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

SusanLord1
Community Member
11 years ago
We have a course that is 14 hours. Currently I use a multisco approach, but the problem with that is everytime the user clicks on a lesson, it inadvertently resets the lesson status, hindering completion (resetting the lesson to incomplete in the LMS). This not an issue if the user goes straight through, but if they are popping around, it does.

The course is too large to put into one file. I would love to make a feature request for a solution to this dilema. It looks like I am not the only one who creates large courses.
AshleyT-Pollard
Staff
11 years ago
Hi Susan,

Thanks for chiming in here as well, and you'll also want to share your thoughts in regards to feature requests with our product development team using the form here. This allows us to track and categorize those requests as our team looks towards future updates and versions.
aaronleary
Community Member
10 years ago
Hi all,

I'm not sure if there are any activate eyes in this thread but I'll go for it anyway. I have been developing my lessons for some months now and it is time to build the course structure using my LMS (LearnDash). Once the course structure is built, I will upload the published AS lesson to the appropriate lesson in the LMS course structure.

Here's the thing. I have hundreds of lessons, each about 10-15 MB when published. I have already increased my user base by a magnitude of thousands and next year, it will be thousands more.

I need suggestions from people who know of a first rate server solution to hosting a large amount of AS lessons for a large amount of simultaneous users. If people want to suggest the best LMS I will also be very grateful. LearnDash is good but I'm not sure how ready it is for my future plans.

Many thanks!

Aaron
AshleyT-Pollard
Staff
10 years ago
Hi Parashuram,

I'm not sure that Don is still subscribed - so you may want to message him directly using the "contact me" feature on his profile.

Best of luck!
MeganSullivan
Community Member
4 years ago
Hello All - This specific post is many years old, but I am curious what is still accurate within Storyline 360 and/or with Presenter? I have a course that I am about to start designing that is currently a collection of ~30 PPT files with ~10-40 slides a piece - and in a perfect world they would be interactive and link between themselves much better then they do now. The slides are all text and images (no videos, yet), but I am initially concerned with the best practices for very heavy topics/courses like this.

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