Content and Technology Maintenance question

[Veronica Escutia]

Many years ago we spent a year and a team of four converting our lessons from Authorware to Flash, then we were converting them from Flash to Articulate Presenter. The reality is that in order to keep with the trends, technology and content updates we need time and its something we usually don't have. An now with the cut of flash support we need to have a plan on what are we going to do with all our eLearning lessons as we have some developed on Presenter 09, storyline 1 and storyline 2. They all output swf files.

When you have 1000’s of eLearning lessons and you keep receiving request for more, how do you maintain your content and technologies up to date?

Does anyone have a Maintenance Schedule or strategy for this?

Thanks in advance,
Veronica

[max]

Hi Veronica, and welcome to the forum.
You're right, Flash is quickly disappearing and the most recent authoring tools directly publish in html5.

Yet, I'd like to comment on your statements regarding the tools you use: Presenter '13, Storyline 1 and 2 output either in flash AND in html5.
Therefore, if you publish with those tools, your courses should already be playable on mobile devices.

Of course, if what you did was just publish slides with those tools, but your slides consisted of .swf objects, you're right that those objects ... will just stay the same...

Here you can find a useful table illustrating what will work and how on mobile devices, that confirm the above.
https://www.articulate.com/support/stor ... yer-output
https://www.articulate.com/support/stor ... ml5-output.

In our case, all of our courses were always developed starting from text and images slides, so we could easily transition from Presenter 5 to '09 to 13 and to Storyline without losing on compatibility. We never used Flash animations. Therefore, our maintenance plan has always been to update our authoring tools to the most recent ones.

The real issue, then, is Flash. There is no other way than to re-build the animations with new tools.

I don't know about your contents, but in my opinion courses developed 10 years ago would have to be updated regardless of the technology behind them. Information changes, content becomes obsolete, the look & feel of 10 years ago often would look old today....

What I would do in your place is: divide your catalogue according to what you can still sell or what can be abandoned. Re-develop the ones you are sure you will sell, abandon the obsolete content and be ready to update the ones that maybe can be interesting on the market.

These are just my thoughts. Hope it helps.