ELearning Beyond Flash And The Future of SCORM

Here is a devastating bit of news for e Learning developers. As per a news report on January 1, 2021, “Adobe’s Flash Player, which was first launched in 1996, has been officially discontinued on December 31, 2020. In 2017, Adobe had announced the end of support for the plugin, which brought animations to the web. Zynga had also recently announced that FarmVille, the farming simulation game, will also be shut as a result of Flash’s end.”

The announcement is a game-changer in the world of technology. Flash used to be one of the go-to applications for everything — ranging from video ads to complete websites and millions of games. And now, Flash has ceased being supported by almost all Internet browsers.

Now, for the L&D leadership, this development serves as a major hindrance. Why? If you have old courses, published in Flash, you might face multiple issues. Yes, HTML5 is a more recent publishing option and serves as an alternative. However, even if you had used HTML5, your training curriculum may contain elements of Flash such as animations, transitions, effects, accordion or hover features, among others.

On the other hand, even if you had used SCORM to develop your eLearning courses, your modules might contain Flash elements as well. Here is the thing, It’s true that several online training packages are delivered via SCORM. But courses containing Flash can still be affected – even if they are delivered via SCORM. In fact, while publishing a SCORM course, you have the option to pick between two different output types. To secure the future of SCORM, you can export packages to Flash, HTML, or both. Since Flash is the most popular output type, it is quite possible that your courses are SWF Flash-based.

To surmise, in the absence of Flash, certain segments of your course may not function efficiently or fully. Trainees, while undergoing their training, will experience gap areas and experience discontinuity while finishing their respective modules. If your course is too old, it might not load or play at all!

The news about Flash could not arrive at a better time — after all, the New Year is the best time to make new resolutions! So, kick off the process by assessing your old content. Is your content relevant at all? Do you need to overhaul the entire curriculum? Or do you simply need to weed out the obsolete parts and replace them with fresh, targeted content?

Once you decide to refresh your old content, you can replace the Flash content that you want to retain and republish them in HTML5, which is more lightweight, faster, and demands minimal CPU time to render web pages. Again, you can take the help of platforms like PlayAblo to migrate your legacy content into manageable, mobile-friendly micro-chunks. It is a reliable way to future-proof your learning content. Why? The experts at PlayAblo manage and maintain the compliance, correctness, and quality of the course material. What’s more? They also render your content more engaging and interesting by embedding it with fun gamification elements, reward-based assessments, and quantifiable analytics.