So, Emily Wray forwarded my initial letter in the previous post to the director of the program and she wrote back and DID address some of my concerns:
"Hi Gina,
Emily forwarded me your message expressing your concerns about the Digital Media & Education Applications course. We certainly welcome feedback from our students and it is particularly heartening to hear from someone who is obviously passionate about technology. I can assure you that our instructors share that passion and stay current with trends and research in educational technology. Equally as important, our instructors and our board of advisors have a great deal of real world experience - not only in the field of academia but also corporate and government. In fact, given your interest in iPad, you should be excited to know that we have the head of Apple Education as one of EMDT's key advisors.
The choices we make regarding our course content is based on the combination of what is current, what is relevant (real world application), and what is feasible in the accelerated timeframe of our program. It is true that the majority of our students are currently working in K-12 education. But there are also a good number of corporate trainers, e-learning designers, and students hoping to make the transition to the instructional design field. Technology does change at an astonishing rate; however, most developers of educational/training content are late adopters. They often have smaller budgets and have a backlog of legacy content that must run on any new platform adopted. The adoption cycle is often longer for training than it is for any other technology-driven group in an organization. The EMDT program takes into consideration all of these factors when we develop our courses to ensure maximum benefit for our students.
HTML5 is an up and coming technology. It is making impressive strides in some areas that Flash has traditionally dominated. Unfortunately, it is still far from mature. While I have seen some impressive samples of animation created utilizing its Canvas element, it does not quite match Flash's ability to deliver rich animation and interactive media. Flash remains the industry standard for developing instructional multimedia and courseware in numerous facets of online education and training. For organizations with little to no interactive content, iPad and other platforms that lack Flash support are easy to adopt. For those who have been developing content in Flash for years; however, the lack of legacy support will not be an option. Flash as a tool is also more accessible for those who are more designer than programmer and Adobe has already been building tools in their products that embrace HTML5 (see http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/adobe-shows-off-flash-to-html5-conversion-tool/ and http://www.reelseo.com/html-5-war-won-adobe-kaltura/).
Captivate, on the other hand, is stable (we are now on version 5) and is an excellent tool for rapid e-learning development. In fact, plans already exist to adopt Captivate in place of Flash in the DAE course due to a number of factors including: practicality for our students, its relative complexity in relation to Flash, and its prominence in the e-learning industry. However, even with Captivate, the output will typically be a Flash-based SWF file when interactive media is the end product.
As I have noticed over my career in educational technology, design tools come and go over time. No matter what we teach, within a few years, the technology is in danger of being obsolete. In light of this, I view the understanding of how people process the various media forms and how these media can be optimized to best deliver instruction as the key take-away from this month. I hope that you will find the concepts we cover a welcome addition to your overall media design tool kit.
Sincerely,
Lisa Smith | Course Director | Education Media Design & Technology Master of Science | Full Sail University"
And I wrote back this:
"Lisa,
Your response is so very informative and appreciated. Thank you for the articles as well.
My initial feeling is that teaching educators/trainers Flash is like teaching someone learning to swim in a raging river. I believe that it would intimidate most people and make them feel that they need far more deign and technical skills to create engaging eLearning materials. I personally think teaching Flash is a huge overkill for your basic teacher.
I worked for Apple many years ago as an Apple Education Consultant. This was back in the Macromind (before Macromedia) Director days. There was no one on the planet more enthusiastic than I was seeing and knowing all of the possibilities for teachers and how this software could enhance education. However, there was also no one more disheartened than I was a few months later after beating my head against the wall trying to get teachers to embrace a new way of teaching. So many teachers were unwilling to put the time and energy into learning a complex piece of software. In fact, none were. Which is why, I think the rapid eLearning approach is crucial, especially given the rapid pace of this program if your sincere intention in this program is to create tech-savvy educators who leave this program and use what they learn. Flash takes years to really learn and it is highly complex to create even a simple interactive quiz, whereas, Captivate combines screen capture, quizzes, powerpoint features (that they probably already know) and then produces an entire course in one file. While, I am very happy to hear that Captivate is planned to become the software for this course, (and I hope for other courses as well) it is disappointing to me that what I believed to be the most cutting edge education program is not utilizing the latest and most efficient tools to create eLearning content. I just don't think of Flash in itself as "the" eLearning tool of choice but rather a design and programming tool.
I see so much potential in this program but so far, I don't see anything we've done so far as "cutting edge" - Rena had us pasting our formatted research papers into the cell of a Google Spreadsheet in order to collaborate with fellow students. I cannot tell you how appalling that was having used Office Live and Apple iWork.com and Glasscubes.com and Huddle.com and other countless cutting edge collaboration tools. There was no real collaboration using emergent technologies in a course with that name. I love iWeb as a tool and iMove and I do believe that educators should know them, but I don't see where they fit in a class about collaboration. The classes Wimba's were completely unorganized and uninteresting. I also received a 100 grade for a research paper that I spent weeks on and then learned during the Wimba (after I received my grade) that Rena hadn't even read my paper. So, basically, I received a 100 for pasting text into the cell of a spreadsheet.
Your email and knowledge in this field is so impressive and appreciated and I hope you can take my words as constructive criticism rather than just a bunch of empty complaints. I want this program to be cutting edge for my own learning experience but also for other students who are out in the field with the opportunities to change the course of education. And finally, I want this program to be a huge success for Full Sail as a school to be truly offering a cutting edge experience in designing eLearning materials.
Anything I can do to help this program, I am 100% on board.
Thank you again for listening and taking the time to respond.
Warmest regards,
Gina Fant-Saez"
I have heard nothing back and have been sitting and teaching myself Captivate for the last week.....
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