I'm exploring options for developing music/performance e-learning packages for a fair-sized (100 voice) chorus that I'm in. We have been working with some limited success with interactive Acrobat files but I wondered if anyone here has tried to use Articulate for choral or musical training. I'm afraid a search of the samples came up empty and the only discussions I could find were about music being used in presentation backgrounds.
You can import audio to Storyline presentations. From your description, I can't tell what your training objectives are. Do you just want to play audio samples? Are you looking to display anything? With a little more information, I bet you will get a ton of ideas from the folks here.
I suppose our goal could be summed up by paraphrasing this discussion forum's title -- instead of 'Building Better Courses', we want to be 'Building Better Choruses' (one extra syllable!).
When our chorus competes (and it's at an international level) we generally do so with two songs. As part of the prep, there's a lot of individual work and tweaking. Yes, notes and words but a lot of more abstract performance levels as well.
What we've been experimenting with using interactive PDFs is using the song's musical score as a kind of background for overlayered markups and post-its about certain phrases, chords, etc. -- and distributing these as separate editions tweaked for each voice section.
We distribute the PDFs through our chorus website's members' area which also includes the support media for embedded web links in the documents. One of the nice advantages of PDFs is that most users can easily learn how to add and edit annotations. And of course, printability. And that's useful when details change in a performance plan (eg: lyric or note change). The downside, at least for now -- not too many PDF readers on the mobile side support PDF interactivity features, at least not so fully as the desktop versions.
What I'm wondering about with Articulate, and other courseware products, is if we can find a way to use these products to develop a more integrated package of study for our singers. A place where they can study a plan, some theory, listen to samples of sections. Perhaps even some quiz and other test options to see where the work is needed most. Is this too ambitious? I don't know.
As for staffing -- it's a volunteer group, but very dedicated. And we have quite a good subgroup of media and computer pros lurking about (including myself, a graphic designer of +30 years experience).
When I signed up last night and looked around at some of the samples posted I was impressed with the potential I saw there, and a little surprised by the absence of musical study work. It made me wonder about another possible reason: copyright. Most of our music material is delivered electronically by the publishers and arrangers with pretty strict legal restrictions on distribution. These don't seem to include modifications to the PDFs, but I'm not sure where we would legally stand if we started to chop and reassemble it into new formats.
(On the other hand... maybe some progressive publishers might well consider going into this direction as a way of increasing sales!)
I hope that gives enough background. If anyone has any tips or leads on adapting musical studies to e-learning, I would be grateful if you would share them here.
I think Storyline could go a long way doing some of the things that you want to do. You can easily import your audio, and even video clips into Storyline, and set them up for presentation in any format that works well for your reviews. You could create a musical score, and animations that work with the music to demonstrate the concepts you need to share. Articulate also has some new products with Articulate 360 that work better with mobile environments.
We do a lot of video, that moves what we can do with Storyline to the next level, and we create our animations and multi-media in the Adobe line of products. Then we import the custom videos into Storyline for presentation. I've found that the combination of the two allow for the best and most flexible presentations. Storyline can also allow for you to do your quizzing, and you can use your multi-media content in your quizzes as well. I think if you look at combining Storyline with Adobe's creative cloud, you can develop just about anything you can dream up.
I'm on my break at work and I opened up a sample I tried last night on my Windows home machine, and it wouldn't play on my iMac here.
Now I read that Storyline is a PC-based only platform. Given the mix of people we'd have working on this (which includes for sure, a lot of Apple users), I'm afraid that this could be a dealbreaker.
I have to confess I was quite surprised to discover platform issues, especially in the e-learning area marketplace.
As someone with a BA in Music I love this idea Bob! One thing I could see doing is a course on sight singing.
Regarding platform, authoring the content requires Windows, but playback works on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, Chrome... basically everywhere (that can play HTML5).
Yes, I thought playback online was supposed to be cross-platform, but it's not working at all in my Chrome Osx. Worked fine on Windows Chrome last night. I'll test things in FireFox at lunch to see if it's some kind of Chrome setting.
Yes, Storyline should play fine across all platforms. The new Articulate 360 has new additional support for mobile platforms that work even better than Storyline 2.
Ah, I think I know what happened. I was trying to run a sample that looked like a rather old one (near the list bottom) and perhaps that was enough to make in incompatible with Chrome OSX. That same sample worked fine on Firefox though.
It might sound like a minor complaint, but I know from my experience with other online sharing groups, particularly large ones with mixed technical understanding -- these kinds of potholes can play a significant role in implementing a delivery plan. Many of the singers in our group are of an age where anything out of the 'normal' sphere of email and attachments can quickly escalate into a hypertension emergency. Then there's the 'tech support' time it takes from the material distributor (that would be me) in getting things working again.
Our group also has a mixed range of sight singing skills. It's definitely an area that I would like to improve on myself, and given the potential of an 'interactive score' with the right software, I'd like to see how far we could go with that.
For my chorus practices, I use an Android tablet and an app called 'Mobile Sheets'. It actually sort of approaches some degree of interactivity (for a sheet music reader) that I find very helpful (a pop-up metronome and an A-B player, for example) but it's kind of limited. I have also used MusiScore as a midi-player/music editor -- but it's too easy to muck up the content in this form.
Thanks for the info Dave. I'm going to talk/think about this with my group and see where we might head from here.
I sense, like me, you can see the potential of this technology for music instruction. And maybe just as surprised that more effort hasn't been into using it more for such.
If you ever come across anything that shows some promise, I'd love to hear/see it.
Were you running it locally? If it was a web version, running locally, with Chrome, Chromes new security settings may have prevented it from running. There can be issues if content isn't running in the correct environment.
It runs fine in Chrome on my machine. Since it didn't run on your mac, it may be that it was published to run only in flash. Storyline 2 can always be set to publish content that will run in HTML5, which should play anywhere.
11 Replies
Hi Bob,
You can import audio to Storyline presentations. From your description, I can't tell what your training objectives are. Do you just want to play audio samples? Are you looking to display anything? With a little more information, I bet you will get a ton of ideas from the folks here.
Hi Dave. Thanks for the reply, and suggestions.
I suppose our goal could be summed up by paraphrasing this discussion forum's title -- instead of 'Building Better Courses', we want to be 'Building Better Choruses' (one extra syllable!).
When our chorus competes (and it's at an international level) we generally do so with two songs. As part of the prep, there's a lot of individual work and tweaking. Yes, notes and words but a lot of more abstract performance levels as well.
What we've been experimenting with using interactive PDFs is using the song's musical score as a kind of background for overlayered markups and post-its about certain phrases, chords, etc. -- and distributing these as separate editions tweaked for each voice section.
We distribute the PDFs through our chorus website's members' area which also includes the support media for embedded web links in the documents. One of the nice advantages of PDFs is that most users can easily learn how to add and edit annotations. And of course, printability. And that's useful when details change in a performance plan (eg: lyric or note change). The downside, at least for now -- not too many PDF readers on the mobile side support PDF interactivity features, at least not so fully as the desktop versions.
What I'm wondering about with Articulate, and other courseware products, is if we can find a way to use these products to develop a more integrated package of study for our singers. A place where they can study a plan, some theory, listen to samples of sections. Perhaps even some quiz and other test options to see where the work is needed most. Is this too ambitious? I don't know.
As for staffing -- it's a volunteer group, but very dedicated. And we have quite a good subgroup of media and computer pros lurking about (including myself, a graphic designer of +30 years experience).
When I signed up last night and looked around at some of the samples posted I was impressed with the potential I saw there, and a little surprised by the absence of musical study work. It made me wonder about another possible reason: copyright. Most of our music material is delivered electronically by the publishers and arrangers with pretty strict legal restrictions on distribution. These don't seem to include modifications to the PDFs, but I'm not sure where we would legally stand if we started to chop and reassemble it into new formats.
(On the other hand... maybe some progressive publishers might well consider going into this direction as a way of increasing sales!)
I hope that gives enough background. If anyone has any tips or leads on adapting musical studies to e-learning, I would be grateful if you would share them here.
Thanks!
Hi Bob,
I think Storyline could go a long way doing some of the things that you want to do. You can easily import your audio, and even video clips into Storyline, and set them up for presentation in any format that works well for your reviews. You could create a musical score, and animations that work with the music to demonstrate the concepts you need to share. Articulate also has some new products with Articulate 360 that work better with mobile environments.
We do a lot of video, that moves what we can do with Storyline to the next level, and we create our animations and multi-media in the Adobe line of products. Then we import the custom videos into Storyline for presentation. I've found that the combination of the two allow for the best and most flexible presentations. Storyline can also allow for you to do your quizzing, and you can use your multi-media content in your quizzes as well. I think if you look at combining Storyline with Adobe's creative cloud, you can develop just about anything you can dream up.
Thanks again, Dave.
I'm on my break at work and I opened up a sample I tried last night on my Windows home machine, and it wouldn't play on my iMac here.
Now I read that Storyline is a PC-based only platform. Given the mix of people we'd have working on this (which includes for sure, a lot of Apple users), I'm afraid that this could be a dealbreaker.
I have to confess I was quite surprised to discover platform issues, especially in the e-learning area marketplace.
It seems like a fundamental oversight.
As someone with a BA in Music I love this idea Bob! One thing I could see doing is a course on sight singing.
Regarding platform, authoring the content requires Windows, but playback works on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, Chrome... basically everywhere (that can play HTML5).
Yes, I thought playback online was supposed to be cross-platform, but it's not working at all in my Chrome Osx. Worked fine on Windows Chrome last night. I'll test things in FireFox at lunch to see if it's some kind of Chrome setting.
Hi Bob,
Yes, Storyline should play fine across all platforms. The new Articulate 360 has new additional support for mobile platforms that work even better than Storyline 2.
Ah, I think I know what happened. I was trying to run a sample that looked like a rather old one (near the list bottom) and perhaps that was enough to make in incompatible with Chrome OSX. That same sample worked fine on Firefox though.
It might sound like a minor complaint, but I know from my experience with other online sharing groups, particularly large ones with mixed technical understanding -- these kinds of potholes can play a significant role in implementing a delivery plan. Many of the singers in our group are of an age where anything out of the 'normal' sphere of email and attachments can quickly escalate into a hypertension emergency. Then there's the 'tech support' time it takes from the material distributor (that would be me) in getting things working again.
Our group also has a mixed range of sight singing skills. It's definitely an area that I would like to improve on myself, and given the potential of an 'interactive score' with the right software, I'd like to see how far we could go with that.
For my chorus practices, I use an Android tablet and an app called 'Mobile Sheets'. It actually sort of approaches some degree of interactivity (for a sheet music reader) that I find very helpful (a pop-up metronome and an A-B player, for example) but it's kind of limited. I have also used MusiScore as a midi-player/music editor -- but it's too easy to muck up the content in this form.
Thanks for the info Dave. I'm going to talk/think about this with my group and see where we might head from here.
I sense, like me, you can see the potential of this technology for music instruction. And maybe just as surprised that more effort hasn't been into using it more for such.
If you ever come across anything that shows some promise, I'd love to hear/see it.
Were you running it locally? If it was a web version, running locally, with Chrome, Chromes new security settings may have prevented it from running. There can be issues if content isn't running in the correct environment.
Not a locally run. But as I said, when I tried running a new, different sample, things ran fine.
The title I tried that didn't work in Chrome was from 2014. This one:
https://community.articulate.com/e-learning-examples/storyline-font-challenge
It runs fine in Chrome on my machine. Since it didn't run on your mac, it may be that it was published to run only in flash. Storyline 2 can always be set to publish content that will run in HTML5, which should play anywhere.
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