Library of Media Assets Shared Among Multiple Courses?
Oct 01, 2018
I know almost nothing about using any Articulate product to develop elearning. I'd like to know if there's a built-in feature to manage a media asset library associated with a course, or more importantly, with a group of courses (perhaps even our entire course catalog).
In addition, beyond just managing that library and being able to pull assets from it, is there a feature that would allow me to update an item in the library and have that change be incorporated automatically into every course that uses it... without having to edit and re-publish the courses?
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For instance, let's say I have an image that's currently used 20 to 30 times among a family of about 10 courses. Right now, if I need to update that image in every course I have, I just replace that one image file (i.e., save the new image to the same folder with the same name, overwriting the old image).
If that new image is the same shape/size as the original, I probably won't even have to touch any of the courses... they'll just use the new image, and because it's the same shape/size, I know the formatting/layout won't be affected. I won't have to edit or re-publish anything; all I do is replace that one image file.
To be clear, this is not an uncommon situation where I work.
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Thanks in advance for any answers!
Bill
4 Replies
There is no built-in library feature.
Thanks again, Michael. Do you know if there's a way to specify an external source for an image, something like the html img tag? If that's possible, we could get by without a library feature.
Technically, you could link a Storyline webobject to some web-hosted image (e.g. an image stored in a Amazon S3 storage bucket). As long as you keep the name and dimensions of the image, you should be able to switch out the image and have that change reflected in any course that links to the URL. I haven't tested that myself, but it may be worth a try.
Well, I've confirmed that this works; replacing the image file (keeping the same URL/filename) updates the image shown in the course without having to open, save, publish, etc.
However, you have no control over how the image scales within the bounding box of the web object... it displays at native resolution, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get a partial image display with scrollbars.
A workaround is to create an html file that references the image and let the html/css styling in that file control how the image scales. Then reference that html file in the URL for the web object. It works, but it would require fine-tuning or some intelligence in the html/css (or throw in a js resizer).
The bigger issue here is that the authoring / publishing / previewing / adjusting process with this approach is a pain in the behind.
I'll continue working on this.
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