E-LEARNING DESIGN│HTML5 AUTHORING TOOLS VS FLASH

Historically most e-learning content has been developed using Adobe Flash. It's an established and widely used technology, but unfortunately, it's not compatible with many mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. With mobile devices increasingly becoming necessary business device, Flash-based educational tools carry the risk of becoming obsolete.

If you're looking at Flash strictly as a means of publishing content, then it is limited, but the ability to create various content makes it quite versatile.

Flash has become a crutch for a lot of designers, but the need to start designing for a new era using different paradigms is critical. There will be many Flash legacy development projects that will need support for years to come, but all future e-learning content initiatives should be developed with mobile in mind using HTML5.

FLASH LIMITATIONS

• No support for adaptive rendering/responsive designs

• Less flexibility

• No support on mobile platforms

• Uses high processing power and drains battery

HTML5 DEVELOPMENT

In today's world, content needs to be responsively designed so that it is independent of screen size, and created so that it adapts to the device and its capabilities. Content that can't adapt to a smaller screen may promote negative user experiences. We should always aim to deliver content compatible with devices of all screen sizes to avoid alienating any potential users.

BENEFITS

• Widely used for offering content on the Web

• Supports rich media, graphics, animations and interactions

• Works well across modern browsers such as Internet Explorer (IE) 9/10, and all latest versions of Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox

• Most importantly it is compatible with modern mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets of both Android and iPhone platforms

• A great option for creating eLearning material

LIMITATIONS

• Not supported on older browsers such as IE 6, 7 and 8

• Possible shortage of developers being that it's fairly new to the market

SCORM AND HTML5

SCORM is basically a collection of standardized JavaScript calls embedded in a page that was delivered to the student's browser. These calls enable the course content (running in the user's browser window) to communicate back to a SCORM layer running inside the LMS that is delivering the training.

SCORM has nothing to do with HTML5. The challenge of HTML5 is not SCORM compatibility, but is in fact creating HTML5 content that is compatible across the multiple browsers.

CREATE POWERFUL CONTENT

E-learning is a growing field and investment involves acquiring new tools and technologies. We want our learning materials, e-learning courses, performance support tools and additional resources to be as accessible as possible and as long lived as possible.

So yes, the technical format you choose does matter.

We also want our materials to be intuitive and creative enough so our learners can enjoy their training. Therefore we have to think about user experience based on the variety of audiences we have.