Articulate Studio ’13 has so many great new features—and one of my favorites is the new unified player. It offers more control and flexibility than ever before to customize the course player. Plus, when you include Articulate Quizmaker ’13 assessments and Articulate Engage ’13 interactions in your Articulate Presenter ’13 courses, your learners can navigate easily and intuitively with a single, unified set of controls.

Customization

In Presenter ’13, you can use the Player Properties to customize almost anything about the player. For example, you can set the location of the menu tabs (for the menu, notes, glossary, and such) on the player or select which elements the player features to make it look exactly the way you want.

Here are just a few examples of how different players can change the way a course looks:

Space Training Mission demo  |  Sea Turtle demo  |  Identity Protection demo  |  Effective Reviews demo

Check out these tutorials to learn more ways to customize your player:

And that’s not all! The new Slide Properties manager lets you control player elements on each individual slide in your course, including navigation and player features. By default, each slide will display the features you’ve chosen to include in your course player, but you can show or hide the following player features on a slide-by-slide basis, too.

  • Menu
  • Resources
  • Glossary
  • Notes
  • Play/Pause Button
  • Seekbar
  • Next Button
  • Previous Button

Seamless Integration

Studio ’13 also improves integration between Presenter, Quizmaker, and Engage, including unified player controls and consistent menu items across your entire project. Now you can add as many quizzes and interactions as you want and still have an intuitive, learner-friendly course.  

Better Course Menu Display Options

With Studio ’13, you can choose to show individual questions or interaction steps in the course menu—or you can opt to hide them. Simply open the Quizzes and Interactions properties settings, then specify whether your Quizmaker and Engage content will show in Presenter as a single item or as multiple items.

As you can see above, when you show your quiz questions as multiple items, Presenter displays the status of each question as your learner progresses. This way, it’s easy for your learners to easily track which questions they answered correctly and incorrectly.

Easily Manage Resume Behavior

In previous versions of Studio, the resume behavior was partly controlled by the Presenter player and partly controlled by embedded quizzes and interactions. Now it’s much easier—just set it in the Presenter ’13 player and you’re good to go. So if you enable the resume feature in Presenter ’13, embedded quizzes and interactions will also resume. And if you disable the resume feature in Presenter ’13, embedded quizzes and interactions will start fresh from the beginning when learners relaunch the course.

I think all these features make courses feel so smooth and seamless for learners—but that’s just my opinion. What about you? What’s your favorite new thing in Studio ’13?

Post written by Mike Taylor

If you want to try this yourself but don't have Studio ’13, no problem. Just sign up for a fully functional, free 30-day trial. And don't forget to post your questions and comments in the forums! We're here to help. For more e-learning tips, examples, and downloads, follow us on Twitter.

18 Comments
Scott Richardson
Ian Robinson

Mike, Here's a summary of the features we used and the consquence of not having them available. View Mode no longer supported (to go to full width by closing left side bar). This means that Captivate demos, Quizzes and intro slide play in smaller right panel area. Launching captivate in separate window means loss of navigation/skin and need to manually kill window and return to presentation. These were previously played on the slide, but in an area which covered the entire presentation. Seek bar Slide number/progress removed. Path to inserted Flash SWF file: Backup copy still maintains the original path and file name. Converted slides do not contain the path in a readable form. New published material no longer provides this information. Answers to Quizzes to tiny to read i... Expand

Mike Taylor
Jeff Schlaybach

Hi Mike, Thanks for your blog and overview of the new player. I will try to explain in more detail the issues Ian Robinson (my manager who is on vacation) and I are experiencing... 1) View Mode Removed in '13: - I did not find a way to remove the sidebar in the player in the Player Properties. Can you explain this in more detail? - You can remove various elements of the player like Presenter, Menu, Notes, etc., (Not Logo) but the sidebar remains leaving you with a much smaller panel area for demos, etc. to play in. - We have submitted a feature request to have this functionality restored 2) Seek bar Slide number/progress removed: - We run our eLearning material with the Notes side panel open by default so our students who do not speak English as their first language have a b... Expand

Mike Taylor
Jeff Schlaybach
Jeff Schlaybach

To follow-up with item #4L Republished in Quizmaker '13 and incorrect answers still come up too tiny to read. Appears to be an issue with the player not the font selection as even the word "Incorrect" which comes from QuizMaker is much smaller than the word "Correct". None of these issue with '09. Also - after republishing the quiz, the Presenter '13 presentation that this quiz is embedded in never prompts you that the quiz was updated. In fact, it completely ignores the changes to the quiz unless you edit it from within Presenter '13. This is yet another step backward. Finally (and I will check out the QuizMaker forum as others must have seen these issues), the "Print Results" simply opens up a blank new browser window after one types in their name. So the deeper I dig into this... Expand