Instructional Design

So, today I’m talking about the session I gave at DevLearn 2016. It was my first Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL) session, and there were a few hiccups, but I would definitely revise the delivery and give it again! In this session, I showed participants how to use variables in Articulate Storyline to create a closed captioning effect, and to create a very basic progress meter.

Closed Captioning Effect

The technique for this effect was first shown to me by Nancy Woinoski at an Articulate Community Roadshow in Toronto a few years ago. I liked the clean effect, and thought it would be a great one to share with the greater commonwealth of e-learning developers! There are many other ways that you can create this sort of effect, and perhaps one day, you will no longer need a workaround for closed captioning in Storyline (pleeeeease, Articulate?!). Until then, we have workarounds. David Lindeberg actually drafted a great post on how he approaches closed captioning in Storyline – you can read it here.

Download this Participant File, and this Completed File. You can use the participant file to walkthrough the steps with me, and you can use the completed file to reverse engineer the programming and figure it out on your own!

Here’s the video walkthrough:

Progress Meters

Next, I showed participants how to create a very simple progress meter to track learner progress through a course. I can’t remember exactly where I saw this method, but I know it was via Articulate, and it was a long time ago (I think it was in Storyline 1). If you know which post I’m referencing, please link it in the comments below, because I scoured the community but I’m coming up short and would love to provide attribution.

After running into David Anderson on my coffee run the morning of my session, I was told doing both closed captioning and progress meters was ambitious for a 1-hour session, so I was a bit nervous, but I think this example is easy enough that most folks were able to follow along.

Download the Participant File and the Completed File, and then watch the demo below. If you want the Course Starter Template that I based this demo off, you can also download that.

DevLearn day 2 is upon us, and my body certainly hasn’t adjusted to the time change. I woke up at 430am, ran into a bunch of e-learning heavy hitters at 5am on my way to forage for coffee, and at 10:45am, I feel like I have to go back to bed.

I missed today’s keynote because I was preparing for my presentation, so I’m excited to read other people’s recap of that, but I’m here now, and I’m ready to absorb!

Session 1: Tim Slade – Designing with Animation

I love Tim. Whenever I attend a learning conference, I make it a point to seek him out and say hello, and attend his sessions. He’s a great speaker, and really knows his stuff! Today he’s teaching us all about designing with animation, something that jazzes up almost any e-learning…unless you’re using star wipe for anything and everything. His session is also being streamed on Facebook Live!

Animation is visual storytelling, which communicates movement. He takes us through a series of awful transitions and animations, but what he really wants to do is explain how to use animation to focus learner attention, identify how you can use animations to transition learners, and how you can communicate ideas/concepts instead of using text.

Directional Animation

• Animations can distract you, and hold your attention, removing you from an actual learning experience. He provides the example of including ‘click the next button to continue’ text on each slide, but this is incredibly redundant. You can use animation to create a visual indicator to direct the learner’s attention.

Transitional Animations

• Transitional animations are used to transition learners through changing content. You can easily create transition layers to provide additional context for the learner. The example he provides is an exploded view of an e-learning template that he had to animate in order to more clearly explain what he meant by the visual.

Instructional Animations

• Instructional animations allow for non-verbal communication. These animations support the instruction being provided. For example, with the concept of the moon orbiting the earth, you can use animations to animate the moon orbiting the earth to emphasize the concept.

Tim’s 3 Tips When Working with Animation

1. Use animations to help learners see what you’re explaining.
2. Use animations with purpose and intention.
3. When in doubt, fade in and fade out.

Session 2: Ashley Chiasson – BYOL: Using Variables in Articulate Storyline

Now, I won’t inundate you with a lengthy description of my session, because I’m going to be providing a formal write-up, with screencasts in a later blog post. I will say that this was an interesting experience because it was my first Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL), so I was quite nervous.

The session was specifically using text, number, and true/false variables in Articulate Storyline to create a closed captioning effect and to create a simple progress meter, and it was really well attended (about 130 people). Having run into David Anderson, Kevin Thorn, and Alexander Salas at 5am that morning, I was told doing closed captioning and progress meters in a one our BYOL was ambitious, but I think we got through it.

There are things I will revise about the delivery when I provide this session in the future (and I will do this session again). With such a large audience, a job aid walkthrough of each step would be a good consideration for the future. A co-facilitator or peer in the audience would also be helpful to step in when folks were having questions or concerns. Luckily, Tim Slade and Owen Holt both attended and were able to help out post-session.

I still believe the session was a success, because despite a few fumbles, it went pretty smoothly and I got through both demonstrations. I also set my benchmark for epic failure as “if 75% of my audience gets up and leaves…”, so with only about 5-10 people leaving, I think I did pretty well. We’ll see when the session evaluations come in.

Day 2 wasn’t packed with many sessions, but I felt great focusing on the one I had to deliver.

Keynote: Penn Jillette – The Magic of Storytelling and Learning

Penn opens by explaining that he is actually a professional liar for a living. When we’re creating a narrative, we’re lying. We choose what feels interesting to us, and as soon as we leave things behind, we too become liars. Show-business is full of lies, so he began his career as a juggler – to stay honest; if the balls dropped, he did something wrong, and if the balls stayed in the air, he did something right.

Coming from a manufacturing town, his parents surprisingly supported him by purchasing an experimental science kit when he told them he was interested in ESP. I’d say that’s supportive…his parents even humoured him by being participants of this testing. I can only say that my parents would be less supportive and more concerned had I come to them with the same revelation.

In stumbling upon a book about magic in the local library, he found an explanation on how to ‘do a trick’, and the trick being what had initially sold him on researching ESP…which he believed was scientific truth, and which he now realized was in fact a trick…or a lie. He then realized that adults and scientists lied to people, and that “scientists were all bullshit and performers were all bullshit”. This realization began his rebellion against science and started to tank his academic achievement in all science courses. He was embarrassed that he had been scammed and wasted his parents time…so he became a juggler.

Teller intervened, explaining that lying was alright in the context of performing magic. All of the talk of immoral and illegal. I think Penn would enjoy a good game of Firefly. He explains that magic is a real look at how information is distorted.

If you want to see a Penn and Teller to see Penn get hurt, he has some words for you: “Fuck you, and go home!” – I think that’s a good way to put it when the trick you’re performing is the bullet catch, a trick that has killed 6 magicians.

Penn believes that one of the most important parts of storytelling, is to make the person get the idea themselves. We’ve heard this as it relates to teaching, tricking students into learning without realizing that they’re engaging in the act of ‘learning’. There’s nothing more powerful than a person telling a story. He ends all of his Broadway shows with a story about how he got his start, so he chose to end his keynote with that monologue…and some fire-eating.

Session 1: Michael Raines – Take Storyline to the Next Level with jQuery, JavaScript, and JSON

Michael Raines of ICF is planning to show us some really neat things we can do to leverage the powers of jQuery, JavaScript, and JSON to blow our existing Storyline competencies out of the water. At least that’s the hope!

The methods he’s going to show us are based on real solutions for real problems that he and/or his team encountered. Although, he does caution attendees not to use these elements in their Storyline courses, unless absolutely necessary. Don’t overcomplicate things if you can avoid it!

With the strictly Storyline solution, he was looking at 80 scenarios with 4 slide per scenario, so 325 slides total. Additionally, because Storyline’s triggers are not setup for advanced logic, he decided to come up with another solution using JavaScript, jQuery, and JSON which allowed him to minimize complication (depending on who you ask, this may not be the least complicated approach, but Michael seems to know what he’s talking about when it comes to coding languages, so he can run with this!).

I do think he showed an interesting solution to his 325 slide problem, but I don’t know if I’ll ever run into a practical use for this method, although I do appreciate the time and effort it must have taken to figure this solution out!

To be honest, I spent most of this session straining to see what Michael was explaining onscreen. He’s obviously an expert at this topic, understanding what he had to do to achieve the desired effect. Because of this, I think he’s suffering from a bit of “the knowledge curse”, which is something Instructional Designers often experience when communicating with a Subject Matter Expert. There are a lot of blank stares in the room. It’s also a complicated topic, so I’m sure he anticipated some confusion.

Update: Some kind soul stepped in to fix the visual problem (now we can see!).

Session 1.5: BYOL: Sarah Dewar – BYOL: DIY Whiteboard Animation

I wasn’t getting what I needed from Session 2, so I wandered around and found a fellow Canadian. Sarah was showing everyone how to create cool videoscribe animations, and just like she did in Toronto this past year, she seemed to amaze the pants off everyone with her presentation!

Session 2: Ron Price – BYOL: Creative New Ways to Expand How You Use Storyline

Ron always puts on a good session, so I’m excited to see how he sparks my creativity within this one.

Here’s what he says we’re going to learn in the session:

• Features in Storyline that we may not be using fully yet
• How to build and use custom markers
• How to design unique animations
• How to create unique triggers with motion

We’ll see how many we get through, but he acknowledged that an hour isn’t a lot of time, so let’s get to it!

In talking about custom markers, he restrains himself from singing “I like big buttons…” – I’m disappointed in this session already..J/K. He always gets asked “why can’t I resize markers?”, and to that, he tells everyone to thank Articulate, because they don’t want us to make ourselves look bad.

• Marker Hack #1 – Use the Marker Border (weight) to increase the weight of the marker border, which will in turn increase the size of a marker.
• Marker Hack #2 – If adjusting border size, duplicate a modified marker, if using multiple on one slide, to ensure consistency amongst markers.
• Marker Hack #3 – Using no fill, no border to create an invisible marker in the normal state (and then removing the marker effects) – I talk about this one in Mastering Articulate Storyline, because it’s a great opportunity to create the illusion of a labelled graphic, without using layers. This allows you to also create an ‘iframe’ style effect, or to ‘gamify’ interactions to have learners locate easter eggs or to display hints.

Next up, adding animation to a state to add sex appeal to your course. I’m not sure I feel that strongly about animating object states, but this is a helpful tip to make your object states a bit more slick looking.

• The example he provides is using an oval with a number in it, and then he adds a Hover state, where he draws another oval over the existing one, with no fill and a thicker outline; then, he adds a wheel animation. Now, when you hover, you get a really neat effect that makes your learners think ‘wow, they put some more time into building that’. He then goes on to add some additional labelling within that Hover state, which has grouped components and another animation.
• He suggests you can use this approach to create an interactive menu for your learning objectives.

Now, it’s time to talk about the need for grouping and animations. The example he shows uses Storyline’s standard swivel. The swivel effect defaults to several flips, but if we only want the swivel to make one flip, we need to do a few things.

• Create the shape you want to animate.
• Create a transparent rectangle over the shape you created.
• Select both items and group them.
• Animate the group to swivel.
• Enter the group, and move the original shape down the timeline, so the original shape only appears after the majority of swivels have occurred.

The effect is a coin flip-style effect. And the crowd goes wild. It’s really interesting to see how impactful such simple tips are, and the ones that are most impactful usually just require us to think outside of the box in terms of how things work. Most people don’t think about animations in this manner, so they don’t experiment and stumble upon these types of effects.

Next, Ron’s talking about determining the length of a motion path. To do this, create your object and motion path. To do this, you use the positioning of the original object (right-click select Size and Position), and then select the motion path and move the height down until the object is in the desired position. Then, take note of the position, and use that pixel length when creating additional motion path animations. This is an effect that would come in handy for doing things like creating a pac-man style game.