Friday, November 09, 2007

Adobe Summit Day 2 - Authorware and the future of e-Learning

Adobe Learning Summit
I finally have an opportunity to sit and live blog. [yes Mark, I know living blogging is soooo 90's ;-)] I'm sitting in the Friday morning session of the Adobe eLearning Summit.
Yesterday was awesome and the reception at Adobe was a blast. GREAT hosts!!! Good people. Can't ask for much more.

Adobe eLearning Solutions
So, Ellen is talking about Authorware and IT's future in eLearning:

6 part plan
1)Business continuity
2)conversion
3)migration
4)enablement
5)develop the next gen leanring content authoring
6)improved communication

Tom KIng will be acting as the Liaison for Adobe and the Authorware community to help this transition process.

Its obvious that the authorware decison was a tough one for adobe. And Silke reminds me that it is NOT end-of-LIFED. For now, its only end-of-development. Because of you, the Authorware community, they are looking into putting some engineering effort into updating the runtime for IE7 and Vista support.

So basically, DON"T PANIC (that's me saying that) ! Just because you shouldn't expect a new version in the future doesn't mean you can't still use and purchase the tool to continue creating killer eLearning apps. With that said, Adobe is actively pursuing #1 above to provide a "soft landing" for its users. The basic idea is that Authorware has been used in the past to be the onsize fits all for elearning development. Adobe is working toward helping the community to see better ways to move some types of content into other tools.

Conversion: Adobe is working with many vendors to facilitate, broker, and enable conversion efforts. Currently, they have reached out and engaged with DazzleTech, SumTotol, Eedo, Atlantic Link, Huric, Eduworks.

Migration: Captivate and Flash for content creation. AIR provides interesting options. Flex is great to some of what Authorware did for you too. The key is that there is NO one solution to fill the gap left by Authorware.
Issues: 1) Migrate "heritage" content. 2) Migrate skills and 3) decision making on new tools as we move forward.
Thermo - ??? PHotoshop plugin - alpha

If you want to have a conversation with Ellen and the Adobe team to discuss all the things Authorware, join their webinar on November 14th on Authorware

Adobe is also putting together an eLearning Advisory Council. This is something that I think will be extremely valuable for the eLearning community. Adobe is a big player and we ALL use at least ONE of their tools to get our jobs done. ADL and AICC will play a role moving forward. AICC.org/blog has great authorware usage data.

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