A large global not-for-profit humanitarian organization which is into providing emergency assistance, disaster relief and disaster preparedness education invested heavily in developing eLearning courses more than a decade ago. This was a commendable radical step they took during that time when teaching vocational courses such as training a lifeguard at a swimming pool through self-learning courses online was unheard of. It was definitely a bold step and they had to really make the courses as close to real instructor lead as possible for people to adopt. This required the eLearning courses to be really engaging and interesting with interactivities, videos, audios, animations, engaging games, assessments, scoring, etc. During those days Adobe Flash was the prevailing and popular software for developing courses of this nature. Therefore they used Adobe Flash to develop more than 100 learning hours of courses involving interactivity, animation, gaming, audio/video, etc. They spent in the excess $1 MM over a period of more than a year to develop because it involved number of activities such as story boarding, instructional design, copy writing, course design, assessment, games, video and photo shooting, etc.
This transition from classroom based training to online eLearning really paid off as they were able cover large number of people in quick time and enabled people to learn at their convenience. Enrollments to the courses increased which not only helped in improving the quality of emergency assistance and disaster relief but also resulted in prevention of number of incidents. Subsequently all their instruction led training was slowly converted to online eLearning. However, with the technology evolution and advent of mobile devices especially Apple iOS, the support for Adobe Flash was withdrawn. More and more users wanted to access the courses using their iPhone or iPad but Adobe Flash components wouldn’t render
Therefore, enrollments to the courses started dropping.
The organization was entirely dependent on eLearning based education and wanted some solution to overcome the problem without losing the heavy investment they have already made.
iPowerFour solutions team engaged with the client and did a thorough technology evaluation including reviewing the implementation and information architecture. They then came up with a technology solution to migrate all the courses in Flash to HTML5 and JavaScript. They came up with a migration strategy along with a technology architecture which will enabled using most of the artifacts and accomplish the migration in a highly cost effective manner. A framework was developed using one of the courses which was then used to migrate all other courses. Following are some of the implementation specific actions that solutions team took