTML courses, and i’ve created custom MooTools-based interactions which add some very flash-esque dynamics to the course.
RE: javascript having cross-platform issues, this is a valid point, and has been a headache for many people over the years. but i think we’ve come to a point where browsers are (finally) more standardized, there are some very solid cross-browser DOM scripting techniques we can use, and there are cross-browser frameworks available for those who like frameworks (MooTools, jQuery, etc.). (and if anyone suggests it, i don’t buy the argument that JavaScript — with or without frameworks — is harder than ActionScript 3.) Plus you need to know some JS to work with SCORM, anyway.
but again, the whole point of eLearning development tools is supposed to be removing technical barriers and making course production easier. understanding this, there is a HUGE difference between something such as Lectora and FlashForm, or FlashForm and ThinkingCap Studio
in the end, i have no answers, only more questions.
As you stated it all comes down to dollars and available resources for a clients given need. I’ve been involved in so many jobs where the client forced us to use something like lectora because their plan was to remove the developer hours as much as possible. Of course it failed miserably as the client wanted the flexibility that requesting custom code in flash gave them. Our change of order cost went through the roof and the client was upset. So much fun.
I think there is plenty of room for all types of e-learning. Some people want captivate/articulate stuff as the priority is to get it out the door. Some companies are thinking more long term and have the money to set a standard for themselves. What many of them find though is that by standardizing on a specific process their pool of vendors they can use shrinks-which purchasing does not like.
I understand the big picture make everything portable etc, i just see that the finances effect everything. In the end many clients have legitimate reasons for just wanting the content done in the fastest solution even if it is closed. They’ll just request a new budget if they decide they want it ported to iphone or something.
@phillip
“the ability to use standard HTML in flash”
http://deng.com.br/
Also take alook at adobe air-it has a html rendering.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/labs/flex3/langref/index.html fl.html package i think. It’s webkit based.