Elearning- Tom King and Silke Fleischer

Elearning Moving Forward

Adobe consolidates the products needed to make great elearning and rapid elearning, whether by furthering empowering a dedicated training professional or enabling a knowledge worker. This includes the technologies for capturing, generating, editing, reviewing, and deploying media assets, sophisticated traditional deep elearning, and best-of-breed rapid elearning. One stop shopping for the phrase I appropriated back in 2001, "weapons of mass instruction".

I am leaving Adobe to work as an independent elearning consultant. I look forward to working with the same great people (and new folks too), the same great products (and some new ones too), but in a different capacity.

Cheers to Silke Fleischer, who also blogs here, and all the other under-recognized internal champions of elearning who will continue to move elearning forward from inside Adobe.

-Tom King

MAX Elearning Day- It's a Wrap

We had a great MAX conference with 3,000 or so attendees and nearly 300 training and learning professionals at our dedicated elearning day. Attendees got to see and hear from Don O'Guin of Pfizer, Frank Hanfland of safety-kleen, and Kit Horton of Horton Consulting. The event was presented live to an enthusiastic crowd.

If you missed it, you can still view the presentation materials to learn about best practices for rapid elearning, ROI and demonstration of value for elearning and some 'sneak peeks' of product futures. The live sneak peeks included an live example of a future release of Authorware publishing out to Flash Player (SWF) files, and supporting the use of Flash component (SWC) files and events. A preview of Captivate concepts under investigation included integrated support for scenario-based learning activities and a unique branching flow view for simulations.

The presentation materials are are archived here, under the "eLearning Seminars" tab:
http://www.macromedia.com/resources/elearning
[Use no-cost registration for access to all the archived elearning seminars and the MAX Elearning Day presentation materials]

New book on Captivate

Brenda Huettner just published her book Macromedia Captive: The Definitive Guide. It's available for $19.77 at Amazon and contains all aspects of the tool from installation to branched eLearning content.

Test driving products without downloading or installing

One of our Captivate customers, Mark Fletcher, has created an amazing simulation for WebAssist. The simulation is used as an interactive product experience - great marketing without requiring prospects to download and install software. Check it out!

Just click on the "Take a Test Drive" link:

http://www.webassist.com/Products/84/Overview.asp?RID=80?RID=481

If you have similar examples, please send them to us.
Greetings,
Silke

Seminar on using Authorware and Flash with Breeze

The elearning seminar series is starting again. I'll try to post reminders about upcoming sessions. The next session is Friday August 26th at 1pm Eastern (GMT -5).

Using Macromedia Authorware & Flash with Breeze 5 Training
Macromedia Breeze 5 supports AICC content communication. Join this free seminar about creating Authorware and Flash content that communicates with Breeze. Andrew Chemey and Tom King of Macromedia will help you learn what you need know as a developer to create content that tracks well and integrates tightly with Macromedia Breeze.

mLearning- Development is Still a Big Challenge

I've written a few mobile applications and keep thinking I should dig in again. Then reality sets in. I think we're a good 10-12 months away from being able to widely deploy mobile learning. Too much inconsistency across PDA's like Palm & Pocket PC's, SmartPhone and mobile phones-- even within anyone of those genres it is tough. You'd almost have to be willing to target one model of PDA or phone. That just won't work for most training needs. Even for corporate training with company-supplied phones, many companies let employees choose which phone (or even carrier). Frustrating? Take a look.

Palm OS. I love my Treo; best phone I've had, but... Palm OS is aged and seemed going to Linux, now maybe Windows Mobile, so who knows. I'm not going to start with Palm OS native apps right now. See Palm OS the future at PalmAddict.

Microsoft mobile tools rarely span 3 years of target platform releases, so for instance embedded Visual C works on PPC 2002, but not PPC 2002, and marginally on PPC 5. Sound complicated? Someone from the WIndows Mobile Team put together a nice 5 column by 7 column chart showing where showing where .NET Compact Framework, embedded Visual C, and embedded Visual Basic will and will NOT work. It is a very handy chart, but doesn't help much if you know one tool/language and want to target PPC 2002/2003 - Windows Mobile 5 and SmartPhone, unless you're will to live with restricted debugging and can still get embedded Visual C 3.

Java has gone through Java 2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) to Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) to Mobile Services Architecture MSA, and the implementations are still fragmented enough that between Java changes and device/browser capability you sometimes need to target a specific release of a specific handset. See c-net "'Write once, run anywhere' not working for phones."

Take all of that and then add GSM vs CDMA phones (oops forgot iDEN/Nextel, RIM BlackBerry, and Qualcom BREW development environments). Then add issues with over-the-air (OTA) application deployment and carrier certification.

Seems like web applications might be the way to go for awhile, though you still have to adapt to mobile browser subtleties. For now, sigh, I guess we'll have to let entertainment and games lead the way. Once they've paved the way, we can use that stability to transfer knowledge and skills via mobile.

It also makes me wonder if thinking of mobiles as another platform for 'classic elearning is just simply wrong. Maybe there are other ways to use this technology, centered more around responsiveness, presence, collaboration and location awareness (or independence). I don't really think of a phone or an iPod as 'elearning platforms', yet people certainly use them to learn new things.

Registration Now Open for MAX eLearning Day on October 16, 2005

Macromedia is hosting an all-day event on elearning the day before the MAX conference officially begins. The event is FREE. An expanded agenda should be available soon. Meantime, you can get some information and register here:

MAX E-Learning Day October 16, 2005 - Register here: http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=239246&loc=en_us

While you're at it, sign-up for the whole shebang and get the latest info on everything Macromedia.

Making the Most of the Most Common Media - Text

Interesting research about multiple columns, line length and the impact on reading speed and comprehension from Usability News at Witchita State. The review of prior research reads like a tip sheet for text layout and editing for elearning.

In summary, the major findings regarding line length, justification, and multi-column displays and online reading have been:
Longer line lengths generally facilitate faster reading speeds.
Shorter line lengths result in increased comprehension.
The optimal number of characters per line is between 45 and 65.
Paging through online text generally results in better comprehension than scrolling.
Reading speed is faster for both single and multiple columns, but preference is for multiple short columns.
Left-justified text is read faster than full-justified text.

From Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends! by J. Ryan Baker, full article here: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/columns.htm

Good points to keep in mind; shorter lines for better comprehension and avoid scrolling. I've always strived to do this in design and it is good to see the research to back it up.

Trim the fat from Simulations- Tips for Reducing File Size

OK, its not quite liposuction. Here are some tips for creating lean SWFs from Captivate projects. Once again someone else provides the content (Dave Mozealous) and Tom performs the dangerous stuntwork of typing.

See these two sections of the help file:

Troubleshooting movie file size

Recording Tricks and Tips

Finally, when conditions warrant you can take these extra steps:

Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and deselect 508 and Include Breeze metadata (if not publishing to Breeze).

Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select 'Advanced Movie Compression'.

Select Movie>Preferences>Preferences and select 'Compress compiled SWF file'.

Select Movie>Preferences>Start and End and deselect the option for a loading screen, this should make the svelte SWF play ASAP.

Note that the most likely culprit for file bloat is audio. Consider this and if you still want narration make your scripts tight, crop audio closely, and use the smallest/lowest practical audio rate (eg, AM radio)

-TK

Captivate in Action: View It and Do It Examples

Thanks to Silke for letting me know that the Captivate team has worked with Convergys to post some nice Captivate examples. They really show how rapid elearning simulations can be scenario-based and compelling (as opposed to neuron-numbing displays of dialog boxes with narration as dynamic as a Ben Stein caricature). Even better, there aren't exotic post-production tricks, it's all done with out-of-the-box features.

Scroll down and look for Captivate in Action on this page http://www.macromedia.com/software/captivate

Ink Officially Dries on PENS Specification

The AICC officially released the PENS specification. As explained in an earlier post, PENS (Package Exchange Notification Services) allows a content tool to stage a SCORM package or AICC content zip file at a URL and then "ping" the LMS (or CMS or LCMS) server. This ping triggers the LMS to retrieve and import the content, and allows for alert messages as the content moves through an LMS workflow. Voila, the content is published-- no need for users to understand FTP or have special ActiveX upload controls, etc.

Customers are already using products or services supporting PENS from vendors including: EEDO, EMC Documentum, Pathlore, Plateau, and Recombo.

I'm looking forward to that list growing, and seeing more and more products that simplify transfering elearning from authoring or content systems to a LMS. I hope by next year we all just expect publishing to an LMS to be a simple one-time configuration in the content tool/system, followed by a PhD step (Press here, Darling) whenever we feel like publishing content.

For details on PENS, see these AICC documents:

AGR-011 Guidelines for Package Exchange Notification Services (recommending use & support for PENS, incl. simple overview diagram)
CMI010 - Guidelines for Package Exchange Notification Services (technical specification for those implementing it)

- Tom

Captivate Integrates with Breeze

Captivate was recently updated to offer tighter integration with Breeze. This includes direct publishing of Breeze-ready content to the server and optionally the Captivate source file too. These features alone will make it much easier to deploy and manage Captivate content. For example, you can easily search from Breeze to find Captivate content and source files.

The free Captivate 1.01 update adds these features, as well as support for Breeze metadata that allows the indexing and provides Breeze reports with the question stem/prompt and full text for answer options from Captivate questions slides. New Breeze 5 features enable Flash-based content to work in both a "shared view" synchronous and a "let em try individually" asynchronous mode. Captivate now recognizes the instructor toggles and supports both modes in live meeting sessions, and recordings. For full details on Captivate 1.01, see the update page. Or, take it from me and even if you don't use Breeze, just get the update; it's worth it!

- Tom

Elearning Publishing Gets Better

Two recent developments make it easier to publish (and use) elearning content with management systems.

For the sake of better indexing, I've posted separate entries on each.

MacroChat on using Captivate with Breeze

We have this great opportunity to learn more about Captivate tracking and usage with Breeze. Here is the information to sign up:

Capturing Quiz Responses in Captivate Macrochat

Thursday, June 9, 2005

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM US/Eastern

Macrochats are free, online LIVE technical discussions!

Join Macromedia Product Support Engineer David Mozealous for a live discussion on integrating Captivate output with Breeze. David will be covering the capturing of quiz results with the new Breeze reporting feature in Captivate as well as synchronizing content in Breeze Live meetings.

What You Will Learn

* How to configure Captivate to publish to a Breeze server

* How to develop quizzes in Captivate

* How to develop courses in Breeze using Captivate quizzes

* How to sync content in a Breeze live meeting

Rapid Elearning is NOT Process Improvement

Today I'm participating in a Rapid Elearning course being led by Bersin & Associates at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Patty Shank of Learning Peaks and a few other vendors are contributing as well. Several themes have emerged and resonated.

First, Rapid Elearning is about revolutionizing or accelerating instructional design. I'm all for process improvement, process re-engineering, and reduction of cycle time, but that doesn't encapsulate rapid elearning to me. Josh Bersin really drove this home today. I would state it as follows:

Rapid Elearning is the conflux of time-sensitive information, enabling technology, a skill or knowledge gap, and it often includes a compelling event (such as dealing with an innovation, disruption, crisis or opportunity).

Second, as we've always expressed, Rapid Elearning is a continuum. (As of May 2005, see the "No Barriers.... No Limits" content here on our site). In some cases it may be time-critical information for experts with a quick knowledge check, in other cases it may be lightweight simulations and scenario-based training for intermediate users. The content can range from narration and animations done with Breeze, to Captivate simulations and scenarios, or even virtual classrooms mixing both of those content types with live instruction and collaboration.

Third, Rapid Elearning is not just a technology. It is a concept, an approach enabled by technology. Choosing the technology alone doesn't make it good or bad. You still have to think through what to cover, how to cover it, and the desired results (a demonstrable skill or measurable knowledge). I like to say "Bullet points don't kill presentations, bad presenters kill presentations." Keep rapid elearning content relevant, short and sweet-- I shoot for a 5-8 minute experience.

My advice, to paraphrase Dean Wormer, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through rapid elearning." Keep it lean, lively, relevant, accurate and timely.

Fourth, Rapid Elearning can be an excellent entrance point for organizations getting started with elearning. If you focus on shorter, time-sensitive information, audiences will appreciate it more. When you're trying to get your job done, "available" is better than artistic. Compare news to literature.

-Tom

PS- This was composed and posted from a Treo, we're mo-blogging now. Is this "rapid blogging" or is that sort of redundant.