pipwerks

Being an idealist, I eagerly bought into what was being covered in grad school. I believed (and still do, to a point) that every project should follow ADDIE or a similar model. C’mon, it makes sense, doesn’t it? The line in the sand had been drawn: skip these principles at your own peril. Now that I’ve spent a few years working full-time as an instructional designer-slash-eLearning developer, I’ve learned first-hand that the instructional design ideals taught in grad school are quickly thrown out the window when you get a ‘real’ job.

Understanding that we should be using standards and best practices throughout e-learning development, the question becomes “what standards and best practices should we follow?”

Here’s my attempt at outlining some basics.

I’m 100% positive I’ve missed a few things, and I’m pretty sure not everyone will agree with my statements. Why not join in and add your two cents?

I’m proposing we create a community-defined set of simplified e-learning development standards that can be viewed more as ‘rules of thumb’ than law.

Today Rapid Intake announced a new service named Unison. Out of curiosity, I perused the Rapid Intake site to read more about Unison. [...] I certainly don’t mean to beat up on whoever designed their site, but as a company whose business is publishing web-based documents, this website gives me zero confidence in the quality of their product.

Buckle your seatbelts, you may not like this statement: Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

There, I’ve said it. Please don’t hate me.

Update April 7, 2008: I’ve written a new AS3 class named LegacyCaptivateLoader that uses ExternalInterface to bridge the AS3 SWF and the Captivate SWF. Check it out.
I guess I’m late to the party, but I only recently realized that although a Flash Player 9 SWF can load an older Flash Player 6/7/8 SWF, it [...]

Here are my first impressions of Captivate 3’s improvements and new features.

I just got Captivate 3, and eagerly installed it to see if any improvements have been made regarding JavaScript and Actionscript handling. Short answer: nope.

Captivate SWFs can communicate with the host HTML file via JavaScript, but the scripting options suffer from severe limitations imposed by the Captivate authoring environment.

Captivate 2.0 doesn’t include the ability directly manipulate Actionscript. This has been problematic for people like myself who have Flash-based ‘players’ that load and unload both Captivate SWFs and Flash SWFs; we often need the Captivate SWF to perform some kind of action when it reaches its end.