Important! New Flash Player Release Might Impact the Performance of Articulate Courses

Today’s posting on the Articulate Word of Mouth Blog   identifies a potential challenge Articulate course developers will have with the newest release of the Adobe Flash Player.  If you or your users upgrade to Flash Player v10 (released today), you may not be able to properly view courses created with Articulate Presenter 5.

The blog post does a good job identifying where the problem lies with the compatability of Flash 10 Player and Articulate courses.  Earlier today, I downloaded the new version of Flash Player, and was able to replicate the problem identified in the blog post.  With the new version of Flash Player, I was unable to view Articulate Courses that were previously loaded to the web and to the LINGOs LMS.

The good news is that the blog post provides instructions on how to ensure any courses you developed previously are accessible by your audience with Flash 10 Player installed.  In summary, Articulate recommends that you do  do the following:

1.       Download and install the new Articulate Presenter 5 Updater for Adobe Flash Player 10, which will update the stealthray.swf file to correctly detect the Flash Player 10 version number.

2.       Review FAQs about this updater in the Presenter 5 Knowledge Base: Why are my presentations not loading with Flash Player 10?

3.       Run the updater (look for the Flash 10 Updater icon on your desktop) on all your local and Web-based Presenter 5 presentations.

4.       Clear your browser cache (and instruct your users to do the same) and view impacted Presenter 5 presentations; they should play just fine now.

Important notes:

• The LINGOs team has tested the fix identified by Articulate and we find it is working.  NOTE – however that the automatic updater does not appear to correct the problem if your published course files are embedded in .zip folders (which is the norm with LINGOs courses loaded to the LMS.)  To update your published files that are found in .zip files, you will need to republish your course manually (which we did  and were able to successfully load content that is accessible via the Flash 10 Player on the LMS)
• The newly released Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio ‘09 (including Presenter ‘09) and other Articulate products (such as Quizmaker 2.x and Quizmaker ‘09) are not impacted by this Flash 10 issue.  LINGOs member agencies are not yet using this version of the product, but we hope to move that direction in the future.

§ The updater will also update your installed Presenter 5 files, so new presentations will not need to be updated

Learn more in the Articulate Knowledge Base

Elluminate New User Video Clip

For two years, LINGOS member agencies have endeavored to make the Elluminate Live Virtual classroom accessible to staff across the world.  During that time, two adoption challenges have been especially significant when promoting the application within organizations:

1.        Ensuring that field-based users overcome their initial apprehension of entering live on-line sessions;

2.       Ensuring that new users have the Java download that is required to participate in Elluminate.

 

Today, I received a note from a LINGOs member agency that quoted an e-mail from an employee  based in India:
“Thank you for sharing this clip. One of the reasons I did not join any session was my hesitancy with the technology. Thanks to this I have run out of this excuse. J Looking forward to participating in the next session.”

The e-mail refers to a video clip that had been sent out widely to field based staff which aimed to address both the challenges listed above.  The video clip provides a 5-minute introduction to Elluminate and summarizes everything a new participant needs to know about using the Elluminate Live Virtual Classroom.  The video clip has two clear advantages:

1.       It raises the comfort level of session participants by providing a clear, intuitive introduction to the application – within the context of an Elluminate session.

2.       It identifies a number of additional resources that users can access if they require additional information.

A further advantage of the video clip is that it requires the Elluminate plug-in to be installed before it can be viewed.  That means that anybody who has viewed the clip now has the plug-in required to attend an Elluminate session.

So, as you think about the challenge of preparing staff to attend Elluminate-based sessions, keep this video clip in mind.  The URL for the clip can be inserted as a link in session announcements and it can be presented as required viewing for first-time Elluminate sessions.