Move from Flash to HTML5 –
and Still Keep Your Super Powers!

Last July, Adobe announced that Flash, the ubiquitous, super-powered website and elearning authoring tool will be phased out by the end of 2020. What does this mean for you and your courses? Most importantly, your audiences won’t be able to see your courses built in Flash, or even courses created in older versions of software such as Storyline. Popular web browsers have already begun to limit their support for the Flash plugin. And your mobile devices already can’t support it.

At this point, there’s very little that Flash can do that HTML5 can’t handle. The number of companies that rely on Flash has steadily decreased over the last few years. Still, a number of holdouts remain, especially in the education and gaming space.

While the end of 2020 seems far away, it really is not, especially if your organization has a large library of courses published for Flash output. Here are some pointers for developing your transition plan:

1. What tool was originally used to build your course?

If Storyline or Captivate or similar top tier authoring tools, were used you’re in for some luck. These tools have the option to publish in both Flash and HTML5. It may just be a matter of opening the source file and re-publishing in HTML5.

Test to ensure the features still work correctly. If your course was built in Flash, you need to consider re-building with one of these other tools.

2. How much updating does your content require?

[…]