Prepare for Flash End of Life with this plugin for your Open LMS site
As announced in their blog, Adobe will end support of Flash at the end of 2020 in favor of supporting more modern and open standards such as HTML5 and WebGL.
This is an expected move, as there were not only concerns around the security of Flash content, but also, its lack of compatibility with mobile devices is well-known. This was also noticeable when major web browsers started to reduce their support for the content format.
Considering this and as part of Open LMS 3.7 MP1 release in February, you will have access to a new plugin called Flash Apocalypse.
Flash Apocalypse is a report plugin that will allow you to identify flash content in activities and resources across your Open LMS siteThis plugin will be enabled by default at no cost and is accessible for admin roles.
With the information provided by this plugin, there are some general actions we suggest to prepare for Flash EOL in December:
- Decide what content should be migrated: The report will list all flash content in resources and activities but, what content pieces are still relevant for you? Are the courses for those content pieces still active? If the answer is no, those elements won't be a big problem. Maybe this is a good time to do some cleanup of old courses.
- Check if the content already has an html5 "fallback" alternative: Some content publishing tools offer the option of dual publishing, and the report will show if this is the case.
- Check if you still have the source files for the content you want to migrate: Depending on your content authoring tool, you would be able to select a different format to export your content.
- Consider native content formats: This is our recommended option. There are multiple options to generate great content using Open LMS tools like lessons, books, H5P activities, etc. This includes some excellent interactivity options that could cover some of the needs you had with Flash in the first place. Using built-in Open LMS activities and resources also provides a better experience when consuming content from mobile devices.
Find more information about Flash Apocalypse report plugin in:
https://moodle.org/plugins/report_apocalypse
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at Open LMS support channels. We're always happy to help.
