Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop Your eLearning in Flash

Developing eLearning in Flash is not as hard nor as expensive as you may think. What’s more, whatever your mind can conceive, you can literally achieve in Flash! (Within reason)

1. Flash professionals are plentiful: Most professional graphic designers are at least somewhat familiar with Flash, and many are expert users. Plentiful talent means relatively reasonable hourly or salary rates that you and your department can afford. Whether you outsource or retain internal talent, you can add Flash experts to your talent pool easily.
2. Do-it-yourself tools are limited: Why limit yourself to the capabilities of do-it-yourself tools such as Captivate, Articulate, and Camtasia (to name a few). Often these tools in the hands of a novice can actually result in very badly designed eLearning that is also more bandwidth intensive (fatter files) than more efficiently designed Flash pieces.
3. Rapid Intake makes Flash “SCORM Friendly“: wwwRapidIntake.com makes a product called ProForm. They also offer a web-based version called Unison. This tool makes it incredibly easy to take any Flash file and present it in a “SCORM Wrapper”. No special programming skills required!
4. Custom interactivities are easily programmed: Whether you want to create custom drag-and-drop interactivities, hotspots, software simulations, or other interactive elements, designing these in Flash is actually quite easy for an intermediate-level Flash programmer. The leap from Java Script to Flash ActionScript programming is not a large one, so many of your current web programmers may be well positioned to pick up ActionScript skills.
5. Animations and Illustrations that add a “wow” factor: Creating stunning and creative visuals using Flash adds an extra touch of elegance and interest to what may otherwise be boring page-turning eLearning courses.
6. Synchronize audio lecture with visuals: The Flash timeline makes it easy to drop in audio lecture (e.g. MP3 recorded using the free Audacity tool) and reveal/remove visuals like bullet points, pictures, graphics, and so on, in timing with the audio lecture. See www.mediamanagers.net/portfolio for lots of great examples of this.
7. Integration of Video: Flash has a great video encoder that comes standard, which makes it very easy to import your video content into Flash and convert it into lightweight online video with built-in play/pause/mute and other controls. Using Rapid Intake’s ProForm you can then quickly drop these videos into your LMS via either SCORM or AICC import.
8. Increase your learner satisfaction and completion rates: The number one reason why learners do not complete courses is that they loose interest in the content. When you develop in Flash, you tend to build your eLearning at the instructional design/storyboard level with an eye toward user engagement. You simply can do more in Flash to make eLearning interesting than you can in any other tool available today.
9. Custom Reporting and LMS Data Tracking: With Flash, you can program custom code that reports back data to your LMS in order to add a more sophisticated level of user performance tracking.
10. It just makes your job as an eLearning developer more fun! Let’s face it – sometimes working in eLearning can be a thankless job. If you have not yet started developing in Flash, pick a project where you can dip your toe into the Flash water. You may rediscover a love for the creative eLearning development process and reenergize your work.

Promoting Cleavage Covers via eLearning-style animations

One of my relatives invented a product called Cleavage Covers.  She came to me asking how to best infuse some nice looking multimedia into her website. We came up with a concept of using a 3D model and showing before/after effects. You can see the demonstration on her website at Cleavage Cover.  The technique that we used to create this Flash piece is similar to those which we use to create visual eLearning aids. I would imagine that there are many applications in the fashion and other industry for eLearning – hopefully this piece will give you some ideas.