[Resolved] AICC / Learning Management System Forum

[JabezStone]

Originally posted by flea
it was fine for me. then all of a sudden - one day it wasn't. Who knows what's up!!

It must have been that self-detonating actionscript bomb I had set for the 13th of June!
I don't know if the problem is actually my footer or not either. I actually thought I did a masterful job on it [/shameless-conceited-comment]

Well, it's gone now anyway... off to footer heaven. It was sure nice while it lasted and, man, I'm gonna miss that little feller!

BTW, I just turned off all SWF's in my browser because these footers are slowing it down too much. Kinda stinks!

[sorehead]

FINALLY!!! Jeez I've been going round the bend trying to find fellow flashers(ooerrr) with experience creating AICC/SCORM courseware to run on LMSs it's an absolute nightmare especially if your in the e-learning industry 'cos more and more companies are purchasing these LMSs to run and track courseware and if you want a slice of the pie you need to make sure your courseware is compliant.

Only trouble is all AICC/SCORM or LMS documentation is geared towards creating Frame/table html based courseware and theres little or no information on using Flash to do the same (yes I know Flash5 have publishing templates with minimal SCORM RTI support but it would help if they put some thought into the bloody helpfile).

[seanmo]

I co-own a company where we develop online learning/training products primarily using Flash. Like most of you I have found it hard to find any info on using flash for this purpose and specifically integrating with standards and LMS's. If projections are correct, this is going to be fast growing segment of multimedia development (plus macromedia is starting to really plug elearning), and I would love to see a forum devoted to general elearning/education issues, and where we could talk about standards and LMS's. Who do you talk to about new forums? I think it would be very helpful, and as far as I can tell, it would be the first forum of its kind for developers. If anyone is interested in lobbying for this, or needs help organizing, or need a mod, count me in.
thanks

[pwilster]

Pwilster, have you/do you use the Flash learning extensions at all for CBT development?

also, the program sites you mentioned, "WebCT or SmartForceLMS" seem to be geared toward providing actual training modules. I couldn't see where they might provide just the tracking, but maybe haven't searched thoroughly enough. How do you use the WebCT solution?

Sorry for the delay, If your question points directly to Flash as an authoring media my answer is yes (both for CBT and WBT). What do you mean by learning extensions? the learning objects Flash has in its library to create course interactions? Maybe I´m missing something...

GlobalLMS (SmartForce) as you know, is AICC compliant, that means you could integrate your AICC courseware to any of this LMS´s at least in theory. But they don´t spread the word on this fact very much, their main objective is to sell your company their courses (AND their LMS).

WebCT on the other hand sells just the LMS, you have to provide your solution on course modules.

[sorehead]

The biggest problem with LMSs is that they're built to handle html based courses (to track progress they rely on reading pages eg your course structure will be something like intro.html, slide1.html, slide2.html, faq.html etc etc) now, what happens when youve created your coureware in flash? if you look at any of the so called 'developement' environments that come with most LMS all they let you do is embed the flash movie into an html page..but..this is just read as one page by the LMS even though you might have 15 slides, glossary options etc in the flash movie..GAAAARRGHHH..HOW THE HELL DO YOU TRACK???

I think that when they designed these authoring tools and LMSs they thought that flash would be used like an animated giff or something and not as an interactive element in its own right.

Then again its a very lucrative business you have this clique in the e-learning sector who are developing this stuff and it all costs a fortune, case in point you look at the list of 'suggested' authoring tools by these corporations..most of them are designed for teachers or technical writers and granted they do make it easy to author courses problem is they cost from $1000 upwards and the finished product looks crap, you will find little or no mention of Flash why?..because its cheap even though the results far outshine anything these other systems can come up with.

This is so frustrating as on one hand macromedia is creating this wonderful technology to enhance the web 'experience' and then you have this lark which seems to be completely ignoring this and sticking to tried and tested technology (most of which is about 10 years out of date) it galls me to think that I spent so much time creating courseware in flash which is cross platform compatible, has the type of functionality you dont get with most LMS based courseware and looks good and now it looks like I have to rip it apart to 'comply' with some think tanks idea of what it 'should' be.

Sorry for the rant and the length of the post its that I've been stuck with this for the past 3 months and the more I learn the more frustrated I'm getting.

[pwilster]

Sorehead,
I understand you completely, I made those very same rants some time ago and asked myself the same questions. By reading your post I assume you already had a complete courseware made in flash (?), if this is the case I just can tell you what I did: break it into several pieces, where every lone piece will be an html page containing your flash object in it. I dont think you will need to track every single page the user is reading but if the user has opened it and finished it.
We had a lot of discussions regarding which will be the level of "tracking" for our courses, and I can tell you there´s little or no use in knowing whether if the guy clicked on the button "A" in the animation "B" in the screen 12. Is more important to know if the student has entered the course, date and time and if he completed the section.
I agree with you. Companies like IBM and its "Knowledge Factory" use Flash only to build "nuggets" as they call it, little animations that make the same function, perhaps a little more, of an animated gif or a java applet. And I had a really bad time convincing my company to make a template where the main element would be a flash object containing all the information, but my opinion prevailed (after long meetings and mucho sweat). But in any case, the course had to be broken down into several trackeable chunks.

[sorehead]

Hi Pwilster,
yes your right, about a year ago the company I work for decided to migrate from html based courseware to Flash purely because it was cross platform compatible (we needed to be able to run courses in UNIX and the 'Attain' objects for dreamweaver were crashing the course) So to this end I created a sort of Flash engine to power the courses, this basically consists of a parent movie which handles the menu system/navigation and in turn load movies in and out as needed...it works perfectly, as time went on from a production perspective I streamlined it so that external text files practically controlled everything (this was primarily to speed up production as designers/technical writers could work on courses simultaneously also I was aiming eventually at making it database driven..hence text files). Now suddenly our biggest clients are requesting that our courses run from a LMSs.

So I've read the whitepapers, seen the examples and now I give up, the biggest problem is I'm a designer not a programmer (OK I happen to have fairly good Actionscripting/Lingo skills)and reading the SCORM whitepapers are giving me a headache, they seem to be written for software engineers. The most frustrating thing is that if they did a bit more research and got the flash community on board we could do amazing things and maybe even drag them kicking into the 21st century.

On a side note from what I understand for minimal AICC compliance the courseware only has to call the LMSInitialize and LMSFinish functions and it seems that the Pathlore FS SCORM template for Flash5 allows this (and a few more commands as well) in fact I think the FS SCORM template allows the flash movie to control an LMS through FS commands, I'm currently testing this and if it works I'm laughing and I'll share my findings (fortunately we have the Docent LMS to work with).

[pwilster]

well Sorehead, I think you really are breaking new ground on this. I made my own experiments with the "send variables" command and it sorta works good but my course architecture is not an engine like yours and we just needed not-so-advanced features on our courses.
Anyway, I´m curious about your progress in your AICC/Flash investigation, anything you think I can help you with just email me at pwilster@hotmail.com

[PAlexC]

Holy mother of crap! I started this thread so long ago and no one responded to it. I ran into it by accident on a search. I'm glad to hear other people are having these issues. I have a document on getting the learning extentions to track in LS4 if anyone wants it. I'll post a better response once I get to read it all but for now...

1.) LearningSpace 5 kicks ass from the user's perspective. Vastly improved UI (I've been beta testing.) I'm pissed, I'd like to see the hook for FS Commands built into their frame, so I can set an AU as started when launched, and have and FS Command mark it as completed at the end of my movie, without using the stupid frameset from CourseBuilder or the Learning Extentions.

2.) I'm in the midst of integrating with KnowledgePlanet. Their LMS doesn't support pre-requisiting. (Apparently it wasn't built in, and you need to use the suspend_data field to make something up, since AICC dictates that AU's can't talk to each other, which is ****ed.) Anyone doing a deployment in KP that wants to do pre-requisites, drop me an e-mail at pcolombo@weblearning.com

3.) Anyone ever deploy in Saba? How is it? I have a deployment coming up there.

4.) If I started a weekly / monthly mailing list, would anyone be interested. Let's exchange e-mail addresses before this thread dies.

[Nav]

Lemme know if you guys do start out a mailing list. I would definitely be interested. Email me Right now I have a project where I need to make a quiz that can be configured to work with both SCORM and AICC LMSs (sort of like a smart clip quiz) Unfortunately, I don't have an LMS to test it out. any idea if the Macromdeia FSSCORM can be reliably used. Any standard compliant LMS available for a trial download? Any push in the right direction would be much appreciated...

Also, anybody developing courses that run of IE/Mac (shudder...)?

[sorehead]

Hi guys,
PAlexC, I think that mailing list is a great idea put me on it (you'll get my email address in my profile) I've gotta deploy for Saba as well however I'm struggling with Docent at the moment, the thing is I was under the impression that if your courseware was AICC/Scorm compliant shouldnt it work across all LMS ?...this is another one of those annoying things that arent well documented. In the Docent LMS when you create a catalogue you have 3 options, A Docent Module (only work in Docent LMS), An AICC/SCORM module (for 'compliant' courseware) and a standard web based course function (not sure what this does I think it just tracks the start and end of a course).

NAV, try this link http://www.aicc.org/pages/aicc_ts.htm this is a simulated CMI/LMS environment its free you just have to register for it..only thing is I havent used it so I dunno if its any good.

[Nav]

Thanx sorehead, much appreciated...

[david petley]

peeps,
this thread seems very serious for the lounge, would you like me to move it to the boardroom?
david p.

[Nav]

Yes I think it would be more suited to the boardroom. It would soon get lost amongst the heavy traffic in coffee lounge... Also i'm sure a lot of flash elearning content developers would be interested in this topic...

[nordberg]

yeah, please move this david. i know there are a couple people in there who would find this interesting.

[sorehead]

Hey guys,
Just came across this widget/plug in thingy

http://www.elearningobjects.com/caster.asp

Anyone used this? if so is it any good?

[sorehead]

OOOPS,
the link seems a bit dodgy, basically go to http://www.elearningobjects.com and look up the "ELO Tracker"

[dissector]

Hi all,

I found this thread in a search and it occured that its authors may be able to help me out. I've also found a discussion forum I which involves a lot of the issues that have been mentioned in this thread.

http://www.astd.org/virtual_community/comm_learntech/

There really doesn't seem to be much discussion, however of how useful flash is in elearning.

The way I see it is that people need to prove that the ROI of using a Flash based tutorial is better than using traditional text based html tutorials that use GIFs as illustration much like a textbook does.

I think that elearning should be about using the new techniques of interactivity of the type that has been demonstated by the computer games industry to enhance the learning process. Flash allows us to create online game-like interactivity easily and at a low cost.

Does any-one know of any studies that have demonstrated the benefits of interactive learning over traditional methods.

We need to experiment with new methods of learning and testing. Methods I have seen so far are: muliple choice questions, matching words to pictures, drag and drop puzzles, and thats about it! There must be more creative ways to get across ideas than these methods - think of all those great interactive adventure games people play. They all started from very simple text based multiple choice games. Please let me know of examples of Flash based learning techniques.

I have started using flash fairly recently and have produced a couple of anatomy tutorials for medical students - http://www.dissectionroom.com . Now I want to create a new, more professional product. I shall be taking my exams for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in about a years time and as part of my study process I have decided to create an elearning course for part 1 of exam which is mainly based on revision of the basic sciences and anatomy. I will enlist the help of fellow doctors who are studying for the same exams to create different parts of the course. I would like to use Flash to create interactive content but it would be helpful in convincing my collegues to help me if there were any hard facts about the usefulness of such content. I feel it will be a lot more work creating animations and graphics than just text and if they add no value it will mean a lot of time wasted. Also, my helpers will easily be able to type out an html based course but will find it a lot more difficult to draw and program in flash.

Thanks for your help.

[TheOriginalFlashDavo]

If anyone has more information on integrating a Flash course structure into an AICC/SCORMcompliant LMS please, please get in touch with me.

The construction of a single interaction or quiz is obviously very easy with the new FlashMX components. What isn't so easy, and I can't seem to find anywhere, is how to create a course structure using just Flash. At present I've only found methods that would allow me to create a course structure in some other authoring tool and use Flash only as elements within that authoring environment. It must be possible to create a course soley with Flash!

Please, please contact me.

Regards
Dave
drooney@e-cademy.net
dave@envisionous.com

[PAlexC]

Dave,

I'm sorry to say I think it's almost impossible without using javascript. While data can be sent to the LMS using GET and POST, and I'm sure if you wanted you could certainly pass all of the proper AICC data elements that way, you need to get the session ID from the LMS.

The session ID is sent back to the content as part of the URL, so it needs to be parsed out of it first.

The closest I've come to do what you sound like you want to do, is have a blind frame with an empty form in JS waiting to be posted. You can pass your lesson status, score, suspend data, time, etc. all from Flash to this form if you wish, and then trigger it to post.

I've successfully done this with Saba.

Sorry, it's a bit late and I may not make much sense.
Contact me at pcolombo@weblearning.com

Or...if your company is serious about e-Learning, ask for my resume at paul_colombo@hotmail.com