10 Best Practices for Developing eLearning Programs  in Flash - Centrax Corporation

Friday, May 18, 2012

10 Best Practices for Developing eLearning Programs  in Flash

The following are some tips Centrax Flash developers and designers have learned mostly the old fashioned way… trial and error.

Optimize the screen size for viewing area. Centrax finds that 990x760 is a good maximum screen size for viewing on various screen sizes and will accommodate the Internet browser navigation.
Streamline development. Create a main player movie that will load your pages / movies and screen elements. Centrax has taken this a step further and developed our own main player movie Framework with supporting elements like navigation files and a library of functions. Centrax Flash developers and designers reuse these core elements for each eLearning program. This improves development time, leaves more time for design and content development.
Make your Flash source files easy and fast to edit. Develop a naming convention for symbols and channels on the timeline in your movies, so that anyone editing the file (including yourself) is able to quickly and easily navigate the file.
Animate everything on a separate channel. Make separate channels on the timeline for every animated element especially text. For example, if you have 5 bullets of text that animate in at different times on the same channel, you would have to change it 5 times if the first bullet changes instead of once, if the bullets are separated into different channels.
Optimize your graphics. Always optimize and resize your graphic images in Photoshop or another image editor before you import them into the Flash source file. This will usually give your images a cleaner look as well since they are not being “squashed,” and save on your executable file size/bandwidth.
Save your hard drive space and bandwidth. Make your flash files cheetah-sleek by deleting unused symbols. You can do this quickly through the symbol library menu by using “Select Unused” and click the Trash icon. Then "Save and Compact" (under the File menu) after your final edit, then publish your file. This will save your hard drive space and also usually export a smaller file.
Easy audio syncing and cuing. Place numbers in your audio scripts to match with numbered labels placed on the Flash timeline. As you put the audio in the files place the numbered labels to know exactly where animations should start/stop. You won’t have to go back and listen to the same audio again and again to place animations.
Save bandwidth while preserving audio quality. You will get best results by editing the audio outside of Flash before importing it. Edit your audio to 22Hz and mix down to mono.
Test, test, test. Test the movie every so often while you are creating it. Be sure to watch the entire file once it is finished. You will save yourself and your tester time later on.
Keep a backup and save versions as you develop. If you are using a Mac, TimeMachine is your friend but don’t count on it exclusively as it may not back up as often as you need a new version.