All joking aside, we’ve spent some time redoing our entire portfolio of eLearning, training and educational game samples to show a bigger variety of our work in a more enticing format.

Great creativity and design sells itself, and we excited to show off a set of clear categories, larger visuals to ogle, and many more projects to view.

Be sure to check out the new character design, 3D and illustration sections as well! Although not commonly found services within an eLearning development company, these services are a great addition to any simulation or game and help smack your users in the face with entertaining visuals!

Over the last 11.5 years of developing eLearning for the full range of humans (1st grade on up to corporate and elderly) I’ve gotten to experience a wide variety of situations, scripts, content and end results.

The thing that struck me as odd along the way was how the larger the corporation is, the more project managers they have on board debating the content of a course, the easier things get for the end user. For some reason plot points disappear (too hard to follow), humor is erased and sterilized (you’re going to offend that one person out of 20,000 – so everyone else will have to be bored and disengaged as opposed to entertained with a memorable learning experience) and complexity is added back in (well, if they’re not going to be entertained, we should at least cram in all 75 pages worth of content into that single slide and lock the next button so they don’t have a choice but to read).

I was talking to Matt my developer yesterday, and we agreed that if the user really hates what they’re going through, they’ll find a way to ignore the content, skip the slides and in the end they always have the option of clicking the little X/close button on the browser window. To think that we, as educators, don’t also need to entertain and make it a priority always amazez me. 

When peter Jackson made lord of the rings, his point wasn’t forcing plot retention and memorization of the books, but to slim them down, prioritize entertaining and action packed moments, bring out the true essence and emotion of a broad and lengthy concept – in other words – make it accessible to the general public without them feeling the writer/director was  treating them as brain dead, unable to grasp complex ideas.

I’ve always though an analogy, whether visual or spoken (as a story) goes a long way towards helping the average person understand complex ideas. We use this over and over in our Edheads.org projects – take hard to teach concepts and make the accessible to the average user. We open doors by using a set of hand drawn animated characters, in bright non-intimidating fun environments. Once users feel welcome, they open their minds to the activity and really begin to learn. We ask them questions, suggest open discussions and let them take it from there.

In comparison, corporate level projects tend to use visuals of multi-raced adults standing on white backgrounds, or someone in a cubicle hard at work.. it’s almost too realistic and definitely not a fun and engaging visual to entice your employees. Setting an analogy outdoors, telling a story through a mythical character, using light humor that can’t possibly offend will only make people pay more attention. Once you have their attention, you can begin to layer on the challenges.

When a learner is disengaged, the chances of them wanting to solve a problem are slim.. they might poke around at it but in the end they really don’t care. Entice that same learner into story with mildly dramatic plot points.. you’re saving the company form disaster.. you’re helping people overcome a problem, you’re negotiating a sale with a virtual customer… suddenly there’s another aspect, usually character driven that looks back at the user and spurs them on to conquer the challenge. This is something that no number of multiple choice tests will accomplish.. I can tell you i barely passed my SATs.. got a D- on my algebra exams, and thought overall a C average was great. Now as an adult I use algebra on a daily basis when programming, use problem solving skills and a whole lot of real world experience when building my companies and completing jobs.

In the end, there’s a reason people cringe when they have to sit down in a sound proof room with a camera over their shoulder when taking some eLearning certification test.. it’s not fun and brings back haunting memories of high school. We have the potential to truly teach people these days, sure it might take a little longer to develop and cost a bit more.. but would you rather spend $5,000 on a course that people forget, retaining no information what-so-ever, or spend $12,000 on a course where people spread the word on how fun it was to learn a concept, actually got buzzed about the learning experience and looked forward to the next course. Suddenly you have an engaged employee, open to learning, happy and excited about solving the next challenge that comes their way. Motivation is a powerful tool, it’s just a shame how often the opportunities to motivate are passed up, and in return we can expect some mediocre results.

All I can say is it’s worth it.. the effort, the time, the cost. Look at Brain surgery on Edheads.. One month went by with no marketing, no one forcing anyone to use it, and we’ve had over 1,000,000 unique users, word of mouth and a great response overall. It is possible to create this in the corporate world, it just takes some additional effort.

We just wrapped up a rather large project for an unnamed client involving about 16 one to four minute videos of the client speaking about a process. Our task was to import and compress the videos on an alpha channel, then time them to animated reveals, drawings and bullet points over time – and it needed to be exact.

Flash is a little tricky when it comes to this sort of thing… choose a single wrong export setting when making your .flv file and you waste three hours figuring out what went wrong (I’m talking about 3 gig video files being compressed into 4 meg .flvs.. it takes a while!).  For instance, if you thought importing the video into the .FLA timeline sounded like a good idea, it may be but only if the file was less than 25 seconds long. After that the audio track either speeds up or slows down and the visuals of not only your flash animation, but the person talking in the video itself become out of sync.

So understanding the above, and that we should use .FLV (external flash movie files) and import them into our eLearning template, we thought we had it figured out. The odd thing was, was that the audio and video might be in sync, but the timing of the main timeline visuals was completely random. We’d test the file once, and everything (bullets, animations) would time up perfectly. Test it again, and suddenly only the first bullet was well timed, the rest was completely off, sometimes by as much as 5 seconds. It was random, things like deleting a single frame would throw everything off.. even clicking a key frame would shift everything around.. it was very buggy looking.

The way I see it, the video is on an independant timeline, and once I thought of it that way I assumed that the video was playing as fast as it could, and the flash timeline was playing as fast as it could, and every once in a while they’d sync up, which wasn’t good enough.

The solution was to glue the video to the timeline, while still keeping the .flv files external. The way we went about doing this was importing a silent 1 second audio clip, adding a layer, then set it to loop, and stream for the entirety of the video file and main timeline.

Just like the difference between event and stream sounds, the streaming sound basically embeds everything on the flash timeline down into a permanent visual/audio experience. It makes the file sizes a little larger, and degrades the quality just a bit, but in the end you get a flawless timing of and external video file and an internal timeline animation.