Stuck With Legacy Flash Content? 7 Options To Consider As You Finalize Your Modernization Strategy

Modernization Strategy: Flash To HTML5 Conversion
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Summary: With Flash slated for sunset by 2020, what should you do to your legacy content? How do you recognize which of your courses require modernization? What are your options? Keep reading to learn.

7 Options To Consider As You Finalize Your Modernization Strategy

While Adobe plans to officially close curtains on Flash by the end of 2020, most web browsers have already started phasing out Flash support. The end of Flash is approaching fast. If you have a lot of Flash-based training content that needs to be converted to a format that meets your current and future business needs, here are some options you may consider.

1. Retiring A Course

Your organization may have a huge library of legacy courses and not every course needs to be modernized. The first step is to identify the courses that need to be retired. The decision to retire or retain a course can be framed based on the following factors:

  • Relevance of the course content today
  • Current market requirement for the course
  • User enrollment analysis for each course
  • Recent feedback given by users after taking the course
  • If a course performs adversely on the above parameters, consider retiring it.

2. As-Is Conversion

If there are minor to no tweaks that you need to make in the modernized version, contemplate converting the course as-is, using any of your preferred authoring tools. The conversion will be driven by the selected tool’s capabilities. Do not expect major modifications or enhancements if you take this approach.

3. Upgrade Authoring Tool

Upgrading to a newer authoring tool might be a good solution if you are looking at major enhancements in the modernized version. But this option will work only if you have the source files of legacy courses available. There are many new tools on the market, like dominKnow Flow, GoMo Learning, Articulate Rise, which come with responsive design ability and the latest tracking and compliance standards. A thorough evaluation of tools can help you pin down one best suited to your business requirements.

4. Custom HTML5 Development

If you are anticipating enhancements in the modernized version and source files of legacy courses are not available, redevelopment of courses using custom HTML5 might be your best bet. Custom HTML5 development provides you with the ability to refurbish legacy courses completely and implement major changes related to design, responsiveness, or accessibility. HTML5 is a standardized format that is universally acceptable and stands strong from the perspective of future-readiness.

5. Microlearning Nuggets

Breaking lengthy eLearning modules into smaller, digestible, microlearning chunks is an effective way to modernize, considering the modern-day learner’s attention span has reduced drastically. Modernization is a great opportunity to convert legacy content into bite-sized nuggets that are searchable and available Just-In-Time. These nuggets could be in the form of short courses, videos, animations, infographics, or even AI-powered chatbots. They can be used as standalone learning units or even as a reinforcement tool, depending on an organization’s needs and strategy. These could be nudged at specified intervals or could be triggered based on user performance. They could even be pushed via mobile apps for on-the-go learning.

6. Nudge Learning

Your employees can spend hours in training and come out of it feeling they have learned a lot, but suddenly the "Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve" starts kicking in, and before you even realize it you do not recall the majority of things learned during the training. It is found that almost a whopping 60% of knowledge is lost in less than an hour after learning it. One of the key reasons for this is lack of reinforcement. Nudging your learners with reinforcement training material on a periodic basis could be one of the potential ways to improve knowledge retention. Your legacy content could be re-utilized to create nudges that could be pushed out to learners periodically. These nudges are usually pushed to learners based on their learning preferences, knowledge levels, and performance. Nudge learning aims at knowledge retention through regular quizzes, reinforcement of content at regular intervals, and encouraging the right learner behavior through badges.

7. Chatbots

Performance support at the point of need is a key requirement for many organizations, especially today when the skills gap is a major challenge. CLOs and L&D stakeholders are constantly trying to find effective ways to make employees productive faster. Legacy content could be very well utilized for creating performance-support chatbots, since answers to many employee queries are embedded deep into organizational legacy content repositories. Content and media elements could be extracted from legacy courses with the help of automated extraction utilities. Different types of questions can then be created using Natural Language Processing (NLP), lexical analysis, and syntactic and abstractive language approach. These questions can then be mapped to appropriate answers in the course content. Once the library of questions and answers is ready, a bot could be trained to deliver them.

Once the courses to be modernized are shortlisted and evaluated for further action, the next step is to decide who is going to do this job. Is it your internal development team or should you bring in a third-party expert? If you intend to bring in a third-party expert, what should be criteria to bring them on board? The right technical skillset is non-negotiable, but do you want to onboard just a vendor or someone who is a partner with you in achieving your goal? Once you make this important decision, your modernization journey would be up for a kick-start.

Have you modernized your legacy content? How has your experience been? Share in the comments below.