Awhile back I created a project in Articulate Storyline that was inspired by the site coolors.co and its functionality, so this week I thought I would show you how I created that project.
I mentioned yesterday that Mastering Articulate Storyline has been published, and I wanted to give one lucky person a chance to win a copy, and some other really neat things!
This giveaway includes 1 copy of each of my books, Mastering Articulate Storyline and Articulate Storyline Essentials, a $50 gift card to Creative Market (one of my favourite places to find e-learning assets), a $50 gift card to Amazon (because you can find everything there), and a Blue Snowflake Microphone (portable microphone with incredible quality)! The giveaway will run for one month from today, you can earn a maximum of 3 entries (per person), and a winner will be selected at random on August 7th. Good luck!
Everyone – these past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity! I’m so happy to announce that Mastering Articulate Storyline has been published, and is available for sale. Get your copy now!
It took quite awhile to write this title and get it published, but it’s finally finished, and I really think it will help Storyline users level up their existing skills. I was actually contracted to write Mastering Articulate Storyline way back in October 2014, but Packt also saw a need for Articulate Storyline Essentials, so we shelved Mastering until Essentials was finished, and then plugged away at completing Mastering.
In addition to being excited to teach Storyline users some more advanced techniques, I’m also excited that I no longer need to procrastinate! I mean, I’m sure I’ll find some way to procrastinate doing other things, but writing won’t be one of them!
The other really great thing about having released these two books is that they’ll be really helpful for those registering in the Articulate Storyline courses that Sprout E-Learning will be offering in the near future – if you haven’t signed up to hear more about sprout, sign up for the mailing list!
Other exciting things that have happened: The Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshow: Toronto was last week, and was a big success, and I found out that one of my sessions was picked up for DevLearn 2016, so it seems as though I’ll be getting to Vegas in the fall. I’m hoping to get back on schedule this week, so stay tuned, because you’re going to see a few posts appearing not on their regularly scheduled days.
E-Learning Challenge 1: Convert Bullet Points to Interactive Content
I’ll have to have a chat with Tom, David, and Nicole, because there was not enough coffee in my morning to unleash creativity…but that’s for another time. Tom provided us with some content, and we were tasked with creating an interaction from that content.
Our group spent a lot of time talking about all of the cool things we could do:
Then we settled on some buttons to make a decision making scenario with images for each gift, three options (Accept/Politely Decline/Read Policy). Dylan drove the development, and made everyone laugh with his firing feedback.
E-Learning Challenge 2: Create Character Driven Interactions
For this challenge, we were tasked with creating character-driven interactions, specifically related to the content provided by Tom. In this situation, a supervisor is giving an employee feedback on their job performance.
Samples included text-messaging discussions using motion path animations, text-messaging discussions with data entry fields, and quiz question conversation interactions.
With five minutes to spare, I settled on the idea I had for my interaction, which would be a flip book animation style interaction. Because it took me so long to decide on what I wanted to do, it will be a forth-coming challenge I feature here on the blog, so stay tuned! Until then, you can take a look at the intro slide, below:
E-Learning Challenge 3: Establish the Right Look and Feel for Your Course Part 1
I’ve participated in this challenge several times now, but it’s always a good one to provide developers with ideas for when they get to development.
David is having us create a mind map for a course associated with Canada Day, which has the goal of being used in E-Learning Challenge 4.
E-Learning Challenge 4: Establish the Right Look and Feel for Your Course Part 2
David prompted us to commit some of our paper ideas to more physical ideations. He then discussed the importance of this mind map in helping your through your development process.
He had a shockingly (Come on, David! You don’t know The Tragically Hip?!) low level understanding of Canada, but we’ll forgive him (because we’re Canadian), but he managed to relate his point to our points of Canadian reference.
E-learning Challenge 5: Incorporate the Company’s Brand into Your E-Learning
For this e-learning challenge, Tom prompted us to use a company’s brand in our e-learning; originally, he asked us to develop using Good Belly’s branding, but then halfway through, he wanted us to change to Disney’s branding standards to create e-learning for using company vehicles for business.
Once everyone was finished, Tom provided some tips and tricks related to colour customization (e.g. using the Design tab and themes in Storyline, using theme fonts, and customizing the Player colours).
Session 1
The Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshows are one of my favourite e-learning events to attend! The folks at Articulate are lovely (and many of them share my affinity for a good pint), supportive people, and always put on a great event.
Day 1 kicks off with Tom Kuhlmann showing us how to create our own assets for use in e-learning, working in PowerPoint – you don’t have to be a graphic designer! If you follow Tom’s blog in the ELH community, you’ll recognize the reference to many of these concepts, but the demo really emphasizes how easily you can create your own media assets. The posts he references include:
Session 2
Next up, Nicole shared E-Learning Odds and Ends, and there were so many good tips in this session!
First, Button Sets were talked about – these are one of my favourite features in Articulate Storyline. They make life so much easier! Button sets allow only one (of multiple buttons) to have a selected state at a time. Nicole illustrated this using characters, and shared some quick tips (e.g. When adding a new state, just type in the first letter of the state (e.g. Hover/Selected), and then hitting enter, and when using multiple characters on one slide, with the same state, create one character, add the states, and then copy/paste the first character, and then change the character in the Character Design tabs).
There’s always a lot of ground to cover in these interactive/bring your own laptop sessions, so participants are always racing to keep up – it keeps us on our toes!
Next, Nicole showed folks how to use cue points to sync animations in Storyline. This example involved using cue points, animations, and triggers, and is a very practical method that can create a really slick looking slide.
Finally, Nicole showed everyone how to create an invisible player. This is a great way of creating a custom interface, and really goes a long way at convincing your clients their courses will look nothing like their competitor’s courses. Invisible players are a more modern design approach, so get with it folks!
Session 3
Sean O’Brien from the Toronto Police provided a case study, sharing how the Toronto Police are using Storyline to develop internal training content. Motion graphics were used to create an aesthetic appeal.
E-Learning was used as a solution for being unable to physically train 5,000 people at the same time. Makes sense! This case study has functionality to allow police officers to change roles at certain points in the e-learning. Each case study is followed by assessment pieces to reinforce the learning.
There was a lot of video production throughout the modules, and Sean spoke about some of the services they used to produce those videos. For example, filming at local colleges with large campuses, and used college students as actors.
Sean mentioned that students are not allowed to skip questions, and pass marks are set at 100%. The content learners are being assessed on will always be available within the e-learning module. He also stated that developers will often toss something very engaging (e.g. graphic homicide scenes in a module on homicide), deep in the module to grab their attention and bring it back to the learning experience.
Session 4
For session 4, David Anderson began to show everyone course makeover tips to fix common mistakes, a super relatable concept for anyone who works on a very disorganized development team (many hands in the pot is not always a good thing).
He hits on some key concepts such as design elements: typography, contrast, hierarchy, and chats about the 5-point makeover:
David then jumped deeper into the trenches of designing course elements, recommending handy applications as he saw appropriate (check out Adobe Kuler). He took us through tangible (and awful/assaulting) examples and then walked us through how to create a better version of those examples.
Session 6
One of my favourite ladies from the ELH community, Linda Lorenzetti, presented on five production tips she learned through doing ELH challenges (she’s racked up a TON of submissions, because she’s bananas and incredibly talented – seriously – check her out).
Linda shared a Storyline project that she created for a ELH Challenge # 51 – Font Games and Interactions for E-Learning Designers. She ended up finding a game online, I Shot the Serif, and decided she wanted to replicate elements from that game, and shared insight into how she created that interaction.
Her interaction used variables to keep track of errors, time, and remaining items. Each object uses states (crosshairs and check or x marks).
Things she learned:
Session 7
Session 7 was all me. Today I’m presenting on Five Things to Consider Before You Begin Development, which has a ton of super helpful information, but might lull people into REM sleep near the end of the day. We’ll see. Here’s the presentation!
Session 8
Tom finished up the day by teaching us about an Instructional Design model for soft skills and principle-based courses. First things first, interaction instructions! Explain to the audience how they will interact with the course, and this may enhance user engagement.
When building interactive e-learning, there are always three parts:
Follow these building blocks to build out Instructional Design models:
Discussed Model:
I’ve been reading a book by Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains, and the concept of iDisorder was referenced. It’s a concept that seems increasingly relevant in a digital society, so it seemed apt to talk about.
iDisorder?
The concept iDisorder was coined by Dr. Larry Rosen (who wrote a book about it), and it is defined as “changes to your brain´s ability to process information and your ability to relate to the world due to your daily use of media and technology resulting in signs and symptoms of psychological disorders – such as stress, sleeplessness, and a compulsive need to check in with all of your technology.” (Dr. Larry Rosen’s Website)
iDisorder and Education
It’s an interesting concept when you consider it in the context of education. Outside of education many of us are glued to our devices, continually checking and refreshing our email and frequently visited websites. Within the realm of education, students are doing this too, and it’s causing an increased expectations (on the instructor) to be constantly available.
Whenever I work with faculty members on crafting their course outlines or syllabus, I always emphasize the importance of setting expectations; not just for assignments or graded components, but for their availability. When will you be available in office? What will your email turnaround time be? When will you return feedback on assignments? Without defining these expectations, faculty members are setting themselves up for failure in terms of how students perceive their availability. In a society where ‘on demand’ is a popular service offering, students have been trained to believe that you, as an instructor, will also be on demand. This is a bit dehumanizing. Even if students don’t mean to dehumanize, the expectations makes instructors seem a bit more robotic.
When instructors don’t outline their expectations, and students perceive them as constantly available, slower response times may emphasize a student’s iDisorder – increased stress, sleeplessness, and constantly checking their devices as they wait for a response, which poses the question “how to we deal with this?” Unfortunately, I think the change needs to begin at home, and then in K-12, and then throughout classes in university or in the real-world at places of employment, and it all hinges on setting clear expectations and modelling. When I say modelling, I mean that if you outline your communication expectations clearly, you stick to them. If you say you’ll respond within 24 hours, you do; you don’t respond in 36. When you say that you’ll be unavailable after 5pm, you stick to that and don’t respond to emails or inquiries after 5pm.
It’s unfortunate that this concept has been coined and seems to be running rampant in our society, but if we can take small steps to be clear with our expectations, we might just combat it as much as possible, and then, if individuals still experience symptoms associated with iDisorder, they’re doing it to themselves.
