Toolkit: 2015 Year-end Round Up

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gonealready. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were celebrating the start of 2015?

I started my career creating eLearning while anundergraduate in college pursuing my Computer Science Bachelor of Science. Thiscoming year will mark my 33^rd working in this field and my 18^thsince starting my own practice. In all these years, I’ve lost count of thenumber of authoring tools I’ve used and the number of courses I’ve developed.Today, more than ever, I love creating eLearning, writing about it, andteaching others how to design and develop it right.

Let’s focus on commercial enterprises for a moment. Why isthere so much of a demand for learning inside corporations? Think of it thisway. If a corporation were to never lose or hire an employee, were never tohave to change their product, marketing, or support programs, had a stableclientele that never requested any changes to the way the corporation works, itwouldn’t ever need to have its employees learn anything new. How many companiesdo you know like that?

That’s why most of the eLearning that you and I create doesnot stay in use for years, as much as we’d like to think that it will. It iscustom-made to meet a client’s needs and those needs are usually immediate andare prone to change in just a few years or even just a few months. Changes arehappening all the time, so the shelf life of our eLearning is limited. I thinkthat’s a good thing because it keeps our services in demand.

So now I can’t help but sing,

Shouldauld eLearning be forgot,

Andnever brought to mind?

Shouldauld eLearning be forgot,

Andalways redesigned?

We can borrow from the past, but we’re unlikely to ever repeatit. Not in our field, we won’t!

Authoring tools continue to evolve, as well. Where do westand at the start of 2016?

AnAuld Acquaintance: Authorware

I wrote quite a bit about Authorware in July.A friend and colleague recently posted on Facebook that she was having todiscard a lot of items that she no longer needed, and that included severalbooks I had written on the venerable eLearning development tool Authorware,which has not been updated since Version 7 back in 2005. Macromedia, of course,merged with Adobe that year. Ten years later, it is still on sale. If you go tohttps://www.adobe.com/products/authorware/,you’ll still see it is available, though you have to go through a partner companylike Amazon.com. In each of the last ten years, including in 2015, I have receivedinquiries from companies who have decided finally to move away from Authorwareand wanted to learn a new tool. Why on Earth would they still be usingAuthorware ten years after the last version was released? Because it offered aninterface and certain powerful features that have not been included in any toolsince. That being true, it is also very outdated, lacks many of the featuresavailable in today’s tools, and never got to the point that it could run in theFlash player online, though it came very close before production was shut down.

Speakingof the Flash Player

The Flash player has come under fire a lot this year. Theengine is old and bloated and it has been prone to many security issues. OnDecember 7, Adobe updated the player again and addressed a whopping 79 securityflaws! Several companies have already moved to HTML5, including Facebook,though for now it still supports Flash games and videos. We know that SteveJobs had decreed that the Flash player would not be allowed on any of Apple’smobile devices, and Android devices have not officially supported the FlashPlayer since version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) in 2012, though it is possible to forcethe Flash player on Android if you’re determined to do so.

So what’s happening to Flash? Adobe has announced that itwill now be called Adobe Animate CC (not to be confused with Adobe EdgeAnimate) and will evolve to support multiple standards, especially HTML5.That’s not to say that Flash hasn’t already been used to create HTML5 content.In fact, Adobe claims that a third of the content developed in Flash is beingpublished to HTML5. The Flash product itself will continue to be useful, thoughit may not be as popular as it once was. More importantly, there are no otherHTML5 development tools yet that are as powerful as Flash has been, though Iexpect that won’t be the case much longer.

Animate CC will have a lot of new drawing features. See https://blogs.adobe.com/flashpro/for more.

HTML5 and mobile

If a tool doesn’t publish to HTML5 nowadays, it isn’t longfor this world, unless its vendor updates it very soon. If a tool doesn’t allowfor custom mobile formats (a separate issue), it’s going to start losingcredibility in 2016, as mobile learning becomes ever more important. In fact,2016 may very well be the tipping point after which the vast majority oflearning must and will be available on mobile devices.

Mobile learning has become so expected that the idea ofhaving online forums or conferences dedicated to mobile delivery may becomeimpractical as mobile will just become part of the process and not a separatepractice.

Classifying tools

I have written before that tools can be classified intothree categories:

• Those that plug directly into PowerPoint
• Those that are installed on your computerseparately
• Those that you access online (in the cloud)

The cloud-based tools, of course, are thenewest of the three categories, though it has been ten years or so since thefirst ones were introduced.

What’s new in PowerPoint tools?

I wrote an overview of these tools in May.What has been happening since then in the top three PowerPoint tools?

iSpring Suite 8.1

Last month I wrote about the new iSpringSuite 8 and I said at the time that my favorite new feature was the newDialog Trainer, basically a way to build soft-skill scenarios (with somelimitations). Version 8.1 has already been released since I wrote about iSpringand includes some nice updates:

1. Dialog Trainer has been rebranded TalkMaster. iSpring has added theability to add new characters and custom backgrounds into the dialogs youcreate. Note that on the iSpring ribbon in PowerPoint, it still shows as Simulation, as it did in version 8.
2. The VideoLecture player option now can be customized in terms of colors, bars,buttons, text labels, and more.
3. The QuizMakerfeature now lets you give learners the option to skip over questions andreturn to them later before finishing the quiz and submitting it. Students willbe able to flag questions and can get a full list of any questions they flaggedat any time.
4. A number of other options were added to speedthings up quite a bit and give better quality results. See more at https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/ispring-suite-8-1-is-out/.

Adobe Presenter 11

In OctoberI reviewed the new Adobe Presenter 11.My favorite new feature in version 11 is the inclusion of the wonderfullyenhanced Adobe Presenter Video Expressproduct, which lets you create demonstrations, combining video of yourself andscreen actions that you demonstrate in several different ways. This latestversion lets you easily crop out backgrounds and replace them with your own orfrom a provided library of cool backgrounds.

See more at https://www.adobe.com/mena_en/products/presenter/features.html.

Articulate Studio ’13 Pro

The last time I wrote about Articulate Studio was in November 2013, after version ’13 Pro wasreleased. Articulate has always had an excellent reputation for customerservice. Along with that, it does not release major versions of its tools veryoften as iSpring and Adobe do. As of now, there is as yet no major upgrade ofArticulate Studio, though its many fans have stuck by it.

Rather than release major upgrades often, Articulatereleases minor updates. It has had seven updates since ’13 Pro was released.Most updates are to fix bugs and make some improvements to features. Forexample, in its last update on September 22 this year, it added support forApple iOS 9 in that update, along with fixing three bugs. See more here: https://www.articulate.com/support/presenter-13/issues-addressed-in-the-latest-articulate-presenter-13-update.

What’s new in installed tools?

Most authoring tools fall into this category and there arehundreds in the market, though most have a very small audience. Let’s see whathas happened this year in this category.

Adobe Captivate 9

My review of Captivate9 came out in August.In it, I noted that the major new features include:

1. The free iPad App called Adobe Captivate Draft that lets you storyboard and prototype, andthen bring the results into Captivate.
2. Multi-stateObjects, something that has been present in Articulate Storyline, but withsome abilities that allow for more flexibility.
3. KnowledgeCheck questions, that are basically untracked quiz questions that learnerscan try as practice.
4. Integrated access to 25,000 free eLearning assets (now 30,000, I believe), from theeLearning Brothers website.
5. Scaled-vectorgraphic support and direct testingin the SCORM Cloud, along with several other new features.

Adobe has put out a major update of Adobe Captivate everyyear for the last several and I expect it will continue to do so.

Articulate Storyline 2

My Storyline 2review was published in October 2014. Since then, it has had seven updates (but no major new release).Along with bug fixes and improvements, Articulate has added new features toStoryline 2 along the way. Most would not warrant a major new release but allare welcome additions. In May, for instance, in Update 5, Articulate added afeature to define the custom tab order of slide objects (though not in HTML5)and added more support for screen readers. The last update was in September ofthis year. Will 2016 bring Storyline 3? We shall see. I was surprised whenStoryline 2 did not include responsive design options to allow for easycustomization for different mobile devices. I expect Storyline 3, whenreleased, will remedy that.

Lectora 16

The folks at Trivantis have been very busy, so much so thatthey have moved from Lectora 12 directly to Lectora 16 now, similarly to how Microsoft skipped Windows 9 andwent directly from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Trivantis has been diligent aboutpublishing major releases just about every year.

Version 16 adds responsive design features so Captivate nolonger is the only major eLearning authoring tool that offers responsive design.One advantage that Lectora has built into version 16 is the ability to open anyof your current Lectora files and with a click make it responsive. After doingso, you’ll need to edit the visuals to make sure they look good in each view.

I’ll be writing more about Lectora 16 very soon.

The others

This year I also reviewed several other installed tools, allof which I thought worthy of review. I encourage you to investigate those ifyou haven’t already. There are several more that I will be writing about in thecoming year.

What’s new in cloud-based tools?

Newer tools tend to be cloud-based, which does add someadvantages. Chief among these may be the ability to collaborate on a project,which allows teams to work together much more easily than if they had to sendeach other constant file updates. Not every cloud-based tool allows for this,but the smart ones do.

Another obvious advantage is that you don’t have to lug yourfiles with you whenever you travel or switch computers. Your files remainonline where you can access them from any computer connected to the Internet.With most of us enjoying faster Internet access speeds now, this is no longer adrawback as it might once have been.

Lectora Online 3.0

Lectora also has updated its popular Lectora Online tool to version 3. This year, it took the Silver inthe 2015 Brandon Hall Group Excellency in Technology awards. It is not yet aspowerful as the installed version of Lectora, but it can boast that it allowedfor responsively designed lessons before Lectora 16 could.

I’ll write more on Lectora Online soon.

Easygenerator

It has been a while since I have written about Easygenerator. While it hasn’t achieveda big market share, its fan base has grown. It is an authoring tool that takesthe Learning side of eLearning seriously. It guides you through setting upcourse objectives and includes tutorials. It allows for responsive design aswell. Though it is limited in other ways, I really appreciate the thought thathas been put into this tool, including setting up adaptive learning lessons.

I will also update my review on Easygenerator in the nearfuture.

The others

There are many new cloud-based tools being released, and Ithink 2016 will be the year in which I will likely be writing more aboutcloud-based tools than about installed or PowerPoint-based tools. I am workingon some cool ideas for 2016 as well that I think many of you will find veryuseful. Stay tuned!