Can articulate do these things?

Hi Matt

1. You can add custom buttons to the player using the SDK

a.You can only bookmark the last viewed slide

b. You could possibly communicate this data to the LMS using text entry questions,otherwise it will be difficult to get this information out of the LMS

2. Storyline can report a single results slide to the LMS, you can use results slides of results slides and report that to the LMS

3. There is no default progress metre in the player, you could build this in with the SDK (but will need flash and javascript skills. The menu will show progress.

4. Last viewed bookmarking is built into storyline.

5.  HTML5 is supported for iOS devices, it may work on android but is not supported by Articulate

Hi Phil thanks for that very useful reply. It's a shame to hear it isn't possible to bookmark slides. That's one of the main features I am looking for. Is there no work-around for this? I would have thought this would have come up before? I have some js knowledge but I'm rubbish with flash.

You could build bookmarking within the course and use a lightbox slide, even if you sort out the bookmarking there is no way to communicate this to the LMS

Thanks Phil.

That's a good idea. The problem is that the 'course' will be spread across probably 30+ articulate stories and therefore the bookmark really needs to be to both the story and the slide within it.

I was thinking about either of the following as an alternative:

1) Reporting the bookmarks to the LMS as an 'answer' - so each slide had a bookmark checkbox (a 'question'), and if checked then its answered yes which could be reported to the LMS (and act as a sort of bookmark?) Im not sure if that would work though because i dont know if you can actually report individual answers to the LMS? or just an overall 'score', im not that familiar with it.

2) A javascript plugin which would add a 'link' to a list (say in one of the sidebars of the LMS), which i could probably build. However, i dont know if articulate can accept post values through the URL like this: eg: www.website.com/story1.html?slide=5. Or some alternative?

Thanks,

Matt

You could add it as an answer that will be reported to the LMS, but users will not have access to this

Storyline does not allow deep linking, you could build this in with variables and use javascript to pass the value, it is a lot of work not sure how much it would get used

Thanks again Phil.

That's a shame. I noticed that it can be done in presenter though?

http://articulate.www.resources.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/community/tutorials09/presenter09/Overview/player.html?slide=5

I wonder why its a feature of presenter but not storyline?

Do you know of any posted examples of this being done using js in storyline, so i can get an idea? I think its a pretty important feature for the type of learning that i am trying to make (fairly complex post graduate medical stuff - lots of tables and equations that i think students will want to mark to come back to often).

Im thinking i could have a custom button in each slide, which executes a script which adds a hardlink to a separate page that is accessible to the student. Obviously wouldn't work for offline mobile learning but its closer to the mark.

Maybe im just trying to shoehorn this project into storyline too much because i like the software. I really like the GUI its nice design features but at the end of the day i still need it to be able to build my project. I dont know if any other authoring tools out there can do this? ...perhaps this is the wrong forum to be asking in!

It can be done in presenter 09 but not 13

I don't know of any examples that do this.  

It may be that you are over thinking this, why do you think they will want to access, is it something that will help in their job? If so I would add it as a downloadable file.

Otherwise as you say it may need to be a different tool

Its going to be a long course with lots of modules and information. I suppose what i am trying to achieve is the equivalent of folding down the corners of important pages in a textbook that you might want to re-visit (but slightly more organised). Downloading the material doesn't really help. I will see what i can do with js, and post if i work it out. I'm actually really surprised this hasn't come up as an issue before. Although looking more closely at articulate there are a number of other things that i would have thought would be standard features that it cant do (eg as far as i can tell it cant go fullscreen without additional swf or js). Im sure it's good bit of software, but for the cost i would expect it to be able to do a little more. Then again, I guess people have different priorities and you cant include everything.

Thanks again for the help and info Phil.

I try to steer my clients away from huge courses and break then down into bite size chunks.

Bookmarking is a nice feature idea, and could be achieved within a course (you probably don't need javascript), you just couldn't pass this information to an LMS, because the LMS wouldn't understand what you were trying to tell it.  I don't think any LMS will allow you to deep link into a scorm.

I don't like the idea of fullscreen it gets the users lost very easily, it is much better to leave the chrome of the browser visible.

oh - sorry, that post doesn't look very pretty. couldn't figure out how to multi-quote. You get the idea  

Presenter 09 never had a fullscreen option, it had a slide only option but this still left browser chrome visible.

I start to get the feelling that Storyline is not the tool you need, if you want to package a multi-sco (which although possible will not work out of the box), you want to deep link and pas information back to the LMS at this point I see headaches that I would tell any client to avoid.

Maintenance is another issue if you plan on using noodle you will need to reapply your hacks after each upgrade.

On a positive if you use interactions to pass data to the LMS then you will be able to read the data, as it will be stored in the database with a respective interaction ID, you could then pass this variable back t the course on initialisation and using triggers and conditions choose the point that the course starts, I think you will need to disable the resume function (thuds data is compressed and not user readable anyway.

You may be better with a html based course editor, or using the dreamweaver elearning add-ins

Thanks Phil thats good advice. There are a lot of positives to Articulate which means i would really like to use it, but i do want to avoid those headaches. The multi-sco shouldn't be a problem, doesn't need to work OOTB, but the bookmarking feature is important to me (either by deep-linking to slide number or some other method). Do i understand you right that using interactions this could possibly be done? How would one pass the variable to the course on initialization? GET/POST? I dont really mind if the info is stored in the LMS or stored in the database and i use some custom php to retrieve and pass it, so long as articulate can understand it.

Thanks

Ok, so I am reading this post and now I am wondering:

Phil: is it possible to open a module so that it opens to a specific point in the story?

I ask this given the following assumptions:

- The learner is opening one module in a course

- The course has at least 2 stories

- The learner clicks on a button published on the LMS web page that can launch the module using customized strings passed to it from a    session variable  (thus accomplishing any customized strings that our team would need to implement to launch a module that opens to a specific point in a story)

- I do not want to use the last slide visited "function" within Storyline (thus accomplishing bookmark-like for the LMS webpage button)

Matt: Thanks for posting this!  It has really stirred up some ideas of my own!

Hi Pedro,

Yep that pretty much what i am trying to to as well (with the added step that the user can set their own 'bookmark buttons/links'), with the page /module location info passed to the database from within the story itself using a 'bookmark this point' button. From what i have understood from Phil and my other reading so far, the LMS itself is probably not going to be able to do this without some modification. Which LMS do you use?

EDIT: i wanted to use the SDK to add the bookmark buttons to the player, but reading around it looks like the SDK only works for the flash player, not HTML5, which is a shame. Im (very) happy to be corrected on this.

Matt,

Not really able to share much about the LMS *BUT* if I were doing this on my own, I would try to create the custome button using the SDK and have it inject the relevant data using JavaScript.  You can then pass data back and forth inside/outside of the LMS as needed (assuming you want to tackle the effort, read on...). 

You would also need to set up a database, the scripts, the connections, consider security in your code design, and consider the kind of maintenance you would need to perform on a per class/session basis (assuming you do not want to maintain the bookmark data perpetually) to properly implement this solution (not to mention the departments and team members you would need to confer with)

However....HTML5 is a show stopper if you want to use JavaScript, based on what I have also read in the Community forums.

You can get some more ideas and gain some great insight by reading through the following Community thread (I certainly learned quite a bit!)

http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/13231.aspx

Based on what I have read here, you may want to take a look at Lectora from Trivantis. Lectora provides more functionality as far as passing and manually controlling variables. You can use asp or javascript to send information to external sources. Lectora also allows for multiple SCO content, but personally I would break up courses into much smaller chunks to allow easier navigation and access. Lectora also supports publishing to mobile devices. The cost for Lectora is similiar to Storyline.

Thanks Shawn,

Will check that out.

Matt

Hi Matt,

I wanted to welcome you to the Heroes community, and am glad that you were able to get answers to most of your questions here. In regards to the final question you  had regarding the SDK, you're correct in that it'll only work for Flash and not HTML5.