What is a Scene?

Hi Amy, a scene is really just a way to group and organize your slides while you are working on them. They do not really affect the user experience. In fact the only place they are at all visible to the user is in the menu structure.

You have to have one scene (one is created by default when you start a new project).  You will notice that this scene has a green flag beside it - the green flag indicates that this is the starting screne. This means that the first slide in that scene will be the start slide when ypu publish and run your course.  If you create more than one scene, you can change the start sceen by right clicking on the screne you want to be first and selecting starting scene from the menu.

I guess the only other thing is that scenes have to be linked to your start scene in order for them to be published as part of the course. When I say linked (I mean that at least on slide in your start scene must have a trigger ( Jump to slide etc) to at least  one slide in the other scene.

Hope I have not confused you too much.

Hey Amy, welcome!

Here's a visual diagram of Storyline's "anatomy" that one of our customers put together. It's awesome, and I thought it might be helpful for you to see Storyline from a bird's-eye perspective. 

Let us know if you have any other questions about getting started

Hi Amy!

At first I didn't really get the benefit of scenes, so my first few courses were all just one scene. It felt like what I was used to - PowerPoint, so I was comfortable with that. They were relatively short compliance courses that were linear, so that worked fine.

Now as I'm getting into larger courses, I'm seeing the benefit to structure the content into scenes. Like Nancy noted, it's a good way to organize and give structure; and if you display the menu for the learner, it helps them see that structure as well. Although I haven't done anything too complex yet, I can see that scenes will be a great tool in any course with scenarios that get into rather elaborate branching as each path could be a scene. Then when you look at the Story View you can easily see how everything fits together.

Another huge benefit is the ability to split sections that you're working on and may want to preview without having to preview the entire course. (When you preview, there isn't the option to start at one slide and view to the end. At first this didn't make sense to me, but with the amount of branching and the tendency of courses to not be linear, it's logical that it wouldn't work very well.) Anyway, I've found that if I'm working on a longer course that technically could all be one scene, I'll still split it into scenes to make the review process a bit easier by being able to Preview Scene and avoid needing to start from the beginning each time.

Hope this helps!

Thanks so much everyone for the responses - now if finally makes sense to me.

To: Peter Anderson,

I was going to take a look the link (Here's) you were referring to.

But, it appears the Here's link was expired. Could you fix the link at your earliest convenience?

Thank you.

- TC

Hi TC and welcome to Heroes! 

It looks like that link is to another site (non-Articulate) and may have been taken down by the original author. You may want to look at this article with a screenr by David Anderson that describes the scene numbering and set up.