ActionScript 3 Support Nearing Beta Release

As you probably know, Rapid Intake Unison outputs courses that can be run on any browser in the Flash Player. The Flash Player is widely supported in all major browsers and allows for a consistent web-based media experience for your learners regardless of the browser or operating system they are using. Using Flash output is the best way to build interactive, media-rich content for web deployment today.

Flash movies are built on a programming language called ActionScript. Normally you don't have to worry about this, as knowledge of ActionScript and how to use Adobe Flash itself is not required to build courses in Unison. Still, you should understand some basic concepts to be able to better understand some new features rolling out to Rapid Intake e-learning software soon.

The Flash Player that all Rapid Intake courses run in comes in different versions, such as Player 7, Player 8, Player 9, and Player 10, and so on (right now Player 10 is the latest). Flash content created for Players 7 and 8 were programmed in ActionScript 2 (AS2). Then Adobe released ActionScript 3 (AS3). AS3 is dramatically different from AS2, and much more powerful. Coupled with the latest Player 10, it offers the best possible experience and flexibility for interactive content available anywhere today.

Many new Flash movies are exported in ActionScript 3 and cannot be played inside AS2 movies. Since Rapid Intake tools load external Flash movies dynamically, courses created in AS2 may become limiting over time.

That's why we are nearing release of a new feature that allows you to build courses that have a foundation (the course style, or skin) in AS3. With the course style in AS3, you can load either AS2 or AS3 content, offering you the choice of either.

Making the move to AS3 is not trivial, and a lot of things, including complex SCORM communication with the LMS, as well as changes to the architecture that we've been wanting to make for a long time, have gone into this foundational project. We'll announce when it is released into Beta, so you can try it out yourself.

Rapid Intake Celebrates 10 Years in July!

We're excited to announce July 2010 marks Rapid Intake's 10 year anniversary--July 14, 2010 to be exact. We'll be celebrating with a number of promotions and events throughout July and through the rest of the year.

For fun, here's a quick synopsis of notable milestones over the last 10 years:

• July 2000 - Rapid Intake starts as a custom content development vendor building content (using Toolbook of all things) for companies such as Lockheed Martin, Intel, HP, Bank of America to name a few
• October 2001 - Rapid Intake publishes "Using Dreamweaver to Create eLearning", the first in a line of e-learning technology books based on Dreamweaver and Flash
• July 2004 - Rapid Intake launches the industry's first and original eLearning Developers Conference, eLearning DevCon (by the way, we just held our seventh conference; learn more at www.elearningdevcon.com -- just concluded); at the conference our attendees and book readers beg us to build tools that will help them build XML-driven Flash e-learning better and faster
• December 2005 - Rapid Intake launches pilot version of a Flash/XML e-learning development product
• July 2006 - Flashform, later renamed ProForm Rapid eLearning Studio, is born
• February 2008 - Rapid Intake launches the first collaborative online course authoring tool, called Unison
• August 2008 - Flashform is renamed ProForm because of pressure from Adobe's legal team to remove Flash from the name
• April 2008 - Unison wins Best Product Innovation in Cloud Computing from COMPTIA and SoftwareCEO
• November 2008 - Unison wins the Gold Award for Best Innovation in Learning Technology from Brandon Hall Research (beating Adobe incidentally, which took a Bronze :)
• February 2009 - ProForm wins the user's choice Best of Elearning award from eLearning Magazine (again beating Adobe Captivate and Articulate...two of our main competitors)
• October 2009 - A new e-learning conference concept is born: BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop; learn more at http://elearning.byol.com
• April 2010 - Unison wins the Gold Award for Excellence in Learning Technology for Rapid eLearning Software, making it the only e-learning software to consecutively win both the Best Innovation and Excellence in Technology awards from Brandon Hall

There's a lot more we could say, of course, but those are just a few of the highlights. Stay tuned for more details on related special promotions and events.

Accelerated Rapid eLearning Development

PowerPoint has become widely used as a medium for building e-learning content. But those who oversee quality often run into these problems:

• Poor course-level instructional design (or none at all)
• Poorly designed individual slides
• Inconsistent visual and instructional design across different courses
• Time to build each slide takes a long time because there are so many possible ways to build it (which is what influences the inconsistency problem as well)

What I call rapid interactive e-learning development is one of the solutions to these problems. Form-based templates have these advantages:

• Better instructional design (assuming the templates have instructional design built into them)
• More consistent experience for the learner across courses making each course "intuitive" to the learner
• Fewer errors when building content because the template has been tested
• Ability to build interactive content quickly (not possible in PowerPoint)
• Overall faster development because course developers are not focusing on layout and visual placement (that's all built into the template ahead of time)

A large pharmaceutical customer of ours recently reported they were able to build courses 60% faster and with fewer errors using Rapid Intake Unison (online collaborative course authoring) than with Articulate (desktop-based PowerPoint conversion tool).

Another Word for Flash in the Adobe vs Apple Wars

http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/html5-vs-flash-the-case-flash-721?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2010-06-02

You may also want to check out my previous comprehensive treatment of the subject here: http://shoutout.rapidintake.com/2010/05/apple-adobe-and-flash-elearning-future.html

Rapid Intake Online Collaborative e-Learning Software Wins Gold Two Years in a Row!

Check out the press release announcing Rapid Intake receiving the top award from Brandon Hall Research for Excellence in Learning Technology in the 2009 contest (only recently announced since it took months for judging to be completed). Rapid Intake Unison also won Gold for the Most Innovative Learning Technology in 2008, making Rapid Intake the only e-learning vendor to win both Gold award in two consecutive years!

Thanks to all of you customers who support our efforts and thanks to our great team.

 http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/38163-1274990889-collaborative-course-authoring-elearning-software-wins-gold-two-years-in-a-row.html

Garin Hess | CEO

Memorial Day - Remembering Why America Stands for Freedom

Having just completed reading the excellent book titled D-Day, by Stephen Ambrose, on this Memorial Day, my heart and mind are turned to those valiant soldiers, so young in life, who gave their ultimate sacrifice on June 6, 1944 in the effort to liberate France from the German occupation and secure the liberties of our friends in Europe and here at home.

This post has nothing to do with e-learning or business. I just want to publicly say Thank You. Having read this book I'm more proud to be an American and appreciate what I have today more keenly.  Happy Memorial Day everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Normandy

http://www.amazon.com/D-Day-June-Climactic-Battle-World/dp/B0013L2EG8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275084172&sr=8-1

Garin Hess | CEO

PowerPoint Poison

Yes, simply converting PowerPoint presentations can be harmful to your learner's and e-learning initiative’s health. This white paper discusses how you can still use PowerPoint as the basis of your training and create amazingly interactive courses with less effort and time than you might expect.

>> White Paper: Effective Powerpoint Conversion for eLearning (PDF download)

We're not the only ones saying you have to be careful with PowerPoint. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html