Elearning Development Video Tutorials Now Available

I’ve been wanting to create some online video tutorials for quite a while now and, finally, I have some spare time to devote to it. I’ve created a new page on my site to list the tutorials along with brief descriptions. You can access them (currently only one, but more to follow asap) here:

http://elearninglive.com/wordpress/tutorials/

Hopefully, they will be of some use to others. I, admittedly, need some way of pushing myself towards learning more about ActionScript 3 and I figured this would be a great way to do it. So, somewhat selfishly, the tutorials are really about my own learning : ) That said, I would think that some folks new to Flash/ActionScript would get some value out them. I’m specifically targeting someone like myself about 5 years back – having jumped into the elearning development role with absolutely zero development experience, with the exception of a couple of intro to programming courses in C which were horrible.

The first tutorial offered is titled, “Creating a Drag and Drop Learning Interaction Using ActionScript 3.0″. In actuality, the focus isn’t on AS3 in terms of the OOP aspect, as this tutorial’s code resides in a single frame on the timeline.

I do plan on following up this simple drag and drop tutorial with a dynamic, XML-based version as that is always a better way to go. Before that, I expect to add a tutorial on some of the real basics – how to create a simple button that controls the timeline, for example. But *all* with an elearning focus, with practical examples. To my knowledge there is nothing of its kind out there presently (not for free!) that has the beginning instructional/elearning developer in mind.

My inspiration for this endeavor is Lee Brimelow’s excellent (and that’s an understatement) tutorials at gotoandlearn.com. Lee started his tutorials a number of years ago before he was hired by Adobe and they have always been top-notch. The first tutorial’s audio is horrible (this logitech headset’s mic is really ‘creaky’), and I should have spent more time polishing it, but what the heck.

PLEASE provide feedback on the tutorials. What you liked, what you didn’t, whether they were valuable to you. Right now I need to redo the way I’m delivering this/these videos as the current cheesy-looking html page that is serving them (adsense and all…I could use the dough) is awkward. After I get a decent number of these videos online I’ll re-think the approach to make it look/work better.

Anyways…enjoy! I hope people learn from these things. I know I will. All my tutorials will come with downloadable source. No licensing – they are free to use in any way you wish. Hopefully someone will come along and improve on them and send me the improvements so that I can post and we all gain from the experience of sharing.