Adobe had announced the end of support for the flash and its plugins at the end of 2020. A few years ago, flash was widely known for its capability to support creation of a decent e-learning content. However with the new generation technologies, Flash was unable to cope up with the new requirements. The failure was mainly due to its unreliable security; crashing issues due to instability; performance issues; touch feature support problems, and compatibility issues. The issues became prominent with the launch of the latest rapidly evolving technologies. In fact, flash was left behind and failed to be in sync with the technological race. Thus converting instructor-led training to eLearning HTML5 based courses became inevitable for organisations that highly depended upon training courseware.
How HTML5 is different from flash?
HTML5, also referred as Hypertext Markup Language, is the advanced fifth version of HTML standard, which is used for rendering structured layout for e-learning and webpage courses with animations, text content, advertisements, simulations, and GIF animations. The capabilities of HTML5 are far better than flash as it supports the latest e-learning and web based modern structures and designs, and offers a common platform to incorporate majority of the advanced technological elements in the e-Learning courses which is perfect for converting instructor-led training to eLearning materials based on HTML5 format.
Benefits of converting instructor-led training to eLearning courseware
1. HTML5 coding offers a platform for HTML (for structuring layout); cascading Style Sheets, also referred as CSS, (for presentation purpose), and JavaScript (for dynamic elements). Since HTML5 offers a host of benefits with the ability to support coding over platforms such as HTML; CSS, and JavaScript, it can be used to create a well-structured interactive website layout in the top browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari Opera and Internet Explorer. This feature is of high importance while converting instructor-led training to HTML5 e-learning courseware.
2. HTML5 is compatible with the multimedia elements and interactive content which include animations and simulations. The best aspect of this being, plugins are not required. To elaborate, for using animations and simulations in flash, Silverlight and third party plugins were required.
3. With HTML5, offline browsing becomes possible which enables the user to access courseware materials once they are downloaded.
4. The best aspect among all features when HTML5 is used for creating a learning solution is - SEO compatible. This means HTML5 is optimised to function with different SEO modules so that web crawlers can index the website content and help it to move up the ranking in the search engine results.
5. HTML5 allows the users to create customised e-learning solutions while converting instructor-led training to HTML5 e-learning courseware using Rapid Authoring tools like Articulate Storyline; iSpring; Lectora Inspire, etc. This is a big bonus as far as elearning content creation is concerned as the e-learning solution can be developed as per the specific customised requirements.
6. High quality content creation standards by the incorporation of SCORM and AICC standards, can be achieved with HTML5 platform.
7. Irrespective of the formats such as PDF; PPT for PowerPoint slides, conversion of instructor-led training to HTML5 elearning courseware is possible.