Hey there,
I just wanted to give some quick updates on what I’ve been working on, one of which is Cascade training. Basically, the training is supposed to give me a better understanding of how to use Cascade (i.e. adding content and formatting it properly, linking it to external pages, adding new pages + dropdowns, etc.) It’s pretty interesting to see how simple it is to use a CMS as opposed to manually doing everything through HTML/CSS. Here’s what it looks like right now!
Other than Cascade training, I’ve also been work a lot with handling Adobe Flash Player remediation on a Hebrew course made by Dean Esther Raizen who’s part of COLA. To rundown what the root of the issue is, the Hebrew course contains learning modules that were built in Flash. This is (or was) fine and dandy, but Adobe announced that they were deprecating Flash Player in December of 2020, meaning that these modules would stop working. Thus, in order to make sure that students will still have access to the modules once it’s deprecated, we wanted to find a way to convert the modules to HTML5.
After doing some exploration, I learned that there was really no way for us to convert the modules directly from .SWF (Small Web Format) into HTML as .SWF is a compressed file format that doesn’t really preserve the interactivity + animations when you try to uncompress it. Thus, after working with Chris Pittman and Ruben Garza, we decided that the best approach would just be to extract whatever information we can from these modules, and then start thinking about rebuilding using what we already have.
Now, I’ve parallelized the process of extracting all ~120 Flash modules and am lucky to have the help of Jalisa and Thuy. We’re working on pulling out all the Hebrew text + images and saving them onto Box, and we should be through all the modules in no time.