Adding and Using Characters in E-Learning #9

Using Characters in E-Learning #9: Challenge | Recap

E-Learning characters are a great way to personalize your courses and connect more fully with learners. Whether you’re using illustrated, photographic, or a combination of styles, it’s never been easier to add characters with Articulate Storyline and Articulate Studio.

For greater interactivity and personalization, you can add triggers, layers, and variables to conditionally change the poses and expressions of characters.

Learning to use the built-in characters as well as creative ways to get more use out of the characters is what this week’s screencast challenge is all about!

Screencast Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to screencast a tip for using illustrated or photographic characters in e-learning.

You can focus your tutorial on the basic features and techniques for working with characters, or you can go with a more project-based approach and show interactive examples of using characters.

NOTE: Don’t worry if someone already recorded a similar tutorial. The weekly screencast challenges are for you to show what you know using your own personal voice and style.

Topics or Areas to Demonstrate

• Inserting characters
• Modifying the illustrated characters
• Changing expressions, poses, and characters
• Using characters to create scenarios
• Creating custom character packs using 3rd party characters

Record Your Screencast

You can record your screencast using any tool you like. Storyline’s built-in screen recorder is one option. Replay works well for including webcam video with your screen recording. Another popular option is Camtasia.

Share Your Screencast

Please use YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia to host your screencast. That will make it easy for me to embed the tutorials in the weekly recap post for each challenge.

You’re also free to bundle your videos into a Storyline project (here’s an example). You’ll just need a place to host your published project. If you need help, I can host your files on our servers.

Ready? Set? Record!

About the Screencast Challenges

The weekly screencasting challenges are ongoing opportunities to teach, learn, and demonstrate your e-learning expertise. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your tutorials.