pipwerks

Best Practices in E-Learning

philip — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:49:13 +0000

Someone recently posted a blog entry ranting about the use of the term “best practices” in our industry. I understand the frustration with thoughtless pronouncements about best practices, especially coming from people who may not know any better; it will often sound a lot like how mom used to say “eat this, it’s good for you” without really knowing whether it’s true. However, there is a big difference between best practices in terms of learning theory — something that’s difficult to quantify/prove — and technology.

A friend of mine, upon completing his MA in psychology, joked that his degree is the only one you can get where you can’t prove a thing that you’re taught. Learning theory is a form of psychology, and as such, you are guaranteed to run into a gazillion different opinions on how learning occurs: behaviorism, constructivism, cognitivism, yadda yadda yadda. Likewise, you will hear many opinions on what development models to follow (ADDIE vs agile vs something-or-other), evaluation methodology, and perhaps edge-case debates such as centralized learning structures versus de-centralized learning structures (social media peeps, I’m looking at you).

I guarantee these conversations will involve lots of name-dropping and liberal use of the term “best practice.” In these situations, I agree that there is no single answer to ANY of these issues, and context will be king.

Most technical issues, on the other hand, most certainly DO have best practices, and for good reason.

For starters, accessibility is a best practice. Why? Well, because it’s the right thing to do. No one should be denied an opportunity to learn simply because their ears or eyes or arms don’t work like yours do. Establishing a baseline level of accessibility is fairly easy to do, regardless of the size of your budget or your time constraints. For example:

For the hearing impaired: Text transcriptions and/or closed captioning for videos and Flash animations are as easy to set up as ever. Free/cheap video players like the Flash video component, the JW Player, and Flowplayer all support multiple captioning standards and make it easy to add captioning to a video. Rapid e-learning development tools such as Articulate Presenter and Adobe Captivate allow you to add captions or notes to your SWFs. (Side note: the text transcriptions for TED talks are an excellent example of what can be accomplished with just a little extra effort.)
For the visually impaired: If the content of your course is provided in a text format such as HTML, screen readers can read the text to the end user. What does this require of you? Well, if you use standard HTML, not much… just a little extra care in your layout and alternate text. If you embed an image, video, or animation, provide fallback text that describes the image or what happens in the video/animation. SWFObject (a free system for embedding SWF files in HTML documents) makes this easy to do.
Similarly, Adobe has been working hard to make Flash Player and Adobe Reader more accessible to major screen readers. What do you have to configure to make it work? Nothing so far.
For those who can’t use a computer mouse: Thanks to initiatives like WAI-ARIA and companies like Adobe who are actively building keyboard support into their products, many script-based interactions (such as course navigation, quiz questions, and other activities) can be scripted to work without a mouse. Alternate input devices are often mapped to the keyboard input; if your course can be completed using a keyboard, you’re golden.
For the color blind: Accessibility can often be improved simply by adding text labels to color-coded objects and not relying on color alone.

I could go on for a while, but the point is that accessibility is definitely a best practice. It isn’t hard, and it certainly isn’t expensive to make a course accessible. It’s also the law if you receive any Federal funding.

There are definitely other technical best practices for e-learning:

SCORM: Technically not a standard but rather a collection of standards, SCORM is a best practice because it ensures your course will work on pretty much every major LMS (if you don’t like SCORM, AICC is equally valid). How can I say with confidence that SCORM is a best practice? Because in the bad old days before SCORM, developers had to spend weeks re-coding courses to work with each LMS’s proprietary code base. Once SCORM was widely adopted, the issue largely went away. No one wants to go back to the bad old days.
Valid HTML and CSS: If you write HTML and CSS, ensuring they validate means you know your pages will work in every major browser. We learned this lesson in the Netscape/Internet Explorer wars. Best practices on the web are still evolving; for example, sometimes it’s ok to write CSS that won’t validate if you know the repercussions and your code fails gracefully in older browsers. The best practice is simply that your pages work in most, if not all, browsers.
Don’t use proprietary code: See above. If your course uses ActiveX, which is only supported in Internet Explorer, your course won’t work in any other browsers. Almost anything implemented with ActiveX can be implemented using other non-proprietary methods. Again, the best practice is to ensure your pages work in most, if not all, browsers.
Follow sensible coding conventions: Well-written code that follows documented — and very well-reasoned — code conventions means your code will likely contain less errors, will be easier to update if the need arises, and will be more future-proof, avoiding expensive bugs like the Y2K bug, which could have been prevented with a bit of foresight. A great example of this type of code convention is Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts.

There are definitely times when people throw around the phrase “best practice” and are simply talking out of their butts. “Never use yellow.” “Never use clip art.” “Never hire a penguin.” “Never let the learner do X.” “Always make the user do Y.” “Always use ___ format.” “Always use ___ pedagogy.”

Whatever.

Just remember that best practices DO exist, but not in every circumstance. And unless you want the evil eye from me and my compadres, remember to never use the phrase “best practice” unless you can back it up with evidence and sound reasoning.

Post script: I’ve noticed this bandying of best practices usually occurs when someone is trying to establish their expertise or exert control on a project, frequently in front of management-types. This is the same sort of thing Machiavelli did when he wrote The Prince, so why not treat them as Machiavelli would and … well, I guess another best practice is to know when to shut up, so I’ll stop here.

Best Practices in E-Learning is a post from: pipwerks.com. Unless specified otherwise, all code is licensed under an MIT-style license. All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Eolas is at it again

philip — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:57:37 +0000

Eolas Technologies is a company that manages licensing for patents.

Eolas seeks to return value to its shareholders by commercializing these technologies through strategic alliances, licensing and spin offs. (source)

The problem is that Eolas is generally regarded as a bully trying to enforce a patent (Patent 5,838,906) that many experts feel should not have been issued.

The 906 patent, received in 1998 by the University and licensed exclusively to Eolas, describes ways that a Web browser can use external applications. (source)

(The US Patent and Trademark Office has made notoriously bad decisions relating to Internet technologies, causing many to wonder if they truly even understand the patents they’ve granted. Blackboard vs Desire2Learn is a great example; Blackboard acted much like Eolas, and their patents were eventually nullified by the PTO.)

Eolas sued Microsoft in 1999 for violating Patent 5,838,906, and in a rare show of solidarity, the Web and Open Source communities — normally very anti-Microsoft groups — rallied to Microsoft’s side. This included Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet. They pleaded with Eolas to release the patent into public domain for the greater good of the global community.

Anybody in the browser field that studies the technology will see that its a very fundamental and basic patent to the World Wide Web. (source)

Despite the overwhelming negative response from the Web and Open Source communities, Eolas would not relent and forced Microsoft to modify Internet Explorer in a way that broke functionality on over hundreds of millions of web pages. Microsoft eventually forked over tens of millions of dollars in a settlement that allowed them to restore the functionality they had been forced to remove.

Other companies and products have used the same technology for years without paying royalties — Mozilla Firefox and Opera being the most well-known — but were not sued by Eolas, who chose to focus on the deep-pocketed Microsoft. (An initial jury verdict in 2003 awarded Eolas $521 million, but an undisclosed settlement was reached in 2007 after the case went through several appeals.)

This week — a year and a half after settling with Microsoft — Eolas has gone on the attack again, filing suit against “Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Argosy Publishing (publisher of The Visible Body), Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, GoDaddy, J. C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, ‘transactional’ adult entertainment provider New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Rent-a-Center, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube.” (article)

For the record, Eolas was founded by former University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) staff, and the patent they’re suing others for violating was developed at UCSF in the 90s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas

I work at UCSF and am ashamed of these lawsuits.

The University of California owns Patent 5,838,906 and has licensed it to Eolas. The Regents of University of California are therefore the driving force behind Eolas’ behavior. By extension, UC is a driving force behind one of the biggest and most unpopular disruptions the Internet has known. If UC is really interested in public interests and good will — not to mention good publicity — I hope Patent 5,838,906 will be released into the public domain.

On a side note, knowing the University of California is being hit hard with budget cuts, I wonder if this latest blitz of lawsuits is an attempt at making up for budget shortfalls?

Eolas is at it again is a post from: pipwerks.com. Unless specified otherwise, all code is licensed under an MIT-style license. All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Ideas wanted for new SCORM wrappers

philip — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:16:56 +0000

As you may have read in previous posts or tweets, I’m working on a new SCORM 2004 wrapper for both JavaScript and ActionScript that will contain advanced functionality and improved shortcuts.

For instance, I’m trying to write an easier way to work with the cmi.interactions model, and also trying to add more error-checking that will look for gotchas such as exceeding the length limit of suspend_data.

I’m looking for good ideas. How do you handle your cmi.interactions? What kind of code shortcuts would you like to see? How can working with SCORM be made easier? I’d love to hear your ideas, just post them as comments below or send them to me on twitter.

This project — just like my previous wrappers — will be freeware, either MIT license or GNU license, so no worries about me running off and selling your ideas!

(FYI: for now I’m focusing on SCORM 2004 — SCORM 1.2 should be retired — but depending on how things work out I might add backwards-compatibility for SCORM 1.2.)

Ideas wanted for new SCORM wrappers is a post from: pipwerks.com. Unless specified otherwise, all code is licensed under an MIT-style license. All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Captivate 4 Variables in PDF Format

philip — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:25:09 +0000

Kurt Melander was kind enough to clean up my Captivate 4 variable list and convert it to PDF format for those who’d like to print it out. Get it here. Thanks, Kurt!

Captivate 4 Variables in PDF Format is a post from: pipwerks.com. Unless specified otherwise, all code is licensed under an MIT-style license. All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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CaptivateController updated

philip — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:16:38 +0000

Bug fixes!

The CaptivateController has been updated to fix the gotoSlideAndPlay and gotoSlideAndStop bugs.

Also, gotoSlideAndPlay and gotoSlideAndStop have been edited to use standard numbering in place of zero-based numbering. This means when you want to jump to slide 4, you use mycontroller.gotoSlideAndPlay(4) instead of mycontroller.gotoSlideAndPlay(3).

I had a number of requests for adding a ‘toggle table of contents’ method, but unfortunately it won’t be added at this time. It turns out that while you can toggle the TOC using the controller, it breaks the Captivate movie’s playbar — the playbar loses awareness of whether the TOC is visible or not. This is therefore not a feature I’m prepared to add. You can still toggle the TOC yourself using KCWebPlaza’s workaround (listed in the comments).

I will continue to monitor the TOC possibilities and would be happy to hear suggestions.

View the original post, download links and (somewhat spartan) documentation here.

Thanks to everyone who contacted me about the bugs.

CaptivateController updated is a post from: pipwerks.com. Unless specified otherwise, all code is licensed under an MIT-style license. All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.