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Standards-friendly eLearning and Web development

Posts tagged ‘best practices’

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 7: Giving the Revisions a Home

I decided to post the revised Adobe Captivate publishing template to GitHub, where it can be easily copied, forked, and updated. I moved a few bits of markup/code around, added some configuration options (such as the ability to turn off centering, turn on logging, and require SCORM when loading), and added a ton of comments to explain some of the new options. Hopefully it’s all self-explanatory.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 6: Bugs & Scope Creep

For this blog post, I was going to write a summary of the changes to the template and wrap up the series. Instead, I’m looking at ways to increase the template’s flexibility and hot-rod it for some cool other stuff.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 5: Finishing up

In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In part two, we cleaned up the HTML file and externalized all JavaScript. In part three, we cleaned up the JavaScript. In part four, we updated the SCORM code. In this installment, we will put the finishing touches on our code and move our files into Captivate’s publishing folder.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 4: SCORM

In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In part two, we cleaned up the HTML file and externalized all JavaScript. In part three, we cleaned up the JavaScript. In this installment, we will examine and update the SCORM code.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 3: JavaScript

In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In part two, we cleaned up the HTML file and externalized all JavaScript. Today we will clean up the JavaScript.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 2: HTML

In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In this part, we’ll take an in-depth look at the HTML generated by Captivate (using the SCORM 2004 publishing template) and clean it up as much as we can.

Cleaning up Adobe Captivate’s SCORM Publishing Template, Part 1: Introduction

In this multi-part series, I will walk through the files Captivate outputs when publishing to SCORM 2004, pointing out the bad parts and suggesting alternatives when needed. At the end of the series, I will provide a fully-functional SCORM 2004 publishing template you can use with Captivate 5.5.

Dear Apple and Adobe

Neither of you are choir boys, and I’m fed up with your bickering.

Best Practices in E-Learning

Someone recently posted a blog entry ranting about the use of the term “best practices” in our industry. I understand the frustration with thoughtless pronouncements about best practices, especially coming from people who may not know any better; it will often sound a lot like how like mom used to say “eat this, it’s good for you” without really knowing whether it’s true. However, there is a big difference between best practices in terms of learning theory — something that’s difficult to quantify and/or prove — and technology.

SCORM security (two kinds of SCORM people)

I’ve had a flurry of emails and messages regarding my SCORM cheat the past few days, and have received feedback from a number of well-regarded SCORM aficionados, some of whom contributed to the standard and helped make SCORM what it is today. This is wonderful, I’m very happy to hear from everyone, especially regarding such an engaging topic.

But as I hear more from these seasoned SCORM pros, I’ve made (what I believe to be) an interesting observation: there is a sharp division between die-hard SCORM developers and casual users. I suppose I’ve felt this way for a long time, but it’s really coming into focus this week. Let me try to define the camps.