Why not have the menu slide in there twice, once with audio, once without, so the first time it goes to the one with the audio, then all the subsequent ones return to the other one... That's what I did with mine this week.
Hi Claire, and welcome! Chris' idea is a good one. If you go that route, you can use the slide properties to hide the duplicate slide from appearing in the sidebar so that it's not apparent to the user that there's 2 versions of the menu. You can also use the slide properties to set the branching behavior, so that the duplicate slide gets skipped if the learner hits forward from the slide prior, or if they hit the back button from the slide just after the duplicate menu.
Regarding your question about giving the learner some sort of indication on the PowerPoint slide to show which items they've visited, that type of logic is not something currently available within PowerPoint/Presenter. Some developers use some custom Flash programming (based on variables) to provide visual indicators like what you're describing. We've also seen folks use a custom solution like what James developed with his custom player.
One easy thing you could try as an alternative, is to customize the color scheme on your Presenter player so that the outline menu in the sidebar uses a very high-contrast color to indicate visited slides. As an example, check out this Electric Pallet Jack course. Click the view-mode toggle button in the lower-right (so that the sidebar is visible), and then move through several slides, and watch how the slide titles in the sidebar show very clearly which slides you've visited and which slides you haven't. If you'd like to try something like that and you need help customizing the color scheme on your player , you can check out this tutorial.
Thanks, that works for the audio issue, but I was hoping to get a solution for the check-off thing too. I was thinking that Tom had done something like what I wanted in one of his tutorials on the Rapid eLearning Blog, but I can't find it!
Claire, might it have been this post that you saw? In that post, Tom shared his version of the "Dump the Drone" demo. There is a menu slide within the demo where there are 2 choices, and when you complete one of them and then return to the menu, the completed one is checked off. It's kind of an illusion, because when you get to the menu with the checkmarks, you're actually seeing a duplicate of the original menu (even though that's not apparent to the learner). The effect is pretty straightforward to create when there are just 2 menu options on the slide like in Tom's example, but as you can imagine, the number of duplicate slides needed will increase exponentially for menus with more than 2 options.
4 Replies
Why not have the menu slide in there twice, once with audio, once without, so the first time it goes to the one with the audio, then all the subsequent ones return to the other one... That's what I did with mine this week.
Chris
Hi Claire, and welcome!
Chris' idea is a good one. If you go that route, you can use the slide properties to hide the duplicate slide from appearing in the sidebar so that it's not apparent to the user that there's 2 versions of the menu. You can also use the slide properties to set the branching behavior, so that the duplicate slide gets skipped if the learner hits forward from the slide prior, or if they hit the back button from the slide just after the duplicate menu.
Regarding your question about giving the learner some sort of indication on the PowerPoint slide to show which items they've visited, that type of logic is not something currently available within PowerPoint/Presenter. Some developers use some custom Flash programming (based on variables) to provide visual indicators like what you're describing. We've also seen folks use a custom solution like what James developed with his custom player.
One easy thing you could try as an alternative, is to customize the color scheme on your Presenter player so that the outline menu in the sidebar uses a very high-contrast color to indicate visited slides. As an example, check out this Electric Pallet Jack course. Click the view-mode toggle button in the lower-right (so that the sidebar is visible), and then move through several slides, and watch how the slide titles in the sidebar show very clearly which slides you've visited and which slides you haven't. If you'd like to try something like that and you need help customizing the color scheme on your player , you can check out this tutorial.
Chris,
Thanks, that works for the audio issue, but I was hoping to get a solution for the check-off thing too. I was thinking that Tom had done something like what I wanted in one of his tutorials on the Rapid eLearning Blog, but I can't find it!
Claire
Claire, might it have been this post that you saw? In that post, Tom shared his version of the "Dump the Drone" demo. There is a menu slide within the demo where there are 2 choices, and when you complete one of them and then return to the menu, the completed one is checked off. It's kind of an illusion, because when you get to the menu with the checkmarks, you're actually seeing a duplicate of the original menu (even though that's not apparent to the learner). The effect is pretty straightforward to create when there are just 2 menu options on the slide like in Tom's example, but as you can imagine, the number of duplicate slides needed will increase exponentially for menus with more than 2 options.
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