This week I thought I would leave Articulate Storyline alone for a bit and show you an application that I have been rapidly recommending to faculty members for syllabus inclusion as a helpful hint for students, especially in courses that are largely video-based. It is an AMAZING student study tool!
Check out the demo, below, and hopefully you too can find some use for this handy, open-sourced application.
First – Hats off to David for not doing this sooner! – I can only imagine how tiring it can be to come up with challenges and examples for challenges each week.
The Concept
This week’s challenge was to choose your own e-learning challenge topic and create an example for that topic, with the caveat that it must be an original challenge (a feat when you consider there have been 129 challenges – go, David!).
The Method
I had a dream about this last night…well. More specifically, I had a dream about colour palettes and one of my favourite websites, Coolors.co. I love the colour generator feature of this website because it makes my life a whole heck of a lot easier when my creativity is waning and I need some colour inspiration for my e-learning projects.
With that, my e-learning challenge topic is: App-Inspired E-Learning Resources. The challenge will be to create an e-learning resource inspired by one of your favourite, existing, applications.
To achieve a coolors-inspired resource, I tossed 5 rectangles on a slide, changed the colours for each rectangle, added the hex code to the bottom of the shape, and modified the player to appear as desired. After duplicating each slide and adjusting colours and hex codes appropriately, I added a trigger that would jump to the next slide when the user presses the Space key.
While this coolers-inspired resource is not as all-encompassing as the actual app itself, I feel like it’s a pretty good representation and it can definitely be expanded upon with an infinite number of slides/colour palettes.
The Result
To view the full interaction, Click Here.
To download the .story file, Click Here.
Continuing with the theme of extending slide content in Articulate Storyline, this week I’m showing you just how easy it is to extend slide content within a ‘container’ by using a scroll panel. If after this demo you’re interested in learning a bit more about scroll panels, check out the Automatic Scrolling Effect demo!
(Also – Please excuse the sound of my dog gnawing on his toes)
This week I thought it might be useful to talk about development plans, as I work within them nearly everyday within my current role.
What is a Development Plan?
A development plan is a document that outlines an entire course. Typically, it will consist of the following information:
Wow. That’s a lot of information. Why is a Development Plan important?
That’s exactly why development plans are important – because that IS a lot of information! Development plans serve as a course outline, and streamline things once the course developer gets to the development phase. A well written development plan will have a lot of elements that have been fleshed out and are ready to be copied from the development plan into the course site.
Development plans are also important because they allow key reviewers (e.g. department chairs, subject matter experts, etc.) to review the plan and make necessary changes or recommendations prior to entering the development phase…and it’s a lot easier to modify a Word document than it is to modify content in an authoring tool.
In online learning, development plans may also come in handy when it comes to fleshing out your activities and assessment strategies with an instructional designer, especially if you’re used to teaching in more traditional mediums (e.g. in a classroom).
Moving forward with the topic of extending slide content in Articulate Storyline, I wanted to show you two very easy and functional ways that you can use Lightbox Slides to extend display content – this works particularly well with navigation instructions and media carousels (which I’ll discuss on another day).
My apologies for the late post; I was going to do a first impression type of screencast with a new technology that has me pretty excited, but there was a bit of a glitch during the demo, and I’m still waiting for technical support to get back to me. Maybe you’ll see the demo next week…maybe not at all – who knows?!
This week we’ll look at how you can easily extend slide content using layers in Articulate Storyline.
Understanding all of the ways in which you can extend slide content is essential as it may allow you to reduce overall slide count in your projects, leading to a more streamlined and efficient project structure.
