New Interactive Flash Templates for eLearning!

We’d like to announce our latest interactive Flash template set: iStyle.

Have you ever wanted to have a library of pre-made Flash interactions and activities? Templates that look great and could be easily integrated with your eLearning authoring software? (i.e. Articulate, Captivate, Unison, Lectora, etc.) Do you also want the source files so you can edit anything that you’d like? Now you can! The eLearning Flash templates are easy to edit, look amazing, and provide the source files.

How to use the templates:
1. Purchase and download the Flash source files.
2. Open the Flash file and copy/paste your text into the movie clips. (or change anything…you have the source file and can edit every part of the interaction).
3. Publish the .swf file.
4. Insert the .swf file into your authoring tool.

Portfolio: Articulate Skins

These are examples of Articulate Skins that we’ve created. The skins have various layouts for courses with and without audio. There are also “stream-lined” versions that have less button options.

Visit our site for Articulate Skins. (eLearningSkins.com)

We also do custom Articulate Skins.

Great Tips from Articulate!

David Anderson over at Articulate has been doing some great screenr videos!

Just watched a few on adding some great zoom and motion effects to PowerPoint. Also watched a great way to insert an Engage .swf file as a Flash object.

Check out his Articulate videos.

Thanks Dave!

---

Want to spice up your Articulate courses? Try flash interactions, cut-out people pictures, and PowerPoint backgrounds.

“Global” Glossary in Articulate

Do you have a glossary of terms that you’d like to have in every course? When there are additions and edits would you like to change one file and have it update every course? We’ll…if so you’re in luck!

Below are the steps that I take to build Global (or Universal) Glossaries.

Overview

The basic concept is that you create a glossary in Engage and then export it as a website. You can then upload it to a server and use the direct URL to access it from any course. You’d place the link in the Attachments section within Articulate Presenter.

Step 1: Build a glossary interaction in Engage 1. Create New Interaction 2. Choose Glossary 3. Input glossary terms 4. When done click Publish 5. Choose the Web tab 6. Select a publish folder

Step 2: Upload the Glossary files 1. Upload the entire Glossary folder to your web server (typically you’d upload this to the same server that houses your completed courses.) 2. Make note of the entire URL to this location

Step 3: Attach the Glossary to your course. 1. Open the PowerPoint file for your course 2. Click Articulate / Attachments 3. Type a Title such as “Glossary of Terms” 4. Choose Link as the Type 5. In the Path field type the full URL to the engage.html file on your server 6. Click OK

Here is a sample of the Glossary link. Notice how the tab says Glossary instead of Attachments. The step below explains how to change that text.

Optional Step: Change the Course Tab text to Glossary 1. Click Player Templates 2. Make sure that the Player Template that you’d like to change is selected in the drop-down at the bottom of the window 3. Choose Text Labels tab 4. Change the text for Attachments to anything that you’d like. (i.e. Glossary) 5. Click Close

---

Check out flash games that you can use in Articulate!

PowerPoint – The King of eLearning Tools?

Is PowerPoint the most widely used tool for eLearning development? Should it be?

It seems that everywhere I go in the eLearning world I run into PowerPoint. Most of the new authoring tools either use PPT as their backbone or offer the ability to import slides. Interface creation, navigation buttons, LMS tracking, and testing abilities are then typically added to the PPT functionality.

I “grew-up” in eLearning world using Director/Authorware and then moving into Flash/HTML (PPT was “off-limits”).  In the past few years I’ve started using Articulate and Captivate to do the heavy lifting and using Flash more for specific parts of the overall course. Using these new tools meant that I had to start using PPT.

At first I was very anti-PPT, however I have changed my tune a bit in the past few years. I have come to appreciate that with some good thought and instructional design you can use most any tool to a decent level of effectiveness. I’ve seen terrible Flash and Lectora courses even thought they were created in amazing (expensive) tools. Then on the flip-side, I’ve seen some very creative content built with free tools.

Seems cliché but maybe it’s not about the tool. Good instructional design skills can be applied anywhere.

Here are a few reasons why PPT seems to be so widely used in eLearning:

1. Classroom training is often converted to an online format. Every classroom course has a PPT and it’s usually the first thing that someone thinks about when they want to put the course online. Unfortunately too often the PPT is simply thrown online without having truly turned it into effective eLearning.

2. Everyone has PPT. It’s probably already on every training person’s computer.

3. Everyone knows how to use it (and if they don’t it’s pretty easy to learn.)

4. You can quickly create content and there are tons of layouts, backgrounds, and color themes.

5. And last but not least, Microsoft already owns the world so why not conform?

What do you think? What has been your experience with PPT as a development tool? What is it missing? Do you think Microsoft will add features and turn it into a more robust eLearning development tool? Good article from Rapid eL Blog.

---

eLearning flash activities, games, cutout people, and PowerPoint backgrounds for your online courses.

Articulate Tip – Lock the Browser Size

Have you ever published your Articulate course and the images and flash are fuzzy and look terrible? Well, if so it might be caused by your course content resizing in the browser.

There is a setting within each Player Template in Articulate Presenter that allows your to either allow the course to expand/shrink as the user’s browser window changes size or to lock the content as the “optimal” size. If you don’t lock the presentation then if your user has a large browser window your images/flash might look as though they’ve be “zoomed in”. They could start to get that pixelated look.

Here’s how to lock your presentation size in Articulate Presenter:

1. Click Publish

2. Open the Player Template (the button with 3 dots to the right of the Player Template drop-down)

3. Click the Other tab and choose Lock presenation at optimal size.

---

Articulate eLearning games and interactive flash templates that you can insert into PowerPoint and Articulate.

Awesome Quizzes – Tips to Use Articulate Quizmaker

I really like Articulate’s Quizmaker ’09. It allows me to do some pretty powerful stuff quickly. Here is a list of how do make your quizzes awesome in Quizmaker.

---

There are times when you need to group questions to ensure that they flow in a certain order. (Especially if you want to randomize the order of some and not others.) I’ve also found this helpful if I want to present a scenario and then have specific questions after.

Grouping Questions

Here are the steps:

1. Create your questions

2. Click Question Group

3. Drag the questions into that group

Randomizing Question Order A lot of times you want to randomize the sequence of questions. In Quizmaker you add randomization to groups of questions. So you could have 10 questions randomized and then have the next 10 stay in order. While grouping questions (above steps) think about which ones might be randomized.

Steps:

1. Select on a group of questions

2. Click Randomize Group

Using a Pool of Questions Sometimes you create a pool of 50 questions but only want to have 30 randomly presented.

Steps:

1. Select the group of questions

2. Click Randomize Group

3. Click the Include drop-down

4. Select the number of questions you’d like to include

Shuffling Answers Want to not only randomize the question order but also the possible answers?

Steps:

1. Open Quiz Properties

2. Select Question Defaults

3. Check Shuffle answers

Branching Users that Pass vs. Fail Many times I’d like to send participants that pass the test to a congratulations page. However I’d like to send the participants that fail to a review page.

Steps:

1. Insert the quiz into PowerPoint (done with Articulate Presenter)

2. Quizzes and Interactions window appears

3. In the Quiz Properties area, where a user goes when they Pass and Fail

Adding Flash Videos There could be a time where you’d like the user to view an animation or video vignette prior to answering a question. You could insert a flash movie on the question page.

Steps:

1. Open the question that you’re editing

2. Click Media/Flash Movie

3. Browse to find your flash file

Submitting Questions All at Once There are two ways to have a user submit questions: All at once or One at a time. If a user submits questions one at a time it is nice because they know right away if they got it correct. However it also takes more time to submit each question individually.

Steps:

1. Click Player Templates

2. Choose the Submit all at once template (or you can make your own template … continue to next step)

3. Click New and give your template a name

4. From the Navigation tab select Submit all at once

Using a Timeline You may want to have content on the slide appear in stages. Maybe you are building up to the question. (an animation build)

Steps:

1. Open the question you’re editing

2. Click Slide View

3. Open the Timeline at the bottom of the window

4. Move your text boxes/image to different time markers on the timeline

5. Grab and move the red play bar right and left to see the content appear/disappear

I hope that these tips help. Are there anymore things you’d like to see?

Also, check out our eLearning games and interactive flash templates.

Using View Slides to Send LMS Completion in Articulate

I published a course the other day and when users started going through it the completion status never passed to the LMS. I just used the standard “publish to LMS” option in Articulate…it has to be working. The user must be doing something incorrectly right? Well, actually I messed up. (but the software tricked me)

Using “Track using number of slides viewed” to pass a completion status to your LMS:
You can have users pass a course if they pass a quiz or if they viewed a pre-determined number of slides. I chose “view slides” to pass my course.

When you publish in Articulate and your course has no quiz, the completion status defaults to “view number of slides”. You can select how many slides must be viewed. I left it at “view 64 of 64 slides”. I wanted them to view all of my pages. Seems simple right? Well, not so fast

What I didn’t think through is that if your course has hidden slides then your user won’t be able to click on every slide.  (for example if you use branching) Articulate software doesn’t calculate that you have hidden slides. It just gives you the option to have a user click every slide.

In conclusion, make sure you think through the flow of your course. Will a user touch every page? If not, make sure that you calculate that when determining how many slides they should view to be considered “complete/done”.

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

Articulate Resources and Articles

If you’re like me I’m always looking for good articles and “how-to” blogs on Articulate. So I thought that I’d share a few resources that I’ve written and use.

Articles:
Articulate and Flash Audio
Navigating the Articulate API with Flash
Scavenger Hunts in Articulate
Using Flash to Control Articulate Navigation

Blogs/Sites:
Articulate Forums
Rapid eLearning Blog (great usability and design info)
Mozealous (technical developer info)
Daveperso (technical developer info)

Articulate and Flash with Audio

I’ve been working on an Articulate Presenter course with a lot of flash files that have audio.  Each of the .swfs have buttons that the user clicks to go to various frames. There are audio clips that go along with each slide. I quickly began to notice that the .swfs acted differently once imported into Articulate. Here are a few things to consider/think about:

1. Import settings – When inserting a flash movie into Articulate you have a few different settings to consider.

• How to display the movie – I choose to display the moving in the presenter panel because it was the main content that I wanted to show. You could experiment with have the flash display in a new browser window (full screen on top of the main course) and have it automatically “pop-up” when a user hits a particulate slide. This could be helpful with system simulations.
• How the movie behaves (advancing) – I you have a linear movie that the users watches and doesn’t need to interact with, you could choose “Advance to next slide automatically”. However if you have a movie with buttons and user interaction, you must select “Advance to next slide when user clicks next.
• How the movie behaves (synchronization) – I always choose “Movie plays independently of slide” as this setting. I want the flash movie to be completely separate from what’s happening on the slide. In fact, when I import a flash movie I never have anything on the slide.

2. Audio placement – If you are using audio in your flash movie don’t import audio to the slide as well. If the user clicks on your flash movie before the slide audio is done, you will have overlapping audio.

3. Overlapping audio within the Flash movie – When I previewed the .swfs in flash the audio worked great. The sounds didn’t overlap. However when previewing in Articulate if I clicked on a button before the audio was complete it would overlap with the next frame’s audio. I solved this by putting a stopAllSounds() action script on each button before moving to the next frame. For example:

on (release) {

stopAllSounds();

this.gotoAndStop(“tool4″);
}

This script stops all audio before moving to the frame label “tool4”.

4. Few audio tips – It’s a good idea to warn the users that the course that they are about to take has audio. This allows them to adjust their speakers and not get surprised. This can be a big embarrassment especially if a course starts blaring and there are customers around.  Warning them also allows them to find another computer if for some reason sound doesn’t work on their current computer.

Audio is a great addition to any course. However with the benefits also comes the extra work.

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

Next Page »