Some projects come out of the blue and change everything

Every now and then, if you’re lucky and you treat your clients well (i.e., you do good work, you don’t charge too much, and you aren’t a pain to work with) one of them will come back with a really special project with your name on it. Those are great days, truly. The only thing that can top them is when a client comes back with a project that might just change the world for the better. No matter how busy you are with other business, no matter how overworked you are, those are the times when you have to decide that this is what you’re in the business for in the first place.

In the fall of 2006, Bill White, the Salameno Director of Educational Program Development for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and a gentleman we’d worked for a few times, called with just such an opportunity. He called one afternoon to say he wanted to create a fully digital, online civics course. That sounded interesting, technically… but it was the way he described the goal that raised goosebumps. He wanted to create a course that would show high school kids what America meant. He wanted to show that America was an ongoing debate between a number of important but opposing ideas and that this debate was ongoing and vibrant and exciting. He talked about how these ideas, these values were always in tension in America. Freedom was at odds with equality, Unity with diversity. The concepts of common wealth battled those of private wealth and law (what was legal) battled ethics (what was right). For example, he said America is a nation of laws, we hate it when a person breaks the law and gets away with it and yet we make heroes of law breakers like Rosa Parks. We hate the idea of communism and socialism but don’t threaten to take away social security. This debate, he said, could be seen in today’s newspapers as clearly as they could be seen in the broadsides of the 18th century. He wanted to invite America’s high schoolers to join that debate.

I know, right?

Though the project didn’t have a name at that point, fittingly, it would later become The Idea of America. How could we turn down the opportunity to participate in that? To make the point more clearly, try to remember what our country looked like in the fall of 2006. It seemed to me that this was the perfect solution for those times. So, we looked at our busy schedule and made a few phone calls and said, “We’re in.”

You start off approaching them as you would any normal project

Standard Imagination has been actively involved in eLearning projects since 2000. We worked with Bill and Pearson to develop a set of CD-ROMs in 2004 and we’ve worked with K12 to develop an earth science course… so we had an idea of what the project would look like in terms of scope and scale. We were wrong. This project was much, much bigger and more comprehensive than we initially imagined. Everything we’d worked on prior to this project anticipated a print component of some sort. In retrospect we’d only created supplemental materials. The K12 course was mostly meant to be delivered online, but it still relied heavily on a truly well thought out text. This project was fully digital. No text. And it wasn’t a supplemental piece of a course… it was the whole course. There’s no getting around how that fundamentally changes the nature of what we were attempting. If the teachers needed to teach to state standards (and they would) everything they needed would need to be included in our online course.

Then you realize this isn’t a normal project

A few facts and figures about the final course:

The course includes 65 case studies spanning from Columbus to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Each case study consists of 6 to 15 activities. A total of 631.

There are 6,928 screens.

It features 4,172 images.

2,389 pages of PDF documents are available to the teachers and students.

The text contains 3,505 citations/footnotes.

Which is all very easy to state now that it’s completed. When we started the hardest thing we faced, though we didn’t know it, was in gauging the scale of the project.

We began to develop using Flash Actionscript 2.0. At that point AS3 had not been released yet. We began creating screen templates that would allow production staff to easily drop in pictures and text. This approach started to show some wear and tear even before we reached the end of 2007. While screen templates were efficient in terms of production, they couldn’t be updated without sending a team back to alter each and every screen. As our screen count grew, the idea of making global changes became punishing. You can see why. If we had to devote as little as 10 minutes per screen over a project this large we were looking at nearly a man-year of effort.

We then started to imagine a solution that separated the content from the screen template. Our production artists were doing quite a bit of repetitive work. Placing an image, pouring and styling text. What if we could store the image and text separately in a jpg and an xml file? Then we could change the screen template as many times as we wanted and the text and image files could be left alone. Change one file and let those changes cascade down to all the screens. We started testing this in late 2007 and implemented it in a limited fashion in January of 2008. Initially, our production staff was hand coding the xml… but it didn’t take long to see we could do better still.

Then you change your way of seeing and doing things

By the summer of 2008 the size of our problem was becoming clear. By then we had an idea that we would be seeing nearly 7000 screens when we were done. We also could see that the client would want to make more than a few revisions and changes. Luckily by then we had also seen the solution. Earlier in 2008 we’d made the decision to convert to AS3. If you haven’t switched (and I know there are a lot of you who haven’t) and you’re thinking about using xml extensively in Flash… do yourself a favor. Switch. The xml parsing abilities of AS3 are miles beyond those of AS2. It’s easier to pull items from an xml file than to pull them from an array. As a result of our work with AS3 it became clear we could, pretty easily, create Flash files that could create the xml files that drove our screen templates. We tested our idea and found that our production staff could create an entire activity in the same time it took to make a screen previously. And it made editing and revisions even easier.

In the fall of 2008 we proposed a complete revamping of our production process. We outlined the development of a Content Management System (CMS) that would allow the client to make as many rounds of changes and revisions as they liked. I don’t know a client who could turn that down. Add to that the fact that they were experiencing a momentary state of distribution partner confusion and they were sold. Over the fall of 2008 we created the HatterasCMS™, a system that allowed our production staff to produce top-flight eLearning content in a fraction of the time.

When you’re done, hopefully, you’ve made something that will change everything

Looking back at the final product, we couldn’t have done it any other way. A side benefit of developing our CMS is that, the way we designed it, we could publish the final product to any LMS. We created an LMS for the purpose of testing and demonstrations but we knew all along that we’d need to be able to publish the course for use in another system. We just didn’t know which system that was until late in 2009. Currently we have publishing options for publishing to SCORM and Pearson’s Pegasus, but we can modify our course output to work with any LMS available. This simply couldn’t have been done if we’d followed our initial production process.

Three and a half years can go by in an eye blink. The project is all but complete. We are left to archive our files and make a few changes here and there as the course is prepared for the students. In the fall they will begin to use the course and The Idea of America will inspire another generation to look at our country with awe and respect. It’s been a heck of a ride for a small business. We knew it would be when we started but we had no idea how completely it would change us. We were blessed with a client who trusted us from the beginning and throughout. Bill White is that rare visionary who sees where technology can lead us in the field of education and has a thorough understanding of the processes required to get us there. We were also blessed with an incredibly talented and patient Program Director, Cindy Greene. Cindy has that rare gift to see the entire finished course in her mind. She understands how the teachers and students will interact with a course and what their expectations will be. And finally we were blessed with a great staff of developers, designers and production staff. Val Nelson, our Art Director gave the course it’s signature look and Kevin Schmitt, our Technical Doirector, performed miracles with AS3 in developing Hatteras. We were lucky to have them on this project because it couldn’t have been done without them.

So now, as always, we look out at the horizon and wonder… “what’s next?”

The Idea of America is available for pre-sale now from Pearson. A six year license of the full 65 case studies is $73.97. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is busy preparing Teacher development Programs to be available for use this fall. Standard Imagination continues to support CWF and Pearson as they prepare for product launch… and we continue our search for the next big thing. Got a project that sounds similar to the one above? Contact Rick Parris via his LinkedIn account.