E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs

I recently authored a series of posts on developing e-learning content using an open source environment where I investigated the potential for creating and delivering e-learning using either free to use or freely available content authoring applications. In that series, I deliberately excluded mentioning tools to enable the capturing and post-producing demos and simulations, as the applications currently available that enable developers to create high-quality SWF-based content (such as Captivate and Articulate) come with a hefty price tag. However, that may be about to change.

Now read on.

For a while, I’ve been following the development path of an open source integrated development environment (IDE) called The Flame Project which

brings what Adobe Captivate offers to the Windows community, to Linux/*nix and others. The final aim is to provide functionality superior to Adobe Captivate, by enabling production of in-depth eLearning with properly verifiable results.

Flame has been renamed Salasaga, and the application is now available as and alpha release for Linux Ubuntu.

The developers’ vision is

…imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we’re well on the way to a first release for doing that.

Initially similar to Adobe Captivate, but will eventually incorporate an AJAX (browser based) playback capability for advanced content. Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning, and this appears to be addressed by the existing capabilities of AJAX in browsers these days.

As an alpha release, the IDE is not stable or functional enough to be used in a production environment, but in my view it shows great potential (particularly now that Adobe have opened up the runtime on Flash (as reported here), thereby freeing up developers to actually work with the code from the ‘inside.’

Where Salasaga differs from tools like the popular Jing screen capture application, is that the former is available under the GNU LGPL, the latter is a free-to-use product created by TechSmith (of Camtasia fame). While Jing is a great little tool, it is, as the owners say “free for now” – similarly, the owners decline to state for how long the application will be publicly available. Finally, Jing content created by all its users is stored and delivered on TechSmith’s ScreenCast streaming media hosting service, which locks content creators in to using TechSmith’s solution end-to-end.

From an open source development perspective, this is not ideal.

The current system requirements to run Salasaga are:

Operating Systems

• Linux
• *BSD
• Solaris Nevada
• Windows XP – No development build presently available
• Windows Vista – No development build presently available

Most recent distributions of Linux should work out of the box. Debian Testing on AMD64 has specifically been reported to work.

Please note that the *BSD, Solaris Nevada, and Windows testing only gets done around package creation time.

Requirements

• Glib and GTK+ – version 2.10 or higher of both is known to work
• Pango – version 1.16 or higher is known to work
• libxml2 – version 2.6.30 or higher is known to work
• Ming – version 0.3.0 or higher is known to work

Click here to view a short demo about installing Salasaga – presumably recorded and produced using the IDE.
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