The Department of Defense (DoD) estimates it currently hosts approximately 70,000 hours of Adobe Flash-based course content. This presents a considerable challenge, as Flash player functionality will be discontinued by all major browsers, and Adobe will end support for Flash in 2020. The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative is working with the DoD’s Chief Management Office (CMO), the Services, and DoD Component agencies through the Flash Deprecation Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) Working Group to understand the scope of the migration effort and potential solutions that create best value across the DoD enterprise.
Given the complexity and variety of content created using Flash and ActionScript, no silver bullet exists for converting this content into a modern standard like HTML5. These organizations and their vendors tackle the problem with non-uniform methodologies tailored to their unique situations. Given the scale of the problem, a fragmented response results in duplication of efforts and increased costs to the government. Through the working group, participants are sharing technical approaches, best practices, tools, and acquisition strategies for migrating courses away from Flash. The CMO is working to align the different efforts through recommended technical practices, policy guidance, and a coordinated acquisition strategy across DoD.
The scale of this effort presents an opportunity to modernize the technical underpinnings of these courses through enhanced metadata and increase performance tracking. This aligns with other initiatives from the CMO IT & Business System Reform, including the DoD common course catalog and the migration of learning technologies to USALearning. The working group has coordinated numerous data calls, technical discussions, and collaborative interchange. This paper will summarize the technical guidance and policy discussions that took place in the working group. It will clearly articulate the approach for identifying, prioritizing, and migrating Flash content and will provide links to tools, scripts, and calculators shared