This article is in honor of Adobe Flash,
You can’t reminisce about eLearing and not include old pal Flash in the conversation. We had a good run friend, but finally it is time for you to retire. This is my tribute.
For some (ok, most of us), Flash was one of the first tools ever used for building eLearning content. There was none like it and for many years it was THAT tool. It looked amazing and the features were pretty advanced. Now, don’t get me wrong, it was not easy to learn how to work with it by today’s standards, but at that time it was considered a great program to develop from scratch eLearning courses/interactive lessons/games and various web components.
The beginning
My first experience with Flash is connected to eLearning development.
Flash came to me like the one ring, close to the end of my high school years, back in 2004. I remember like it was yesterday, my high school director looking evasively at me and saying, half running to a class (he always did that): “Alex, can you make this math lesson in FLASH”?. Of course I said “Yes”. Who am I not to enjoy a good challenge? I took the task and I pretty much fumbled it…
I was ashamed for a couple of weeks of my performance. The problem, I spotted, I was really bad at math during that time…
So, this was the beginning, not a great one, but I guess it was fine in the long run.
Then came the founding of our elearning company, Ascendia, in 2007. We began working as an elearning outsourcing company, many know what that is like. We made thousands of lessons for K12 in about 8 languages, digital laboratories for Chemistry, Physics and Biology. It was both fun and hard! Without exaggeration, almost 90% of the content that we were building back then was Flash based.
The present:
Flash who? Oooh, that old guy?
Our company has migrated completely to HTML5 for course building and most of the content is made in LIVRESQ. It was not an easy transition and we had to make it in steps. Now, not one element is being made with Flash. We sometimes open old courses in browsers and activate the plugin just for the memory trip, yes, we roll like that.
The end
The time is 11:59 pm, the last day of December 2020, Flash is officially deactivated from all the browsers.
I owe a lot to Flash. It was a great tool that has helped us get where we are today. I will always remember it. Sometimes, we need to lay back a little and pay tribute.
