Share Your E-Learning Hacks

Nice tip, thanks!

(and nice animated Gif!)

Why?

How did I not know that?!?!  (and pretty gif!)

Love this trick...and the animated gif.

Hi David. Great feature. Where would I add this java code?

This isn't a SL hack but I use this when adding audio to my courses.  Sometimes I need to cut up some long audio and split them up for different interactive elements/slides/layers. In adobe audition you can add markers that span a certain duration. I use these to mark parts of the audio then I need cut up and then add to different slides or layers.  

In Adobe Audition.

1.Highlight the section you want as an single audio file.
2. Press M (shortcut to create a marker)
3. Highlight the Markers you want to export in the Markers interface
4. Select Export markers.
5. Select the options you want and then click Export.

I've done a little research with Audiacity and you can do something similar using tracks. 

In Storyline 2, some of the built in design themes have a texture or pattern in the background (for example Curves or Grain) that you can manipulate to create additional custom backgrounds. Go to the master slide for one of these themes and hide the first image,  usually a transparent rectangle, and below it is a rectangle with a texture in it. You can rotate that rectangle to change the look, or even duplicate that texture two or three times and layer them over one another in different directions. Then unhide the first image. 

Get some icon fonts installed these are great to use to insert symbols and icons quickly and easily, my current favourite is icomoon

Oh yeah, that's a great one Phil! I've also been using http://fontawesome.io/ 

When building a course that contains several video clips, I create a slide master layout specifically for the videos and add the trigger change state of the next button to disabled when the timeline starts.

I find it critical within my organization to build the outline to my SL2 projects in PowerPoint first. It allows us to not only have a finalized PPT version made up for ILT and other more medium-limited stuff, but also to storyboard and then refine visual aspects very well before committing to the time it takes to implement more complex SL2 projects.

Problem: While it works fine for many basic things, importing PowerPoint slides with shapes and images into SL2 is often a mixed bag of formatting issues between the way vector shapes are imported between the applications. Also, rastered images are brought in at a fairly low PPI so non-shape stuff will  suffer a bit as well.

Solution/Hack: Copy/paste shapes from PPT into Adobe Illustrator! AI doesn't raster these on paste and is able to interpret the shapes as vectors, which means you can resize them to giant proportions, and in turn, import those jumbo hi-res images into your SL2 projects and resize.

Great image quality, more control over how they look, and all whilst having that stuff available in PowerPoint to edit as needed. It's been a game-changer. SL2 does have an image import size limit, but it's fairly generous.

Would you mind sharing the brand and model of the mouse you purchased? Thanks.