Hey everybody! Wondering if any of the experts can help me out I am looking at making a very long "course" in Storyline. What are the best practices for doing this? Would it be better to break it up into multiple projects, or publish as one large project??? What are the max number of scenes/slides that should be used in a single published course? Will a large published output decrease the user experience because of slow load times? Thanks for any info that anybody can provide! It is greatly appreciated! Thanks again, Don

Hi, Don. I'm seeing some nice conversations here and here regarding course length. To summarize, it looks like Gerry and Gabe are making the following specific recommendations: There is no hard limit on the number of slides, but for usability, it is recommended that you stick with something more manageable (somewhere around 30 slides), even breaking it up into multiple presentations. The length of your presentation has a causal relationship with the endurance of the learner. Flash has a maximum number of frames of 16,000. At 30 fps, that translates to 8:53, at 20 fps, that translates to 13:20, and at 15 fps, that translates to 17:00. These slide lengths are far higher than recommended best practices of 30-60 seconds per slide (for reasons of both usability and network load). There have been reports of folks who've experienced slow expanding menus when using levels in long presentations. This is likely content-specific. You'll find a helpful article here from eLearn Magazine on how long an e-learning course should be. I personally have no experience with extremely lengthy courses, so I'm hoping some of the other experts will weigh in on this topic. Good Luck!

Phil Mayor said: There shouldnt be a problem with load times, storyline only loads three slide at a time, Hey, Bud! If this KB article is correct, it does more than that: http://www.articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=st1&id=1ah88m0ttqbd Of course the last time I cited a Storyline KB article to you, it was proven to be in error and you were correct, so I'm a bit gun shy even proffering this . .

Hi Don. There aren't any steadfast rules around course length and some industries have strict requirements regarding the length of the course. That being said, think about your own personal experiences sitting in front of a computer. When you are in a classroom for a couple of hours it is relatively easy to be engaged as you are experiencing a real environment that potentially stimulates all five of your senses. Now a human being sitting in front of a computer has very little stimulation. They have audio and visual stimulation coming from a relatively tiny screen sitting right in front of their face. How long do you think you could sit in front of a computer taking the course you are working on in one sitting before your ability to absorb the material decreased? I have always thought that the threshold is somewhere around 30 minutes. If you are planning on doing something longer, if it makes sense, break it up into smaller segments. There is no hard rule as to the number of scenes or slides really since a slide can vary greatly in length so I wouldn't even worry about that. I think the right number of slides is however many you need to effectively communicate the information to the end-user. A large Storyline course is built out of many pieces and is designed to be played back in low to high bandwidth environments so I wouldn't be too concerned about that either.

There shouldnt be a problem with load times, storyline only loads three slide at a time, I would try an split it because If you are running through an LMS you may hit the limit for the amount of data being stored if you use resume You may have to spend a lot of time on navigation to ensure the user does not get lost Do you expect the user to complete it in one sitting, as Justin says this is really about 8 mins before the user gets itchy feet. If you dont expect them to complete it in one setting why does it need to be one course. That said Storyline should function well with large courses, and if you need to build it you can Phil

Thanks for the AWESOME feedback guys! I am looking at creating something different than a traditional course. I am looking to create more of an "app like" structure that will allow the user to navigate to different areas; therefore users will not complete the whole "course" in one setting. I am thinking it will be better to split the project into multiple courses as suggested earlier, mainly for easier navigation. Here is a link to what I have begun to build to help clarify what I am trying to do http://www.fitsolutionllc.com/exercise/story.html (Only the "Monday" button is available to advance slide until I complete my overall design) Thanks again for all the help guys!

Best Practices? | Articulate

DonNeeds
Community Member
13 years ago

That is interesting....So if a storyline slide is central and branches off in 4 different directions, how does storyline decide which direction to load?

Also, if storyline loads the first 3 slides first, would it be smart to make these slides last a little longer to enable storyline to load the rest of the course while the user interacts with the first few slides???

Gerry, did you happen to have any videos in your test???

Thanks for all the info Phil and Gerry! You guys rock!
GerryWasiluk
Community Member
13 years ago

Don Needs said:

Gerry, did you happen to have any videos in your test???

Hi! Yes--I had 7 videos in it.
GerryWasiluk
Community Member
13 years ago

Don Needs said:

That is interesting....So if a storyline slide is central and branches off in 4 different directions, how does storyline decide which direction to load?

Also, if storyline loads the first 3 slides first, would it be smart to make these slides last a little longer to enable storyline to load the rest of the course while the user interacts with the first few slides???

Not sure how Storyline decides how to load things. The way Storyline names assets (no more slide1.swf like in Presenter), it makes it a bit more tedious to track. If I get bored I may do some more tests later . . . Be good to also know if in a linear course that things get loaded linearly.

Making the first three slides a little longer is often a good idea, especially for courses being delivered worldwide to locations with slow network connections.

Besides branching, if you have a long course with free navigation and are showing the learners the course menu, it might also be good to do.
DonNeeds
Community Member
13 years ago
Thanks again for the info Gerry! I'll have to make sure I make my first few slides longer to allow full loading of subsequent slides. Have a great rest of the weekend!
DorothyStark
Community Member
13 years ago
I'm also starting work on a non-linear Storyline project that I'm afraid might get unwieldy.

If I decided to break up the project into smaller modules for the sake of loading speed, can I connect one module to another in Storyline (maybe by using hyperlink to the story.html file of another module)?

Is there any way to pass information about the value of variables from one module to another?

Thanks!

Dorothy
GerryWasiluk
Community Member
13 years ago
If most of your audience is internal or local, loading speed may not that much of a concern. Many--if not most folks these days--often have good connection speeds. It's when you go global then you may or may not have issues.
SteveFlowers
Community Member
13 years ago
You can hyperlink from one file to another pretty easily. Passing variables is a little more challenging as you'll need to customize your pages to either pickup from a URI querystring or utilize custom frames to hold variables for exchange between the story files. It's possible, just requires some HTML / Javascript know-how after publish.
DorothyStark
Community Member
13 years ago

Thanks, guys. I don't know HTML/Javascript yet, so hopefully my projects won't get too big for my students to use. It'll be a while before I'm ready to make something fit for global consumption.

Dorothy
CaesarAycocho
Community Member
11 years ago
thank you. i found this thread informative.
JamesPicton1
Community Member
11 years ago

G'day guys

The last Storyline that I built was composed of ten individual scenes and around 270 slides. Many of the slides held with custom built Flash .swf animations, audio and compressed video. The project size (unpublished) was 400Mb: once published, Storyline crunched it down to 182Mb (SCORM 1.2 course) and 139Mb for a standalone version (.exe).

Having developed a number of eLearning products over the years, I'd consider this course to be 'very large' with respect to it's structure and sheer number of individual screens.

A second project, although structurally smaller (19 screens) held 18 individual screens with 5 min full-screen video files on each.

Storyline coped with both projects easily.

I would suggest that you need to put adequate thought into your compression settings for the various media types BEFORE embedding them into a Storyline file. Storyline will re-compress, but as with any multimedia product, you need to work as economically as possible at all stages of development.

Some users mention Storyline cracking under the pressure of loading 1Gb files....I'd suggest that most software would buckle, or at least degrade, working with files of this size.

A user mentioned the experience of operating in 'Story View' and seeing al lof the little screen icons flickering/flashin constantly - I have experienced this on a large course when I used my mouse scroll wheel to zoom out to quite a high level on a large course. Net result was that I couldn't operate Storyline and had to force close it. Needless to say, I don't do this anymore

Cheers,

Jim

www.artofjimbo.com