New to Design/Training and looking for a mentor

Hey Melissa, and welcome to the community! That all sounds like a lot, but don't worry. We're here to help make it more manageable.

Being understaffed with a lot on your plate is rough. And I think many of us have been there at one point or another in our careers. In an ideal situation, you'd talk with your organization and triage the workload while your team staffs back up—concentrating on the projects that are the highest priority and/or with the largest impact.

Depending on your situation, though, that might be easier said than done. So the next thing to consider is where you can simplify course development without taking away from the learning experience. That can include:

• Build some courses in Rise 360 instead: If you happen to have Storyline 360, then you also have access to Rise 360. It's another e-learning authoring app, and it's terrific for putting out great-looking courses fast. Plus, it also includes pre-built interactions. If you can switch some of your project building from Storyline 360 to Rise 360, that may save you a significant amount of time.
• Use the included templates: Another option if you have Storyline 360—use the hundreds of pre-built slide templates included in the app. So you can use those as a jumping-off point for your course slides and speed up production that way.
• Try the templates and assets here on E-Learning Heroes: Whether you're using Storyline 360 or an earlier version, you can always use the free slide templates and assets in the Downloads section of this website to make building your courses easier.
• Make copy and pasting your best friend: You mentioned lots of triggers and layers. If you need that level of complexity on a slide, take advantage of copy and pasting to cut down on your work. This article on how to do that is a bit older, but the approach still works.
• Consider if every slide needs complex interactions: You might not always need the complexity you described every single time to still get the content across in a meaningful way. For instance, stories and scenarios don't have to be interactive to be engaging and helpful. So, depending on your topic, it may be okay to have some non-interactive slides in a course.
• Use the Convert to Freeform feature when you can: This feature does most of the work of making a slide interactive for you, making course production much faster! You can use it to make the following kind of interactions: Drag and Drop, Pick One, Pick Many, Text Entry, Hotspot, Shortcut Key

Hopefully, at least some of those tips work in your specific situation. Also, in the long-term consider:

• Setting aside a bit of time regularly to keep learning more about Storyline. Whether through the free resources included in Articulate 360, tutorial videos on YouTube, or articles here, the more you know about Storyline, the more efficiently you'll be able to build courses with it.
• Coming back to this discussion board if you hit a stumbling block in development. People here are amazing at helping troubleshoot challenges.

Good luck and be sure to reach out for any additional help!

BIG learning curve for you if you were power pointing before.. Good news is a lot of the basics in Storyline are just like PPT.

My 5cents is that plan the content so that anything basic, tracked quiz, untracked knowledge self assessment exercises , images, video and more ...  add that in rise. Good, quick work process.

What you need storyline for is the interactions that bridge from basic to advanced/custom or the interactive intensive parts. Then you add the storyline block to rise and still present your advanced storyline parts in rise. I choose to present with a "clean look so storyline player interface is customized to not be visible and seemlessly integrate with white rise pages, but this can vary from the purpose with the storyline block. I use full HD project sizes in Storyline, nothing less. Consider your users devices. Test the scaling.

Hint, via storyline you can add content from other authoring tools officially unsupported by Rise.

Using powerpoint for creating videos with or without narration, animated gif graphics or just plain graphics of any sort,  is also part of how you create content. So you have that already going for you! Powerpoint is now part of your content creation kit. Like Adobe suite etc..

But now and going forward, you present your content via rise and you learn to live with its limitations -  which by the way gets less annoying every year. :) Great improvements and feature enhancements always on the horizon.

So in summary you stay in rise and you use storyline blocks with storyline for anything out of the ordinary.

Hope this helps.

Thank you all for all the help, I appreciate it! 

Thank you! I will discuss some of those options with my boss, to see what we do moving forward! Do you know if there is formal training for storyline 360? I work for the State of Arizona and with such high turnover almost nobody currently working here has experience with it.

The self-paced Articulate 360 Training included in an Articulate 360 subscription is often enough for people to get comfortable with Storyline 360. It has tutorials, recorded webinars, and live webinars. There's a ton of helpful content there for Storyline 360 beginners, plus more advanced tutorials for when people move beyond the basics.

If you're looking for longer, instructor-led courses, though, I'd recommend checking out the programs offered by our training partners.