How to Update Your Legacy Flash Captivate eLearning Projects

In this Adobe Captivate tutorial, I show you how you can update your legacy eLearning courses by identifying and replacing components that are not compatible with HTML5. In this example, I take a course that included SWF based animations and use the HTML5 Tracker to quickly find those unsupported items and eliminate them.

eLearning Livestream – Build Your Own Custom Playback Controls | January 13th, 16:00 UTC

Join me on Monday at 16:00 UTC for this week’s eLearning Livestream. I will show you how you can create your own custom playback controls for your Adobe Captivate eLearning project.

If you wish to participate in the live stream and ask questions join me on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/9Y2M3H89fSQ

Happy Last Year of SWF (Actually Probably Even Less Time)

Over five years ago, I was asked by my employer to make versions of my Adobe Captivate courses to be made available to non-employees such as volunteers and contractors. The problem was that non-employees, due to policy, did not have access to the organization's learning management system. At the time, I published all my eLearning courses using SWF technology, and while there was the availability to publish for HTML5, I didn't do it. I learned that while SWF based courses were okay for our LMS, the IT department had a policy not to allow Flash-based material to reside on their web servers. I had to publish these courses for HTML5. It was clear that the end of posting my Adobe Captivate projects as SWF was in sight.

Adobe will end support of Flash Player on December 31st, 2020. That said, each browser maker will be taking (or already has taken) steps to disable and eventually prevent Flash Player from being installed. When learners go to launch your eLearning courses, they will begin to see different results. In the case of Firefox, today, I get a black screen and a warning that my connection to the site isn't secure. With Chrome, I get a small puzzle piece icon with the message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked. On Microsoft Edge, I get a message that Adobe Flash Player is blocked, but I'm able to enable it to continue to the content. Lastly, with Internet Explorer 11, it runs without incident. 

Google's blog mentions that it will entirely remove Flash Player from Chromium-based browsers by the end of 2020. With the announcement that Microsoft is migrating its Edge browser to Chromium technology, that means Edge will also not be able to run Flash content either. So, what do you do?

Well, If you haven't already started a plan to migrate your Flash-based eLearning content, you need to start right now. A year sounds like a long time, but depending on how much material you have still running on Flash Player, a year may not be very long. Look at the content you have that is presently Flash-based and consider these three scenarios.

It’s an older course but nobody takes it anymore

Sometimes an old course may be on your LMS that is only there for record-keeping purposes. For example, the LMS course exists to maintain the transcript that Robert from the accounting department took that Microsoft Excel 2003 course a decade ago. In this case, I would say that there is nothing for you to do. Nobody in your organization should be enrolling and launching an Excel 2003 eLearning course today in 2020.

It’s a currently used course and you have the project file

Good news. Adobe has built a great tool into Captivate that will help you migrate your content from SWF based to HTML5. It's called the HTML5 Tracker. To access the tool...

• Click on the Project drop-down menu

• Click the HTML5 Tracker option, which will open a small window that will list all the items in your eLearning project that are not compatible with publishing to HTML5.

• One by one, click on each item listed in the Unsupported Slide/Object column. When you do click on an unsupported object or slide, it will instantly jump to the slide and select the object in question.

• Decide what to do with that object. You can choose to delete the object or replace it with something compatible with HTML5 publishing.

For the example course, I used for the screenshots above; the items in question were animated arrows that I used for emphasis. I merely replaced them with smart shape arrows with a motion path to create attention. I was able to republish the course within minutes to be fully compatible with current and future web browsers.

It’s a currently used course but you don’t have the project file

Perhaps you purchased this course pre-published or perhaps you hired a contractor to build the course for you from scratch. Perhaps the former L&D department in your organization wasn’t very good at holding on to source files. In any case, compile a list of these courses and thus begins the year-long project of recreating these courses from scratch. The good news is that your LMS has published versions of these courses for your developers to review. If you have lots of these courses and little time to redevelop them, rebuilding these courses could mean capturing a series of image captures. If you have less of these types of courses to rebuild, it might mean a full development workflow. Much of this will depend on how much regular work you have to complete in 2020 in addition to the migration project. If your in-house staff are not up to the task or don't have enough bandwidth to take on such a project, you can hire an external agency to assist with this project. For recommendations, feel free to reach out to me, and I can either consult with you on smaller projects or bring on additional resources to get the bigger jobs done before it's too late. Use the CONTACT PAUL link on the upper right-hand corner of the page and we can schedule a brief call to discuss your needs.

Resize your Software Simulation to Fit Within Your Design

In this Adobe Captivate Tutorial, I show you how you could resize your software simulations to fit inside a user interface design. This is ideal if you wish to add space for navigational controls, custom table of contents or want to include your organization's branding elements.

Drag and Drop with Unique Feedback in Your Adobe Captivate eLearning

If you've built a few drag and drops with immediate captions you know that by default you don't get unique or specific feedback when items have been dragged to a drop target. In this video tutorial, I'll show you a method to provide unique or specific feedback for each drag and drop for both correct and incorrect captions.

Patreon subscribers get the exercise file that goes with this video. https://patreon.com/paulwilsonlearning

eLearning Livestream: What Would You Like to See in Captivate 2020?

Join me on December 30th at 12:00 EST / 17:00 UTC to discuss what you would like to see in the next major release of Adobe Captivate. I will also be sharing my thoughts as well. You can view the live stream right here or if you would like to participate in the live chat visit https://youtu.be/O06C-RUgrQA at the time of the broadcast.

Secret Timeline Inside Adobe Captivate Advanced Actions

In this Adobe Captivate 2019 tutorial, I show you how you can create a timeline with animation and effects inside your advanced actions. Thanks to Alexa Franklin for this great idea for a YouTube tutorial. If you would like me to make an Adobe Captivate tutorial based on your idea, let me know in the comments below any of my videos. I can't guarantee I'll make your video but I'm always looking for new ideas to share with all of you.

Customize Adobe Captivate Certificate Widget

In this video tutorial, I show you how you can customize the certificate widget (learning interaction) in your Adobe Captivate eLearning project.

Unlocked Captions In Your Adobe Captivate Question Slides

In this quick tip, I show you how I deal with quiz question captions in a fluid box responsive design eLearning project.

Adobe Captivate Features that Users Struggle with the Most

In this tutorial, I share with you some of the features that new Adobe Captivate users struggle with the most.