eLearningDevCon 09 – Awesome!

eLearningDevCon 2009 was great!  We’d like to thank Rapid Intake for once again putting on such a great conference. It was wonderful to meet some many eL designers/developers and to get to hear about your projects and to share ideas.

The debut of e-LearningTemplates.com was a huge success. We had lots of interest in the templates and are in the process of adding more. We have even had requests for new templates and styles. Let us know if there’s something that you’d like to see.

Brother Shawn’s Sessions: (Stop stealing graphics – Make your own and Sweet Templates) If you’d like some more information on graphic design tips and Photoshop send Shawn an email. Also, remember if you purchase any e-LearningTemplates make sure that you visit the video tutorials section.

Brother Andrew’s Sessions: (Articulate Presenter) Thanks for the great attendance at both sessions! Articulate is a great software and has come in very handy for us. If you’d like to discuss it more send me an email.

We hope to see you in October at the BYOL conference!

eLearning Template Site is Momma Approved!

I know that that entire eLearning World has been waiting on the edge of their chairs for this announcement…

Brother Shawn has officially launched the e-LearningTemplates.com site! After many rolls of internal red tape and endless hoops to jump through, it has also been certified “Momma Approved“.

The site offers games:

• Course Style Kits – Everything you need to create an awsome course!  These kits include graphic layouts, the board game challenge, multiple color themes, people, quizzes and many flash interactions.
• Games – Right now we have 4 games to choose from. (Millionaire, Pyramid, Jeopardy and Board Game.
• People – Need some people that are cut-out and ready to drop into your course? Need multiple poses of the same person? We have multiple business and casual pictures.

These templates work with most rapid development tools (Articulate, PPT, Presenter, Captivate, HTML)

 Remember that an online course may be well written but if the learner isn’t visually attracted to the course, they will never read it.

Using Flash to Control Articulate Navigation

I’ve used Articulate for awhile now and have been frustrated that I couldn’t control the navigation of the Articluate Player with my inserted flash. Well…after a bit of snooping and frustration I’ve got it working. If you are a Platinum member of Articulate Support they will give you the software dev kit (SDK) for their Presenter product. This is a great thing to have! They even provide sample FLA files to tear apart.

Here’s how I used Flash to have the Articulate Play advance to a particular slide number:
1. Creat a button in your flash movie. (make it a MovieClip)
2. On the same frame as your button, insert this actionscript (MUST BE ACTIONSCRIPT 2. AS3 IS NOT SUPPORTED)

var ArtAPI = _level0.ArtAPI;
mcButton1.onPress = function()
{
ArtAPI.PlaySlideNum(9);
}

3. Give your button an instance name. It must match the code above. In this example the button instance name is mcButton1.

4. Determine which slide number you want your button to jump to. In this example it is set to advance to slide number 9.

5. Export your Flash. (IMPORTANT: I had to export using Flash Player 7 for the scripting to work. I don’t know why but that’s how is worked for me. You can try a 8-10 versions if you’d like.)

6. Insert the swf into your PPT slide. Your flash import settings should be to play the flash independently from the slide and have the user click next to advance.

7. Publish your Articulate Presentation.

When you look at your published course you should be able to click on the flash button and your presentation will advance to slide 9.

You can also use these code snippets to navigate:

mcButton1.onRelease = function()
{
ArtAPI.PlayNext();
}

mcButton1.onRelease = function()
{
ArtAPI.PlayPrevious();
}

Good luck and have fun! Let us know how it works for you.

Another tip on using flash with the Articulate API.

View our Articulate eLearning games, flash interactions, PowerPoint style kits, and clipped-out people.