Macromedia™ Flash® is a multimedia tool with a long history of progressively increasing capabilities. Yet because of this slow but steady evolution, even experienced designers and developers of e-Learning are often not aware of everything Flash can do. And, while it may be true that Flash is the single most-often used e-Learning development tool, its lengthy learning curve challenges designers and developers who want to master the full potential of Flash.
One way that people learn is through the experience of others, as encompassed in stories. In anticipation of The eLearning Flash Developer’s Symposium that will be held in Boston April 20-21, 2004, I interviewed five of the expert presenters on the program by telephone, to tap into their experience by asking three basic questions:
- How are they using Flash in e-Learning applications?
- How do they and their associates learn to use Flash?
- What are some of their “lessons learned?”
Participating in the interviews were:
- Amanda Saba, Web Author and Course Developer with The Plus Group (for Sandia National Laboratories)
- Andrew Corbett, Independent e-Learning Developer, Corbett Learning Media
- Ben Glazer, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Enspire Learning
- Paul Clothier, Principal, Fhoton Learning
- Thomas Toth, Owner and Chief Designer, Tothweb The interview transcriptions have been edited.
How are you using Flash in your e-Learning projects?
In the past two years, Learning Solutions Magazine has published several articles about using Flash in e-Learning. (See Sidebar 1, Learning Solutions Articles on Flash.) However, these examples are by no means the only uses e-Learning developers have for Flash. Each of our five experts brings particular backgrounds and skills into their projects, and this means that each one uses Flash in a different way.
Macromedia® Flash™ MX and XML: More Than Just Movies, by Gregg Wygonik
July 23, 2002. In this article, Gregg explains how to use XML and Flash MX to represent
the user interface and the sequence of content, not the content itself. The project
demonstrates how to build a small “shell” application in Flash MX that will be
able to work for many projects without the need to recompile anything.
Getting Interactive: Rich, Rapid e-Learning With Macromedia® Flash™ and
Breeze™, by Paul Clothier
September 2, 2003. The most sought-after e-Learning features involve rich media,
animation, and simulation to raise interactivity levels. At the same time, organizations
want shorter development times, lower costs, and better collaboration between
designers and subject matter experts. Find out about two tools that are providing a
“building block” approach to these goals for leading e-Learning vendors, and learn
how these tools can also work for you!
Tutorial: e-Learning with Flash® MX 2004, by Paul Clothier
November 17, 2003. The latest version of Flash MX has been specifically designed
for the instructional designer or subject matter expert who has no experience with
Flash or ActionScript. Here is a fast tutorial that will introduce you to the main features
so that you can start using this tool in your e-Learning projects right away!
Andrew Corbett
Primarily I’ve used Flash in the sciences. I come from a background in biology, and I have a math background as well. While any instruction needs life, I have especially tried to use Flash’s mathematical capability to bring math and science content to life.
I was trying to do this with Java at first, because I came from a modeling background, and Java was more comfortable for me. But Java didn’t live up to its potential in terms of cross-platform compatibilities, whereas with Flash cross-platform compatibility was great.
When they added the math functions to Flash, you were able to actually do simulations. You can simulate random samplings, for example, or plot complex functions in order to modify the plot by choosing parameters, and these applications will work across all platforms. (See Figures 1, 2, and 3)
FIGURE 1 This is one of a suite of tutorials developed with Flash. The students demonstrate their understanding of graphs by dragging data points to the correct location on the plot. (Andrew Corbett)
FIGURE 2 This Flash movie simulates an enzyme-mediated biochemical reaction. It is driven behind the scenes by a valid mathematical model of the chemical reaction. The student can explore the behavior of the reaction by moving the sliders to change key variables. (Andrew Corbett)
FIGURE 3 This Flash movie simulates the monitoring of bird diversity in a hypothetical coastal marsh. Students click “Sample” to randomly generate a new sample, they do some calculations, and they can then check their work. (Andrew Corbett)
Thomas Toth
I’ve been using Flash since version 4, so that’s about four or five years. About half of my work is in e-Learning projects and the rest is your typical Flash development: product demonstrations, banner ads, web sites, that kind of stuff.
I started using Flash for e-Learning because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the de facto standard for any kind of multimedia work on the Web. Once ActionScript “grew up,” in Flash 5, it started turning into a tool that was a programmer’s dream. It allowed an advanced level of interactivity and variable control, so that users could, for example, type their name in, answer some questions, and the program would evaluate those responses in such a way as to give them feedback or to change the program in a certain way. Once Flash started allowing you to easily import video elements, it then became a no-brainer.
When you’re developing multimedia or e-Learning for the Web, if you need something to move or if you need to import video or audio, you’ve got to be using Flash.
Editor: Oddly enough, I still occasionally hear e-Learning designers who think that Flash isn’t interactive. Apparently they’ve never seen it used that way.
Back when Flash first came out and became very popular, you’d access a Web site, then sit back and watch and, boom-boom, something exciting would happen on the screen. Then you’d click on “Skip Intro” and enter the web site. That’s all that a lot of beginning developers in Flash knew how to do. Number one, they were afraid of ActionScript. Number two, all they needed to do for their customers was accomplished on the time line in Flash. You’d build a movie to start, five or ten seconds later it stops, and then it loops. (Editor’s note: For those unfamiliar with the software, Flash multimedia applications are referred to as “movies.” They can be created by dragging objects to a graphical “time line” or by programming in ActionScript, which is the Flash scripting language.)
You didn’t really need to understand ActionScript in order to develop Flash movies. And then the developer community got hold of it and said, “Wait a minute! This tool is much more robust.” You can dynamically load data from databases into Flash movies, or have information typed into a Flash form that gets processed and stored in the database. And you’ve got various Web services, which are XML data streams that you can incorporate into Flash. These are examples of advanced level components of current Web technology.
Macromedia has done a great job of incorporating this cool technology that talks to databases and adds a level of interactivity into Flash. You just have to take the time and energy to learn ActionScript. Get a Macromedia Training from the Source book or a friends of ED book and figure out how to make this happen. (Editor’s Note: See Thomas’ comments in the section below ”What’s the best way to learn to use Flash?” and the book list in Sidebar 2, Resources.)
Flash is a much more visual way of developing. When you’re developing e-Learning, static HTML pages are great, and pictures are great, but if you can actually use animation or 3D or motion capture or video capture to draw your learner in, your e-Learning programs are going to be much more effective.
Editor: Do you use other tools along with Flash for e-Learning development?
Yes. I use a program called Swift 3D. That’s my 3D development program. I can export the files out of Swift 3D as Flash files. Let’s say I have a globe or a cube that I’m rotating for some reason. I can bring that rotation into Flash and control it using ActionScript or using the time line from within Flash. I also use a program called SWiSH. I don’t use SWiSH for its Flash programming capabilities, I use it for text effects. If you want to blow up some text or have text appear in a certain way, it’s a great way of very rapidly developing text-related effects. I recently downloaded their SWiSHpowerFX, a Flash plug-in that is an extension that I’ve started to play with and it’s a nice addition.
Of course I use Fireworks and PhotoShop for the graphics I bring in, and Dreamweaver for mounting the Flash movies.
Editor: Do you have other developers working with you?
I sub-contract out a
little bit, but most of the work is done by me. There’s a graphics guy I
sometimes go to for making icons — he’s really good at making icon sets. I’ve
got another guy who, if I just need to dump a lot of text or create a bunch of
pages, is really good at generating the HTML pages for me. There’s a woman
who’s a database guru that I go to. I’ve got a team that I work around. I don’t
have any employees, but I sub out to about three or four different people all over
the
Amanda Saba
Actually, in my
current assignment, I am not developing e-Learning with Flash right now. My
comments relate to my experience when I was a multimedia programmer and
developer with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), working
at AFOTEC, the Air Force Operational Test and
The applications we were building were for blended learning purposes and also to take the place of some of their classroom courses. We decided to build one of these applications in Flash, because previously we had been using Authorware®, and the limitations of Authorware were getting frustrating. We needed some video and we were having a lot of problems, so we decided to go to Flash.
In doing this project, instead of building individual course pieces, we were building a player, where it was all XML-driven. It would grab all the content externally and put it into the Flash player. The external content was .swf files (Flash), jpegs (images), text files, Flash files that were videos, pdfs, all kinds of different files.
Editor: You said you were using Flash because of the limitations of Authorware. You had other options — why did you choose Flash?
There were two of us on the development team and we had worked with Flash before. We were looking at the dynamic capabilities of it. At AFOTEC they were running Cold Fusion version 5, so the future plan, when they upgraded Cold Fusion, was to connect all of the e-Learning to a database and have all the content dragged from the database. We were pulling it from XML files.
The other reason we went with Flash rather than Authorware was because we needed to have the training be both online and on a CD. With Authorware the player is up to, I think, 14 megs now, while the Flash player is only around 700K, so the distribution of the player was another factor.
Our most successful project was one we finished right before I left. It was an introduction to AFOTEC — this is what AFOTEC does, the structure of the people there. It was pretty much a “Welcome to AFOTEC” on CD and it was also going to be online. This had been a standup course previous to that and they decided they wanted it on a CD to send out to everyone.
Ben Glazer
We custom develop courses and simulations. The vast majority of what we do is in Flash. So we have a number of very talented Flash designers and developers who help us to develop high-quality, engaging, and effective learning experiences for our clients.
Our clients are a
pretty mixed bag. Our first client was
We’re working with
Canon
We’ve been using Flash since the start of the company. We did a fairly extensive evaluation of the technology available at that time. We wanted the technology to be an enabler, rather than a barrier to the content that we develop. We considered a variety of different options. We looked at Macromedia Director® and Author-ware and Java, as well as Flash. Flash was really the clear winner — there wasn’t anything else that was close. If you’re going to develop online interactive multimedia, then Flash offers a development capability that’s fairly easy to get up and running quickly. Flash has a large developer and designer community that you can tap into, and that helps provide support for the tool. It’s clearly optimized for deployment, with direct support for things like vector graphics, MP3 compressed audio, and so on. Perhaps the most telling factor is that it’s by far the most commonly found browser plug-in.
Along with Flash, we use tools for developing other forms of media that are included in Flash, like video and audio editing. We’ve developed our own platform that sits on top of Flash and enables us to do things like separate out textual content from graphics and logic. Our writers actually develop their scripts in an Excel spreadsheet, so they can click a button that runs a macro that exports the content to an XML format that our engine can then read in directly to Flash. It enables us to pipeline the development effort to a large extent. Our clients also benefit because we provide them with the ability to then edit that content without having to have any Flash expertise.
Paul Clothier
I develop e-Learning with a number of tools as well as Flash. I use various tools, from plain HTML with Dreamweaver, to Flash, to simulation tools like Qarbon and RoboDemo. I do use Flash a lot, especially when I’ve been working with high-tech companies. Quite often there are concepts they want to communicate that are not always easily understood by using diagrams and two-dimensional pictures with labels on them. I often use Flash to simplify concepts.
Let me give you an example. There’s one company I worked with last year that needed to explain how a certain part of its software reacted if other parts of the software went down. In other words, if a particular executable stopped running, how this “coordinator” component would actually go ahead and restart these other components. That’s not always easy to explain in words or with one or two diagrams, so Flash was used to animate that to simplify the concept.
