Sections in Articulate

Jun 10, 2011

Akram Ameen
By Akram Ameen

Hello all!

As it's my first post, I thought I'd introduce myself first! I'm Akram and I'm a learning technologist specialising in e-learning product development for medical students. I've worked on Articulate products for around 1 and half years now and am really looking to advancing myself. I have a varied background in IT, HR and Sales and am just settling down now. Thanks for having me on board!

I think Articulate is fantastic - it's ease of use is outstanding, especially given that I've seen people with almost zero experience in e-learning development create half decent modules, although it is noted that e-learning development isn't just about putting a few interactions together. I'm a big fan and am definitely looking forward to Storyboard and Articulate Studio 2011.

I have a specific question related to Sections in Articulate. I know this is possible in modules created in Flash as your limitations are generally due to the developers skill set, but I did find this to be a limitation in Articulate (or rather, I haven't found a way round it ... yet!).

Say my module has five sections in there. I would like there to be a menu page that shows these sections as separate to each other. Each section would be clickable. I guess this shouldn't be difficult - just set up links to the relevant slides (?). However, what I really want is for the module to save completion progress and show this to the user. For example, if they've completed module 4, there would be a box beside the section title that would either have some sort of tick or colour fill.

I also need this progress to be saved so that when the user closes the module and reopens it, there progress would show.

So, I need:

  • A menu system where it shows completed sections. Either the user visits the menu page after every section, or continues on to the next section automatically. Clicking on menu at any time would show their overall progress.
  • The module to save progress appropriately. So, when the user closes the module and reopens it, the module would read the relevant info from the suspend data and show the appropriate progress on the menu page for each section.

Any help on this would be really appreciated. I'm happy with answers that aren't so straight forward and more than willing to take on a challenge - I just need direction on this one.

Best wishes,

Akram

8 Replies
Jeanette Brooks
almost 13 years ago06/10/11 at 5:20 am (UTC)

Hi Akram, and welcome! Unfortunately, PowerPoint doesn't really support the logic that would be necessary to track which sections a user has completed in a multi-section course. In order to provide on-slide visual feedback that shows progress on the menu options, you would really need to use additional Flash programming that is outside of the feature set of the tools. 

As an alternative, what a lot of developers do is leverage the outline menu in the Presenter player to show a high-contrast color change on visited slides - often, this is an easy way to show learners what sections they've finished so far, and what they still have left to complete. Below is an example - see how the menu bar in the left uses orange to display visited slides, a white highlight to indicate the current slide, and gray to indicate non-visited slides? The colors could of course be whatever you want them to be — it's easy to customize any of the colors in the player template.

That said, here's another alternative for you. Articulate MVP James Kingsley came up with a custom skin awhile back, which he offered free to the Articulate community. The skin provides the ability to show checkmarks on completed content in the menu sidebar. So that might be an option you'd like to explore as well. Here's where you can find more info: http://www.frameentered.com/content/free-community-articulate-skin-update

Regarding your other question about allowing learners to reopen a module at the place they left off, there is a "prompt to resume" feature that you can enable. If you've turned that option on, then when a learner comes back to a module after viewing it previously, a prompt will appear that allows them to pick up at the place where they were when they last viewed the course. This feature is part of the player control options you can choose for your player template.

I hope that helps!

Phil Mayor
almost 13 years ago06/10/11 at 6:35 am (UTC)

Hi Akram

You can build something in flash again using something James found that will allow you to pass variable across slide and achieve this

I have an example here http://moodle.mylearningspace.me.uk/mod/scorm/view.php?id=287 if you look at slide 10 Incidence/survival and mortality are ticked when complete

 

just choose login as guest when prompted for a password

Phil

Gerry Wasiluk
almost 13 years ago06/10/11 at 10:40 am (UTC)

You can also package separate Articulates courses into modules for one large course.  Unfortunately, you have to do this manually.

We do this all the time for AICC.  Below I've attached our internal help document on this. Adapt for your LMS.

For SCORM, Dave Moxon of Articulate has blogged this on a SCORM packager:  http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2010/03/25/use-ssp-to-track-multiple-quizzes-and-courses/

With our LMS, we can use one of these methods to create a multi-module course with some of the needs you expressed.  We actually customized our Saba player template a bit to do this:

Simon Perkins
12 years ago03/02/12 at 5:52 am (UTC)

Further to what Gerry says, RELOAD Editor enables you to bundle multiple modules into a single package so the LMS can show the learner what's been launched/completed/scored on a module-by-module basis.

I can't recall the manual making it clear how to do it ... but it literally takes 5 mins to master.  And then you're off.  Some aspects may depend on your LMS though.  

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