Sometimes a project really needs to move the audience… and simple slides or even engaging interactions are not sufficient.
I recently worked on one such project, very heavy in flash animation. The animation was effectively used to communicate the story of innovative internal products and services to an internal audience at a global Pharmaceutical Company in NJ.
While video was originally considered, the team decided that animation would be more effective and communicating high level concepts to a broad audience, and Adobe Flash was used to develop the animation, with a dedicated illustrator and team of 3 developers, an audio studio and professional voice talent to turn the project around in a week.
This project was not typical, being more an internal communication that true eLearning, however it brought the role of animation in eLearning to mind. I frequently find that animation is a useful tool in visualizing information and concepts. Motion is a 4th dimension that adds depth to a visual interpretation of a concept or visualization of data.
I frequently find that animating portions of a graph, diagram or table, even in a limited fashion, focuses the attention of the learner using various devices to emphasize process components or the relationship between various roles, phases of a process, etc.