Category Archives: eLearning News

You’ve got 2 years to convert your SWFs…

Flash Player vs ToolThere is a lot to “Flash”.

The Flash Player will finally be EOL’d at the end of 2020. So all of us who still have Flash *player* published content out there have about 2 years to get it migrated to a non-Flash solution.

I think the above image is being a bit nitpicky but its a valid point, and a somewhat sore point for thousands of developers who spent years refining their Flash skills – and who struggle to find as an effective rich media development platform.

Indeed, apparently “Adobe AIR for desktop and mobile will continue with a re-energized roadmap.” Continue reading You’ve got 2 years to convert your SWFs…

Kaltura Virtual Education Summit – 2016

Online education continues to see the use of video on a rapid rise, especially with the popularity (deserved or not) of MOOCs. Thankfully the speed of most home and mobile connections has finally allowed high-quality video to be a substantial medium in eLearning. I’m sure many remember the small 15fps videos that we had to make do with a decade ago…and how many remember the even smaller, more-compressed video we had to optimize when authoring CD-based training?! Ah, Cinepak

Kaltura is a provider of online video solutions and moving up in the world right along with video itself. We’ve worked with Kaltura fairly extensively over the past year and find its capabilities and features to be mostly excellent. There are, of course, a few areas to be improved…but the core video-streaming capabilities, to a variety of client devices, is simply solid.

I try to be fair and/or somewhat agnostic in this blog, so don’t think of this promotion something specific only to Kaltura. There are other solid video providers out there (i.e. Panopto, MediaCore [now owned by Workday], Vimeo, etc.), each with variations in toolsets, features, and focus… I just don’t have a lot of direct experience with most of them (well, maybe Vimeo a bit) and have been working deeply with Kaltura…plus, ‘open source’ is nice.

SO, to the point, Kaltura is presenting their Education Virtual Summit on May 19th (2016). From their page, Continue reading Kaltura Virtual Education Summit – 2016

Authoring Tool Updates

New software updatesEdit 3/14/16: Adobe has released an official update for Captivate 9. Most of you should be able to open Captivate and select Help > Updates to launch the Adobe Application Manager and select the release. For those of you who need an alternate method, you can download the patch from the CP Downloads page. See the Release Notes and this Adobe Blog post for more details on this rather extensive update, including new Responsive Skins, improved ‘Roundtripping’, and improved Rulers, Guides, and State options.

A summary of current (as of this post) updates for the more ‘popular’ eLearning development tools; Lectora, Storyline, and Captivate – along with thoughts on a couple other tools: Continue reading Authoring Tool Updates

Flash > Animate, a new beginning (?)

AnimateCC-2015As has been bouncing around the news, or at least relevant social headlines, the past few months – Adobe’s Flash product has undergone a significant makeover. Long doomed by many, considered ‘too proprietary’ or old or irrelevant in the current HTML5-is-our-saviour era…Adobe has taken steps to keep it alive. Welcome Adobe Animate CC.

Too little, too late? Is it enough to overcome the flash-bashing trend (deserved or not)?

Continue reading Flash > Animate, a new beginning (?)

Community Connections

Adobe-Community-ConnectionsAdobe has recently been making a push to significantly improve the user experience of their community support resources (likely, at least in part, to Articulate’s excellent user-group support forum). Adobe’s relatively new ‘Community Connections‘ page is a add-on to their revamped product communities (i.e. Photoshop, Captivate, and tons of other products).

Per the Community Connections page, Continue reading Community Connections

Updates! Captivate 9 and Prime (Adobe LMS)

Big update news from Adobe! A long-awaited update to Captivate, now at version 9, AND a new LMS product – Captivate Prime. I new this LMS was coming but assumed it would be an extension or adaptation of Adobe Connect, so was surprised to see Captivate Prime and not Connect Prime. Looks like Adobe has put significant effort into this LMS product, building it from scratch (?) as opposed to sticking a new UI or plugin on to their mature Connect platform.

First, back to Captivate 9 itself. As with all their version updates, this new release includes some solid updates. Two of the most exciting for this old Captivate developer: Continue reading Updates! Captivate 9 and Prime (Adobe LMS)

Creative Cloud 2015 – Upgrade Cautions

CC2015-installIssues01Adobe recently released a pretty substantial update to their Creative Cloud (CC) product. Included are updates to many of the products, a return of Adobe Stock Images (though at additional cost) through a partnership with Fotolia, and a variety of bug fixes (release notes and a much-more detailed blog post on update specifics).

CC2015-stock01Update with caution! With substantial updates to the child products, when you install each update the default option is to have the previous versions *removed*. This is different than previous updates’ defaults and is a concern for a variety of reasons: Continue reading Creative Cloud 2015 – Upgrade Cautions

eLearning Resources

I have a few larger subjects to write about, but the time to do so is fleeting! eLearningArticlesCloudSo thought I’d do this quickie in the interest of spreading the news…

Education Dive is a great, free resource and daily digest summarizing a variety of articles daily. “The Education Industry in 60 seconds” they say… I like their daily email – it gives me a quick overview of a variety of news articles and related items, with links to those items for a closer read. Great resource for those in the education field.

Ed Digest is similar, but it’s not free, and does focus more more academic articles and research, as opposed to general news and articles per Education Dive. However, their summary page of monthly articles provides links to the external sites and resources they discuss, which makes for a good ‘pull’ resource.

Otherwise, personal blogs are often a great resource and fun read for the occasional downtime: Continue reading eLearning Resources

Ay NPAPI! Chrome and eLearning Support

This has apparently been in the works for over a year, but it’s just recently popped-up on my radar as a I’ve received a browser extension warnings for a few tools…

Plugin Blocked‘NPAPI’ is the ‘Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface’ architecture used for a majority of web browser plugins – such as Quicktime, Flash, etc. It was initiated by the fine folks at Abobe in order to help integrate their PDF technology (Acrobat) with the web experience. You can read more about the history of NPAPI at Wikipedia.

Google’s Chrome browser has planned dropping support for NPAPI plugins since 2013, according to that article, due to “NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture [becoming] a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity.”NPAPI support deprecated

So more recent versions of Chrome have blocked any such plugins from running without explicit permission which, to me, was fine (in the guise of a bit more secure). But now, with Chrome v42, such plugins just won’t start at all!

 

Continue reading Ay NPAPI! Chrome and eLearning Support