E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

That's the question a potential client asked me. She wants justification for the decision to use Storyline for her interactive video based course.

She's asking how Storyline has been used for other adult learning programs?  What were the results?  Why is Storyline so wonderful?

I can respond to her with my own perspective, of course.  But I know my response will be much more effective if I pose the question here first.

Thank you!

Dawn

Good morning Dawn,

Of course, my opinion might be a little bias  If you're looking for more feedback from other community members, and their experience with the software (as well as user experience), you might want to head over to the Building Better Courses section of the forums. This will give you a little more exposure and hopefully the feedback you're seeking. 

We've had quite a few posts from members that are working to show their clients the awesomeness that is Storyline. You might also benefit from doing a little searching on the forums for these posts. Some members also work up some example courses to show their clients and have been able to impress them with how quickly they can put together courses that positively impact their students or users. 

I'm sure you'll be able to get some helpful feedback from other community members here, but it never hurts to post elsewhere for maximum exposure to your question.

Good luck! :)

Hello Dawn - 

For me the advantage is more designer-focused than learner-focused. I have made successful cases to use Storyline after I situated the perspective from the increased learning and practice events we could create using Storyline over our other tools.

It might be beneficial to provide a comparison of sample activities that you could create in Storyline and then demonstrate how you could or could not create comparable activities in another program.

I am interested to also learn about interactive video activities in Storyline. Are there any favorites you can share?

Hi Carla,

Thanks for your input!  I've seen several really nice interactive video samples created in Storyline.   Monste Anderson posted a great one on the forums a couple of months ago.  Here's a link to the discussion:

http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/19380.aspx?PageIndex=1

I am not the right person to reply as I am new to the forum and storyline but I worked with presenter. However, from limited experience, there are some things that i find very helpful in storyline. Generally, I think you will get your interactive course out in a shorter time. See attached a slide summarizing a process build one one slides using layers in about an hour.

I can mention here a few of the things i find useful.

1) The time line allows me to do things much faster. I can move objects up and down and easily name and keep everything tidy. I can zoom on the time line, select a section of the audio, play that section and move other objects to sync them with the audio without much effort .

2) The layers panels allows me to hide objects in other layers but also to show a few layers out of many to help me place things around. The ability to use layers makes it possible to implement interactions without much thought. 

3) If you think about a process in advance, its possible to use a lot of copy and paste work where you work some object and then copy its settings to other objects them make quick adjustments.

4) I find the review processing time, even for a whole scene is much faster in storyline as compared to presenter. It can save sometime in the long run.

5) I find the output for other devices such as ipad quite good but maybe they are as good for presenter. I did not try that before. I see that storyline offers a variety of other formats which give more possibilities.

6) Although i have not worked much with the storyline variables, from the much i have seen, I think this provides a big possibility to hold data for conditional processing.

That is part of my take on storyline, thanks,

Jeremiah

For me, one of the biggest advantages is the speed that changing things is possible.

Speed of production is one of the things that I sell to my client-base. In order to make this possible, I do not spend endless hours/days storyboarding - much of the time we "jazz", having a core idea to start with, core skeleton, and then playing around.

Once we have played around, then we finalise.

The playing-around-with-the-course-stage is super-fast in SL.

I an make slides into Layers, add branches, move the order etc. etc. with a simple series of clicks.

"Want to see what the navigation would look like?" - add a configured button in under 10 seconds.

In a nutshell - it is built to allow designer creativity to flow around core learning ideas.

Bruce

Couldn't agree more with Bruce above... As a business owner (who is in the middle of the selection process myself), I had to ask myself that very question... Why Storyline?... The answer for me came when I (finally!) took the focus off the "finished product" or "end result" and looked directly at the pathway utilized to get to those finished results... Many products out there deliver fine, useable eleaning, but there is a very specific cost to getting to that destination (a robust finished product) and through my research, I'm confident that the process pathway for Storyline is better, more user friendly, more intuitive, and "may and can" generate more robust results... when measured against the other mainline products out there ... So I asked myself... "What features first, benefits second... can/will the Storyline interface transfer onto to my potential customers?... Well, I'm thinking... Lower process time and greater speed to market, lower re-work/interface change time, allowing for greater customer flexibility should changes be requested and billed, and finally, I've always been a fan of the statement, creating an easy pathway is never... easy. Because of the ease and grace of the Storyline product, it's my thought that the "easier, more intuitive process" will spawn greater output creativity, due to the fact that the designer isn't hampered by "the techno babble surrounding hard to utilize software", while also trying to figure out... "Now, how can I get this done?". So in the end, as a customer, I would think that the end result with Storyline will/should be: reasonably priced, highly intuitive elearning - at a very completive price point... all brought to us by extremely intuitive product design... Hope this helps....

Dave