Newcomer, drowning

Vickie, welcome to the community. I'm sure you'll find lots of support here. I'll take a stab at your questions and others can expand/correct as needed.

1. Slide masters. Masters are great for setting global formatting, for sure, such as slide backgrounds, fonts, etc., but you can also use them for many other things that you want to appear or happen on multiple or all slides in your course. For example, you might want a persistent custom menu on every slide, so you build it once on a master and use it everywhere by selecting that layout. You can add triggers on master slides that do things each time any slide in the course is loaded, such as set the state of an object or character. And so much more. I think masters are an underused feature in Storyline.

2. Scenes are a way to divide up your course to make management and navigation easier for you. For the most part, it doesn't impact the learner experience (the built-in menu is a clear exception, though even that can be edited). I'll typically have an opening scene with introductory material, and extras scene with instructions or other common slides, then a scene for each lesson in my course. It helps me stay organized, rather than having one scene with all my content together. In your case, my answer would depend on how many slides you have; if each part of the email is just one slide, no scene is really needed, but if each step has several slides, scenes could help you keep everything straight.

3. Layers are simply places to put additional content that can sit on top of your base slide. Layers can do almost anything a slide can do but you use a layer instead of another slide when you want to also have the base slide content available and build on top of it. There is more to it than that but the Articulate tutorials can help with that. States are super useful when you want to change the look of an object. It can be as simple as changing the color or adding an effect (such as a hover state) or as complex as inserting entirely new objects with animations. Layers and states are usually accessed or changed by triggers based on different kinds of events (learner interaction, variable changes, etc.).

4. Jargon is an issue in any industry, I have found. But yeah, IDs have their share. Articulate is good about defining a lot of it--just search for the term in the community and you'll get good answers. A lot of it is borrowed from other communities, such as your example of "masking." But you pick it up over time and soon adopt it yourself because jargon saves time once you are "in the know." So hang in there and you'll be slinging jargon with the best of them soon!

Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. I appreciate it. In particular, your explanation of the Slide Master gave me an "aha" moment, especially when you mentioned triggers. I was thinking of them only as vehicles for style elements, not for action. I can see why they would be useful and time-saving.

I'm probably expecting too much in such a short period of time. I'm not tech phobic, but I see posts from others who seem to be picking SL up with little problem while I'm floundering. I think the jargon point is connected to my confusion with specific topics: As a quick example, I searched for an article on tabs so I could perhaps use tabs in my current practice project. While reading that, I came across some references to the "player." I have seen that before but have no idea what that is, so I tried searching for info on it because I couldn't understand some of the article without knowing what a player is. That led me down a rabbit hole of various articles----none of which actually defined player for me. This happens at least a few times a day. Chasing down the jargon distracts me from staying focused on what I'm trying to learn.

I just wish there were some sort of hands-on, live, synchronous course I could take to learn SL.

Dear Vickie,

I experienced what you are doing too when I first started with e-learning. Now there are still something new and fascinating to learn. However, the recorded webinars have helped me a lot. You could benefit from that too. 

https://training.articulate.com/webinars

 You can start with beginner level webinars. Hope this helps.

Hi, Vickie,

Dave's answers are spot on. 

And, yes, it can be frustrating trying to find basic definitions and info. Perhaps my Unofficial Storyline Glossary will help:

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/unofficial-storyline-glossary 

Best wishes!

Hey Vickie! I hear you! I still remember when I first started out and feeling overwhelmed with everything there was to learn. I relied on the community so much throughout the years to help in my own training journey. It looks like a lot of the community members have already shared some really helpful resources and advice. Just know we are here and hope to help you keep afloat on your journey. 🙂

As shared earlier, the Articulate 360 Training site has a ton of helpful videos. You can filter by beginner or sign up for the live webinars.

Also, you are so right about all the terminology! I hope this glossary helps to define some of those new terms: E-Learning ABCs: An Ever-Growing Glossary of Terms.

And I know I already shared this course in another thread, but I'm sharing it again just in case you want to reference it. I hope that helps!