New Text Chat App, and the End of Flash in CoursePlus
The Center for Teaching and Learning has been working for some time now to remove all dependencies on the Adobe Flash plug-in from CoursePlus.
For years, online lectures were delivered via Adobe Presenter — a Flash-based tool. Those lectures were replaced between 2014-2016 by MP4 video counterparts. The Online Library tool used to use the Flash plug-in for file uploads, and that was replaced in 2015. Adobe Connect, used for LiveTalks, added the option of being able to participate without having the Flash plug-in installed in 2017. We've slowly been pruning away all content and tools that required the Flash plug-in.
The very last tool that required the Flash plug-in was the Class Chat tool, found in the Communication section of every class website. Although rarely used by most classes, the tool had heavy use by students in a handful of courses. We're pleased to say that the old, Flash-based Class Chat tool has been replaced by a completely browser-based chat tool. The new Text Chat tool has a clean, modern interface and uses the photo in your CoursePlus profile as your avatar in chats.
With the removal of the Flash-based Class Chat tool, the Flash plug-in is no longer required to use any part of CoursePlus. We're glad we finally reached this milestone of making CoursePlus more standards compliant and fully accessible across devices!