Slides or Layers

Hi Colin, 

How are people going to access your course? For example, if they're going to be on a corporate network, then the connection is probably fast enough that it won't matter how you do it.

If people are accessing from slower connections, you may want to run some tests. I haven't tried it, but I'm guessing that all the content on all the layers loads at once. If that's right, you may need to use separate slides instead of layers.

Cheers, Simon 

Colin;

If you have questions or other things breaking up the videos I would put the videos on new slides and your other content on layers on each slide.  I dont see any real advantage to keeping them all on one slide but if others have some rationale I look forward to learning it.

You have already done better than most by segmenting your video content.  In this age of goldfish like attention spans people do not like long videos.

Good luck with your project.

Tim

Tim and Simon both have great points. I work for a global company, with people that work from home and in the office.  Connection speeds aren't the same everywhere. Consider how people access your learning. Will they be using mobile devices, PCs, Tablets, laptops.  The more you can do to help reduce the load time the better.  

My biggest suggestion, make sure you test your learning with a few people from different places.

Best of luck.  Phil

Your course will load faster if you put your videos on separate slides. Storyline loads (I believe) the first three slides of a course so it can start relatively quickly and moving to the second and third slides should be quick. If you put all your videos on a single slide it will have to download all of the videos before it's ready to play (rather than streaming them individually while the previous one plays). So even if you aren't starting with a video on the first slide I would still expect better performance if you spread them across slides.

Hi Colin,

When creating courses that are basically all video, I use a video player template that I grabbed from ELH!! (I can't remember the author's name, but if they recognise their work "You're awesome!!").

I upload the videos to our Youtube channel (unlisted) and then just insert the links as web objects to play in the slide itself. Use the buttons as they are, or replace them with funky thumbnails.

Having the video offline makes the footprint very small and manageable.

Now, your issue is going to be if your users are unable to view Youtube, perhaps you could consider an alternative. Again, as asked by Tim, it depends on your target audience. Another alternative I use here for both internal and external users is to copy the Video to SharePoint, and then link to that.

I hope this helps!

regards

Todd

Great suggestion, Todd!

Having the video outside the course also means that you can update the videos without having to republish the course (as long as you keep the video filename the same).

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the reply, people will be accessing through an LMS. We are worried about connection speed, type of computer, tablet & phone that is used and the web browser that is used as it is out of our control what people use. We found that fire fox does not work well, internet explorer works ok and Google chrome is the best.

I did separate the slides to 1 video to 1 slide and this has helped and I also changed the settings when publishing for video quality form 8 down to 2 and works brilliantly.

I like the idea of web objects, as with youtube, it can automatically decide by the internet connection what quality you watch the videos in

Thanks Everyone

Colin

I realize I'm a bit late to this conversation, but I do have a bit of advice (originally offered to me from an Articulate super hero). As noted above, Storyline loads the first few slides right away. If one of those slides contains a large video, it may take a while before the learner sees anything. So consider starting the course with a few simple slides. For example, the slides could say the course is loading and let the learner know that the course includes sound, so they should prepare their headset or other audio settings. You might also want the slides to indicate the best browser to use. I've used a few slides of an hourglass, with each one showing for about 5 secs. Each subsequent image shows the hourglass emptying, i.e., time passing. That sort of thing at least gives learners something to see while they course loads in the background.

Also, even if a course plays quite smoothly during testing, it could have issues if a lot of people try to access it at the same time. That happened at a large company that launched a required course to all of their employees. So many people tried to take it right away that it was difficult for the LMS to handle it. Now, they stagger the launch of such courses, i.e., employees have different time periods in which they are assigned to and must complete the course.