E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

Hi Team,

Was wondering how you plan to deal with the increasing amount of iPad users. I know that in my company they are running pilots with them but my Articulate courses won't run on them :( Are you looking into a Publish for iPad or other solution like publishing a course to HMTL5 or something like that?

I hope they will

Well discussed in the "old" forums:  http://www.articulate.com/forums/general-discussion/21104-articulate-ipad.html

Thank you

Very cool Jeffrey! Can you share any more around the pilot you're running? Are you loading any specific apps or content for training? 

Jeffery,

Are they buying iPads for this training program or targeting them?

In other words...

Do they think some folks that take your training might have an iPad so they want to make sure it works for them?

Or...

Have they decided they want to put training on tablets so they went out and bought a bunch of iPads?

If that's not a hint. 

Or maybe it's a mission statement. 

Hmm I don't know... I mean how much money could there be in iPad learning?

And I hear there might be some money in iOS.

Let's just say if (really a matter of when) Articulate has the ability to publish to the Apple family of product, that will open up huge opportunities. A) Content on the iPad/iPhone. B) Solves the .swf battle.

Apple has made it clear they don't want .swf or .flv on their hardware. If I put a .swf in a slide and Articulate can publish that slide to run on an Apple product....HUGE!  And not just for eLearning. Just sayin'...

I'd love to see this. It would likely mean the ultimate in separation between content and presentation. Along the way, potentially patches up all of the accessibility holes in the tool as well. Talk about opening up to new markets that have been hesitant to use the tool - propelling published outputs well into the future (for far more platforms than we see or can imagine).

Personally, I'd be really surprised to peek in the Articulate mad science room and not see exactly this type of functional requirement hung up on the wall

I hope it's all coming soon!

We don't have any courses on iPad (yet) but more and more managers and execs have got one and want to use it. If our articulate courses would run on 'all' platforms available it would greatly increase our effectiveness .

@Tom, whats the ETA on articulate for iPad/HTML5 ? I swear I won't tell anyone

Well, tonight, maybe about an hour ago....

@GetAdam posted a tweet on Twitter that he's looking for a Web App tester.....

hint, hint!

I don't know anything, but my Apple FanGrrrl brain put my own 2 & 2 together to = Articulate Web App for elearning on an iPad.

But, I could be only dreaming.

It does not work with the Skyfire browser  on iPad either. Skifire will play flash video, but that is it.

http://www.skyfire.com/product/ipad

I havent tried Frash. It might work, but you need to jailbreak your iPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD6HcEYmJFA&feature=player_embedded

So, very late last night I saw that @GetAdam tweeted that he's looking for a Web App Tester.

Then, I saw a general invitation tweet to check out mLearning Studio, Rapid Intake's new HTML5 authoring tool for m-learning. So, I go to my iPad, give it at test run, and write a blog post that I did not promote to anyone ..... except to Rapid Intake via an email sign-up form.

This morning, I see that my blog post has one Comment that links to the old Articulate community forums:

http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-quizmaker/21507-elearning-ipad-iphone.html#post100982

I don't know @loftmonkey (yet), but that person and I VERY MUCH hope that Articulate comes out with an HTML5/iOS-compatible product.

Adam, above, writes: "And I hear that there might be some money in iOS.", yesterday afternoon. Then, later that evening, he tweets that he's looking for a Web App Tester!!

I don't want to get my/our hopes up.... but, from what I saw from Rapid Intake's new product, and knowing the Articulate bright minds can come out with something BETTER .... and, Adam's "hints" .... can we Articulate FanFolkzzzz feel hopeful that we may have an Articulate HTML5-compatible product this year?

Heck, they invested a TON of resources into this lovely new Community site. They care about us. Next step... an authoring tool for ALL mobile devices??

I sure hope so. As @loftmonkey said in the old Forums:

Articulate's strong points are its very customizable slides (and customer service), and if you guys had support for mobile devices that don't do Flash, you would totally rock my world.

I'm waiting for my mlearning development world to be "rocked" by Articulate! (Crossing fingers.)

Hello,

I am new to this forum but not new to Articulate or eleaning. This may not be the solution, but consider how in my firm, iPad users can easily access flash because they access content thru a Citrix receiver plugin. Our iPads are running Microsoft Office and a host of other applications. If someone could develop an app for the iPad similar to Citrix, the problem would be solved.

Ben

Frash works great for Articulate on the iPad... doesn't do Flash video though so it your course has video in it... 

Gabriele is correct we can not ask folks to JB their device... but we can strongly advice the people not by this extremely limited device.

@Ben the Citrix is actually a very smart solution. When you are access content though Citrix it is not really running on your device. It is running on the Citrix box, it's a lot like Go-to-My-PC or any other PC remoting.

I know I am very biased; I am a Flash developer who has been very rudely locked out of a market. But I really do not understand the drive to put eLearning on iPads. Mobile devices? Yes by all means. But there are sooo many more devices out there that readily support our existing tools  and more rolling out every day. 

I am a pretty tech savvy guy and I could do iOS programming. I chose instead to build Android applications because I believe there is a lot more flexibility and soon a much bigger market. And I think I was right. Take look at the recent sales numbers from Nielsen (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=25901) In a years time Android has caught up with iOS and for the last six months has been out selling it. Big Time.

"Analyzing the preferences of those who purchased a smartphone in the past six months paints a different picture, however, one in which Android is clearly in the lead with 43 percent of recent acquirers purchasing an Android device, compared to 26 percent for Apple iOS and 20 percent for Blackberry RIM."

I ask again.. why are we so focused on altering our business models and best practices, spending so much time and resources, on a shrinking market? 

Keep in mind there are some strategic, technical advantages to waiting a bit on HTML5 "stuff."  It's not a fully approved standard yet and some browsers don't support it officially yet (e.g. IE8) and others only support it partially at best.

So do you want to take what's first out of the chute trying take advantage of the "hype" or wait for something that we hope is developed well, is technically sound, and is easy to use.  My choice is the latter.

Hello James,

Apple products, even if closed, are highly successful all over the World, and even if there is a difference in market share at the time in favor of Android, we can not ignore Apple's market share. We're talking about tens of millions of users around the globe. In my opinion, it would be fun to have the opportunity to export also for these devices, because there are too many people using them, and we could give lots of people a positive answer when they ask for their courses on iPad. It is also a way to improve selling power.

I think that as we can't ask our customers to make a JB on their device, so we can not ask to buy another product, when they choose Apple (and the reasons are many, I am sure that one of the first one is that Apple is trendy). Especially when they have already chosen Apple and do not want to throw some hundred euro already spent. : )

That said, maybe the most correct  (for all maybe, but not for Apple) choice would be an opening of the devices by Apple.

Ideally, it shouldn't matter what platform you deploy to. I'd love to be able to publish to a format with graceful fallbacks to less-than-optimally supported platforms vs. no support to a less-than-optimally supported platform. I've seen some really nice frameworks for HTML5 that fallback well even to IE6.

If the content can fallback, it has the power to lean forward. Leaning forward to any platform, anywhere, and even transform along the way through mash-ups and other unique combinations would be a real boon. I'd really like my content to be as usable in 10 years as it is today.

Gerry, very good point! And I totally agree.

We Super Hero's make such life and death decisions on a daily basis so we can see the pro's and cons. The avarage Joe's however often don't look beyond their needs or wants (that's why Lois is always in so much trouble and Clark always needs to bail her out )

I'm just curious to see if and when we'll do our superhero thing for everyone and don't need to 'drop' the apple users.

....up up and away!

Ironically, I tried to respond to this post from my iPad and it wouldn't work! I cant click inside the reply box and have it be recognized as a text input...

Anyhow, I'd agree with @SteveFlowers.  It would be great if I could publish my articulate course to a series of movies that could be viewed on the iPad.  Or just images with hotspots.  

@Ethan

I used Screenr to make 5 minute demos of my Articulate e-learning courses. I have them under the "Videos" icon on my iPad home page.

The MP4s play just fine.

Would that workaround help you?

As for the new Forum... hmm... I haven't tried to use Elearning Heroes from my iPad but will now that you mentioned your experience. Did you submit the issue via Support.... um.... from your desktop? LOL

Exactly, this will be such as lynda.com's courses for iPhone.

http://www.lynda.com/lynda_iphone.aspx

Just videos without interactivity.

Sometimes it may be enough (indeed, for courses on softwares, imho), but usually not!