Text Heavy to Engaging!

Hi, Sabina -- Thanks so much for reaching out with your question! In addition to Brian's great recommendation to share your request in our Building Better Courses forum, I thought  I might also pass along the following discussions and resources that may be of interest:

• Dry, text-heavy documents to into Storyline 2
• How to manage large amounts of content
• Ideas for VERY dry content
• How to Avoid the Curse of Boring Courses

Hope that helps! :)

Here are just a couple of ways I took heavy text or bullet point slides and converted it to less text.  I try to focus on the main points and must knows on the front.  The need to know or might like to know info is hidden from initial view and must been seen to advance or there should they want to know more.

Here are the main points, but if you want more click each item.  The first turns each square over with more text behind.  The second is click each square and one text box changes states to show more info about that point.  The third is showing images, click behind to see more.  1 is set so they can't advance without reading.  The others are you can advance if you don't need to know more.

Not super engaging (I wish I could have done more), but my customers were happy all their content was still covered.

7

Hi Sabrina!

This example is from a few years back, but I took an all-text sexual harassment course and narrowed the text down to an minimum while adding in meaningful context, scenarios, and images to create a course that employees and management both loved, and that conveyed the material considerably better than 47 text-only slides.

Here are some captures to show you how I set up the situations, but you'll notice I didn't avoid the essential legalese they needed to include. It's all there, but presented in the form of feedback after the learner has made some decisions. 

I hope that helps. Best of luck, Sabrina!

Jackie

Thanks for the visuals, this is helpful!

Thanks Jackie, this is great. Your audio sounds great in the example, can I ask what microphone you use?

Hi Sabrina! You're welcome!

I use an Audio-Technica AT2020 USB desktop microphone, and I wrote a bit more about how I record in this post (in response to an ELH Challenge, of course!)

Hi Sabrina,

This is my example:

Demo:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26178433/Articulate/Multitext/Example/story.html

Story:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26178433/Articulate/Multitext/Example.story

I use graphics from:

http://www.freepik.com

Przemek

I am a big fan of using "Hotspots" to hide details.

On the main page/layer, you can show the basic text and maybe an image. Then, similar to Wikipedia, you make certain words hotspots, where a small balloon will pop-up showing more details.

It depends on your actual text whether or not this approach is useful for you, but I found it to be available most of the times (with minor text rewrites)

Unfortunately, I can't share any concrete samples or screenshots because most clients I worked with don't allow for that.

Looks like you are getting lots of great ideas and examples here, Sabrina! Thanks, everyone, for contributing. :)

I LOVE when I can tuck away what might be bulleted items, or a lot of text into markers that correspond with images in a scene. I can't pull it off very often, when I get super excited when I can!!! :)

What I've done before is create tabs on the page and based on which tab they click on, various layers appear. This not only separates the content out, it also keeps it cohesive within topic.

So many great suggestions here. Thanks everyone :)

Thanks all, I have gathered your ideas and I'm excited to get to work! I appreciate the support. 

These visuals are really helpful, using markers looks like a great way to hide text!

Thanks for sharing an example and the file. 

It's not exactly what you are looking for but one idea I like is to use to get rid of a lot of text is to combine markers and videos. I'm often given very text heavy content and I use programs like Prezi, PowerPoint or Videoscribe to turn the content into a short video. This looks especially good when the videos are set within markers. I'm not allowed to share any I've done though :(

Many thanks for the suggestion here, Michael! Hopefully that idea will be useful to others who are considering options for handling text-heavy content, as well. 

Another way is hiding text and the user has to hover or click on the topic headings for more information. I also find chunking text to be really good if there is nothing that you can do about it. It makes it easier on the user to read and they pay more attention.

Have you considered narration with kinetic text?

Kristin, this player you have used here is looking really captivating. Can you please share it. I would also appreciate if you could share the entire source file. Its looking so beautiful and effective and engaging. I am truly lovin it. Thanks again :) 

What do you mean by kinetic text?

Here's the source.

The grey player...

The white player...