Question about Flash & HTML5

Hi Gio. I'm sure that the Articulate folks will be able to provide more specific answers in regards to your Storyline questions, but I wanted to clarify that Absorb does not require Flash. In fact, other than a few files needed to play Flash videos, Absorb is built entirely in HTML5.

That distinction may not matter to you much though as Flash is still the most common course authoring method, by far. There are a number of reasons for this but at the present time HTML5 generally has fewer supported features in course authoring tools, and is more likely to run into browser or device specific issues. Our experience has been that you can certainly make beautiful courses in HTML5, but that you need to take an iterative design approach by testing your course against the devices you intend to run it on.

Hope that helps Gio!

Regards,

Craig

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the explanation about Absorb, I thought that was the case. I think that I should provide a brief explanation. I've authored 12 eLearning courses and posted them to Absorb. I rolled the courses out to my entire organization (125 learners) and discovered a series of inexplicable issues. After a lot of trial and error, I discovered that the issues were really instabilities.

I'm looking to find and eliminate the source of the instabilities. I'm curious that Flash plays a role in improving stability of the courses (at the browser level), but I'm wondering how that's the case. The bottom line here: is there something I can do in Storyline to accomplish my task?

Thanks,

Gio

Hi Gio. Can you clarify what you mean by instabilities?

Hi Craig,

Sure! Most of our problems arose from an inability to complete the course. There are several threads on eLearning Heroes about this and none seemed to have a definitive resolution unless I missed it somehow.

One of our courses went into an infinite loop on a single slide where the learner completed the interactions on the slide and then the slide jumped back it's beginning. This was not designed into the course.

While in Firefox:

1. The font changes from Articulate to Times Roman.

2. Text often appears outside of dialog bubbles.

3. One course uses a lot of variables linked to a navigation menu which make characters and hyperlinks appear when certain conditions are met. The navigation menu depends on variables to pass from the previous interactions so the learner can move to the next sections. This slide often freezes after the first interaction and so the learner can't move forward or backward for that matter.

I believe that these are the most common issues. Most of these disappear when I ask the learner to stop using Firefox (with no Flash plug-in installed) to Internet Explorer (with Flash installed). The issues get more complex after that.