July 3, 2018
8 reasons for using HTML5 for authoring eLearning course
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July 3, 2018
8 reasons for using HTML5 for authoring eLearning course
BDM at WinBizSolutionsIndia, a professional digital conversion company providing end to end solutions for eLearning industry as well as archiving, flash to html5 conversion, eBook conversion and formatting support to global customers across various verticals like publishing, education, finance, media and more.
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Elearning courses have to interactive replete with high-quality animations and compelling graphics. Adobe Flash has been a productive tool for authoring these courses, and HTML5 has superseded Flash as a viable option for authoring eLearning courses because it’s supported by all smartphones and tablets.

The advantages of using HTML5 In eLearning courses are numerous and have been enumerated below for your ready reference.

1) Generates a mass appeal for a deployed eLearning course

Mobile devices have penetrated all level of human society because of competitive pricing and dropping internet costs. Consequently, your audiences would be keener to view the courses over handheld devices. If you develop the course using Flash, the same would not run on devices like iPhone and iPad. This would render your efforts futile as your outreach to audiences would be restricted. Alternatively, HTML5 underpinned courses are responsive, intuitively adapt to varying screen dimensions, and can be optimized using meta tags meant for handheld devices.

2) Learning on the go becomes easy

It is a fact that often we run short of time to sit before laptops/ desktops and commit attention to e-courses. Skill development may be a pressing urgency for learners but the lack of sufficient time may constrain them from attending courses on static devices for a protracted duration. This shortcoming is surmounted through e-courses developed with HTML5. These can be accessed anywhere and may even be downloaded for remote viewing without requiring an active internet connection, provided the app supports storage of data in offline mode.

3) Courses can be tailored to meet user preferences

HTML5 offers the flexibility to tailor e-courses with proper weight for every detail. Dynamic interactions, interactive graphics, engaging animations, and ease of customization do away with any limitation that you might be experiencing with Flash. The content flow can be adapted to the viewing panel, this promoting the accessibility quotient of the e-course for multiple screen dimensions and browsers. You need not integrate a third-party software to achieve this. Installation of a plug-in is also not required. You need to modify the underlying code only for the newer dynamics to take over. Since HTML5 for eLearning makes the course compatible with different browsers, OS, and online platforms, deployment of the course can be pulled off expeditiously.

4) Cross-domain and responsive

For viewing eLearning course developed with Flash, the user has to first download a supported Flash player or plug-in compatible with the browser in use.  For e-courses developed with HTML5, the browser need not be supplied with a plug-in to understand the code that actuates the course. Support for HTML5 courses is extended by all browsers including latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer by Microsoft, iPhone or Apple devices’ Safari etc. This cross-domain adaptability of the e-courses would motivate your targeted learners to readily enroll for the courses as they would not suffer from any limitation when trying to access the course from multiple viewing platforms. Further, there would be no distraction or time loss caused by the need to have adequate plug-in downloaded and installed before gaining access to the course. This convenience and promptness would allow instant logging into the eLearning module for ease of participation and availability of sufficient time to comprehensively walk through the various offerings of the course.

5) A wide range of multimedia can be seamlessly integrated

With Flash and other eLearning authoring tools, viewing multimedia embedded within eLearning module often posed problems. If the needful plug-in had not been installed in the browser, the placeholders for multimedia would often appear as black boxes leaving the user clueless about what to do. Searching for the proper application to run multimedia was also a real pain. The result was that users would be distracted and they would permanently desert the e-course and seek out something fewer multimedia rich. This drawback has been addressed by HTML. You can integrate any multimedia content through HTML5 code and the same would be easily accessible from all sorts of browsers across multiple viewing platforms. There is no need for using a particular player to view the content. Your user can even make organic audio and video based searches through the browser. The comprehensiveness of learning experience gains further depth with sustained interactivity and dynamism of e-courses.

6) Learning experience can be enhanced with games

To add further interactivity to the e-course, you can integrate interactive gaming modules that can seamlessly run on mobiles. You can take recourse of popular HTML5 eLearning course publishing tools such as Articulate Storyline, iSpring, Adobe Captivate, Camtasia Studio etc. to expedite the process.

7) Optimized content flow

HTML5 offers flexibility to the content presentation by allowing you to author the course with a pre-defined width which can later be responsively adjusted to make the content optimally legible in different browsers. Users can widen or lessen the content width as per requirement. Web content can also be easily rendered adaptable to various search engines and readers like Kindle.

8) Adherence to contemporary industry benchmarks

HTML5 is now considered the industry standard. All eLearning courses being developed across the globe are being authored in HTML5 only. The numerous advantages being offered by HTML5 are compounded by recent announcements by major online platforms regarding discarding of Flash in favor of HTML5. YouTube has declared that it would no longer rely on Flash for interactive content and utilize HTML5 sweepingly. The ‘HTML5 Rocks’ platform of Google offers tutorials and insights meant to leverage the potential of HTML5.

Owing to the countless benefits of HTML5 in eLearning, it is progressively taking the place of Flash. Soon, it would be matchless in the instructional design industry. This would also throw open the possibilities of further innovations to enhance the versatility of this program. ELearning domain stands to benefit optimally from the advent of HTML5 with the strategic inclusion of animation in eLearning.

1 Comment
2018-07-05 12:58:05
2018-07-05 12:58:05

Will keep correcting this type of incorrect terminology. Adobe Flash is very much alive. It is an application, used for the big majority of all games, and also the basis for the creation of AIR applications. The application Flash Builder may have been renamed to Animate CC but that IS FLASH. The raw files still have the extension FLA.
You are talking about publishing with any tool to an output indicated as SWF which has been used in the past for creating powerful websites, and also for deploying eLearning assets. Such an output to SWF (which is NOT FLASH) needs the use of the Flash Player. That Flash Player, standardized and managed by one company, used to be embedded in all web browsers (still is possible in all desktop web browsers). A fruit company banned it from his devices, without warning that HTML5 is not standardized, not supported by all web browsers in the same way and maybe never will. The EOL of Flash player as plugin for webbrowsers is announced for 2020 which means that everyone has to transform their courses in such a way that it can be published to HTML5 which still doesn’t have all the functionality we used to have for SWF output. This has been decided, and you’ll have to be ready.
Please don’t indicate the Flash Player allowing to play SWF output as ‘Adobe Flash’, because that is wrong. You don’t say that Captivate is dying neither. Captivate can produce output to SWF and to HTML, it is just that the output will have to be HTML only in the future. Same for ADOBE FLASH: the present Animate CC is very much alive, it can produce output to HTML, to SWF but as mentioned in the beginning also AIR and is still used for the creation of Games.

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