Adobe Learning Suite – There is more than just Photoshop, Flash, and Captivate (Part 2)

In this conclusion to our examination of Adobe’s secondary eLearning tools, I will look at the last of the Adobe eLearning Suite support tools: the Flash Learning Interactions templates.

Flash CS4 Learning Interactions

Flash Learning Interactions are a set of question templates used to build out course assessments or knowledge checks.  During my initial search for supporting documentation, it became clear that Adobe has run afoul of the same problem that they have with CourseBuilder, a lack of clear documentation and support.  Finding any documentation, that isn’t from the era of Macromedia, is an almost futile endeavor.  Eventually, I found a link from an archived TechNote to a pdf that had some useful information on how to use learning interactions, as well as the other Adobe eLearning Suite extensions, to create quizzes.

After discovering this document and looking in-depth at the templates, it became apparent that these interactions are versatile and fairly easily to use.  There is also the Flash Quiz template that has several interactions, each on its own key frame, that illustrate how they function and this template can even be used as a standalone assessment.  It already contains basic scoring functionality and the afore mentioned document lists the APIs available to the learning interactions.  This makes it fairly easy to create custom assessments without having to build out all of the functionality from scratch.

Everything that I tested worked as advertised and it was easy to change question information and layout.  I could see using these templates for small scale assessment creation, but because the content is maintained within the interactions and requires all content to be updated manually in the swf, it would be time consuming, and impractical on a large scale, to make updates or changes to the course content.  Before using these in any production environment, I would recommend updating them to support content driven by XML files.

What is unclear to me is where or when a company would want to take advantages of these interactions.  They are only available when you purchase the Learning Suite, which already contains Captivate and Presenter and both are viable alternatives to the interactions.  If you are using Flash as a part of a larger scale solution or in conjunction with internal tools, you would want something more XML driven to allow course creators to quickly and easily update course content without having to go into every swf file.

In Summation

All three of these tools are clearly outliers to the primary applications that Adobe sells and none of them have the level of support that you would want to use them exclusively.  I had significant difficulty finding documentation for any of these tools and, I suspect if I ran into problem getting them to work, I would probably be on my own.  Also, I suspect that as they extend the functionality of Presenter and Captivate, there will be less of a place for these tools.  So, unless you are already a strong HTML or Flash programmer that enjoys building out your own tools, I would recommend not bothering with these extensions and focus more on their mainstream and better supported tools.