Flare as an instructional delivery platform?

[mchance47]

I come from a programming, tech writing, and instructional design background. Flare would seem to me to be a viable platform for training and performance support (providing Mimic movies to train and small, just-in-time help snippets (Mimic movies and step-by-step) for discrete tasks as the user encounters an immediate need. The user would turn to Flare if she needed regular online Help, in-depth online training, or performance support for an immediate task problem.

I used RoboHelp (our current HAT) to provide a small proof of concept for some internal training customers and it was well-received. They considered the approach to have the potential to add more perceived value to the online Help and to cut down on the amount of both up-front formal training and on-the-job superuser interruptions ("Hey Alice! Please stop what you're doing and show me how to do this.") We have about 16,000 users, so anything that reduces training time or superuser interruptions by even a few minutes per day can pay big dividents.

I realize there are complex Electronic Performance Support Systems out there, but licensing, implementation, and maintenace costs are far too high given that an EPSS represents overkill for us right now.

Has anyone considered or prototyped an approach using Flare as a training and performance support platform? If not, does such an approach make sense to you

Thanks very much for any thoughts you may have.

Mike Chance
Manager, Instructional Technology
J. B. Hunt Transport
615 J. B. Hunt Corporate Drive
Lowell, AR 72745
479-659-6018
479-899-7206 (cell)
michael_chance@jbhunt.com

[forfear]

Welcome to the forums!

Flare is used to provide instructional delivery.
Most people use it for How To help, manuals, process guides, knowledgebases plus all kinds of other things such as training handouts, cheat sheets, product specs, about topics, etc, in multiple delivery platforms.

I am guessing you could try to deliver searchable help and documentation, and additional printable course support material with a Flare project as your delivery and storage platform. You could then link the generated Webhelp up to an open source web based EPSS, such as moodle, to handle the student tracking and quizzing bits.

moodle - http://www.moodle.org

[mchance47]

Thanks very much for your response.

Yes, very familiar with Moodle, but our experience has been that Moodle's a much better Learning Management System than a Performance Support System, although recent developments in the performance support area are encouraging. Not looking at Flare as a place to provide reference materials or to provide 'traditional' online Help (if there is such a thing). Rather, I'm looking at Flare as a delivery platform for actual training and on-demand, immediate-application performance support in, say, a live, customer-facing situation where the user is stressed and needs their hand held 'right now' to get them through a task that is more granular than online Help typically addresses. "Immediately give me only what I need at that moment to get me through only the task I'm trying to perform--no more and no less." This is the user requirement we're trying to address from a performance support perspective. Sorry--I should have been more clear in my original post.

[KevinDAmery]

Ok, Flare is a help authoring tool, not a delivery tool. You might be able to author the content for what you want in Flare, but Flare is definitely not the application I would have the user run if they need to access assistance.

Flare is a direct competitor to Robohelp, if that makes it clearer.

[mchance47]

Thanks, Kevin, for your opinion. I respect your thoughts on the subject.

We have already demonstrated a proof of concept for our users, their managers, and our C-level executives. Today, I demonstrated it for a friend who owns a high-end EPSS develoment firm. He considered it viable, but he may be wrong, I admit. I won't say he was giddy about it, but he considered it worth pursuing further.

I don't want to put Flare in the traditional HAT box and say it can't get out. While I admit you may be proven right in the end, we're actively pursuing a "color outside the lines" approach to see where it takes us. We've done the same thing with RoboHelp, Captivate, and Flash, but consider the MadCap design/development team to be demonstrably more forward-thinking than those fine folks who inherited RoboHelp from them. Again, I respect your very matter-of-fact pronouncements about Flare and readily admit that you may be right and we may be dead wrong--but it just might be that we're actually able to move into the castle we're building in the clouds. I remember back in 1994 when pundits questioned whether the brash new concept of "online Help" could ever hope to catch on.

[RamonS]

I have used Flare in combination with Moodle, but the connection was basically just a hyperlink, not much more. I didn't get a chance to figure out how to use Flare's output as content in Flare. But if I'd ever have to do traditional eLearning again I'd use Moodle. From all the tools I tried this one was the best followed by Lectora, which is very easy to use (but it's not a freebee).
Maybe in some time MadCap crafts an entire eLearning suite using Flare or Blaze to create the content, Mimic for the interactive portions, Capture for images, Echo for sound clips and then something else with a pyrotechnical name that allows for arranging the bits and pieces and wrapping it into a standards based framework.

[CharlesJet]

We've done the same thing with RoboHelp, Captivate, and Flash, but consider the MadCap design/development team to be demonstrably more forward-thinking than those fine folks who inherited RoboHelp from them. Again, I respect your very matter-of-fact pronouncements about Flare and readily admit that you may be right and we may be dead wrong--but it just might be that we're actually able to move into the castle we're building in the clouds. I remember back in 1994 when pundits questioned whether the brash new concept of "online Help" could ever hope to catch on.

Hi Mike,

Hope I'm not too late to the party on this subject. I'm going to disagree with the conventional wisdom which says you can't get there from here. I think that there are many ways to use Flare as you wish. I totally get what you're saying, for what it's worth I put up a RoboHelp based Intranet with tutorials back in 2003 at a defense contractor. From what I heard, it's still up there in 2008.

In fact, I'll bet you're looking for a way to use this as Policy and Procedure training (PnP)? You're in luck; the core team at MadCap worked with RoboHelp and RoboInfo, the PnP version of RoboHelp, for years. They're very aware of flexible ways to use it as well.

I also worked on a PDA-sized version of RoboHelp's WebHelp - optimized for the PDAs that military specialists were using. If you're looking at pushing your instructional content through a PDA to fleet OTR drivers (after all, you're from JB Hunt) this might be an additional way to display it. As for displaying eLearning content where you need it - what I did recently as a proof of concept was to hyperlink in self-centering javascript windows into the footer of a (very) legacy application, similar to context-sensitive help (CSH).

The window which pops up is for all purposes a CSH window with demo / flash content within it. Check out my personal blog for threads that deal with eLearning, Blended Learning - see if there's anything I've been researching that falls into what you're trying to get done and we can chat offline.

Not too hard. Additionally, I'm here in San Diego - what I call reach out and touch someone range from the MadCap geniuses.

[mikejp]

Er:

(1) Mimic (and Captivate, and Camtasia, and...)-style content depend, to a large degree, on the documented system being finished, documented, bug-free and so on. Which usually means there isn't much time to do it. And if you need this stuff in several languages, the time-line gets even more compressed.

(2) One way to pre-plan and deliver in a timely manner is, indeed, to build around topics, using them - where necessary - as containers for much smaller and more manageable screen maps, bits of multi-media, or whatever, that are added as and when.

(3) And one way way to link those topics together is in a browse sequence, rather than a conventional toc.

So far so good. But Flare's implementation of browse sequences is kinda perverse; for example no more than a mini-toc for a .chm (there's good reason, I'm not knocking here). So, if you built your castle-in-the-clouds starting with your RoboHelp experience, don't assume equivalence-or-better for the built targets in Flare. 99.9% of the time your assumption will be dead right, but not always.

If you figure out a good model for targets and a delivery mechanism, do tell. I'd love to drag this area back into my fully-confident-and-comfortable zone after several years away.

Thanks.

[lfilla]

Gosh, I haven't been in here for awhile and look what I missed!

YES! Flare can be used as a "training" tool. I'm using Flare now to develop two Webhelp learning environments: one that can be used by our trainers during live training to demonstrate concepts and a self-paced learning environment that our customers can access any time to review information from the training and much more. Of course, I'm single-sourcing both environments in Flare, as well as the content for a Trainer's Guide and Participant Guide.

I think Flare is ideal for small companies like ours who aren't about to purchase a fancy shmancy LCMS, but who need a framework for delivering learning opportunities to customers or employees. Our technical content is already in it because we use Flare to produce our manuals and online help. And it's no biggie to drop in Flash files generated from Captivate, Articulate, and numerous other sources.

My disclaimer is, I'm still developing this concept. I've run into little snags, but nothing that would discourage me from proceeding. Maybe the big kibash is right around the corner. But so far, so good!

good luck!

Laura

[KevinDAmery]

Laura, question for you: are you 1) using Flare to generate training materials, or are you 2) actually sitting students down in front of a copy of Flare to walk them through the course content? I get the impression that option 2 was what the OP was asking about, so I wanted to clarify. Thanks.

[lfilla]

...are you 1) using Flare to generate training materials, or are you 2) actually sitting students down in front of a copy of Flare to walk them through the course content?

Well, I'm never sitting them down in front of Flare itself. I am generating training materials -- printed guides and learning environments. I am sitting them down in front of the learning environments (really just Webhelp systems).

The live environment is "driven" by the trainer who walks learners through the content and refers to the environment for examples, screen shots, flowcharts, etc. They will actually be flipping back and forth between the environment and the actual software product during training.

The self-paced environment is navigated by the learner. It includes prompts and a flow suggested by the TOC, but learners decide what information they want to visit, what interactions (demos, quizzes, etc.) they want to participate in and such. I'm not developing e-learning courses as much as learning support. Since Flare isn't an LCMS, there are no administrative tools for learner tracking, etc.

Does that answer your question? I thought the original poster had something like this in mind but maybe I misread.

Laura

[KevinDAmery]

Thanks, Laura. What you're describing doing is how I would handle things as well (and in fact I'm starting to develop some training materials in Flare to go along with the help system that's already in place).

In his second post, the OP mentioned that he wanted to use Flare as the delivery mechanism, which to me seems odd. But then again, perhaps I misinterpreted what he wrote...

[lfilla]

Excellent! Good luck with your project. I'll need all the luck I can get with mine. It's BIG!!!

Laura

[rickdinobile]

This message is for lfilla - I would like to connect via phone as I have a similar project which deals with the exact same deliverable. I want to use Flare as a training tool for a new application my organization is implementing.

I'd like to see if you could share some of your design thoughts and/or possibly documents. Thanks in advance for your help. Please reply when convenient.

Rick

[Nita Beck]

This message is for lfilla - I would like to connect via phone as I have a similar project which deals with the exact same deliverable. I want to use Flare as a training tool for a new application my organization is implementing.

I'd like to see if you could share some of your design thoughts and/or possibly documents. Thanks in advance for your help. Please reply when convenient.

Rick

Welcome to the forums, Rick.

That said, the last time that user logged on was in January 2009. I wouldn’t expect a response. Sorry...