Forum Discussion

ElizabethDalton's avatar
ElizabethDalton
Community Member
11 years ago

Combined "View" and "Try" tutorials - method and feature requests

I'm creating tutorials for our online students at a college. These tutorials cover using the LMS (Learning Management System, Moodle in our case), being a successful online learner, etc. I'm also going to be creating tutorials for instructors who are new to creating and teaching online courses.

I like Articulate Storyline because it creates good SCORM compliant objects that I can drop into Moodle and track progress on. However, the division between "View" and "Try" modes doesn't create the kind of learning experience we need, and we also need captioning of some kind for ADA compliance. We want the student action to immediately follow the instruction at each step, so the learner doesn't just doze through the presentation.

Here's what I do currently:

  1. Record an activity on screen, e.g. how to submit an assignment. I don't bother trying to record audio at this point.
  2. Add the recording to my project as a "View" scene
  3. Add the recording again as a "Try" scene
  4. Manually interleave the two scenes. I find it's easiest to work from the end back to the beginning. I drag each slide from the "Try" scene to the position just after the matching slide in the "View" scene.
  5. Go through and delete extraneous slides, e.g. "Try" versions of "Scroll mouse" -- these aren't instructionally valuable for us. I also delete the "Try" versions of optional steps or steps that involve a lot of typing, for the same reason-- we're not trying to teach or test how to type.
  6. Go through all View slides, correcting captions to contain meaningful text (sometimes the name of the web element that was clicked isn't anything an end user would recognize). Remove ending animation effects from hint captions and highlight rectangles. Change color of highlight rectangles to a Theme color so I can easily adjust them later. I use two theme accent colors-- one for highlights where the user will be clicking in the next ("Try") slide, and a different color for items that won't require a user action. If needed, add anonymizing blocks over individually identifying parts of screens. Edit the name of the slide to be meaningful, removing "click..." from the beginning of slide titles.
  7. Copy and paste captions and highlights (and anonymizing blocks, if any) from View slides to the following Try slides. Use up and left arrows to restore position of pasted elements. Remove starting animation from these elements. Delete the hotspot that shows a hint, and the hint layer.
  8. On final slide, set to "Exit Course" to return students to LMS at end of sequence.
  9. Write audio script for each slide in Notes. The Player will be set to display notes, optionally. This provides captioning. (Sort of.)
  10. Record audio for each slide. Adjust timing of slide elements.
  11. Adjust player settings, e.g. menu and notes on right.
  12. Publish to SCORM. Set tracking to report "Complete/Incomplete".
  13. Zip SCORM package
  14. Add to Moodle course using a SCORM activity.

This meets our needs, but it would be really nice not to have to perform steps 3-6. Here are feature requests that could help:

1 - Add a "View and Try" mode that demonstrates each step and then requires a click from the participant to continue. Leave the prompt and highlight visible during the "try" step, don't bother with the "hint" popup, since the prompt will still be visible.

2 - In View mode, use theme colors for the highlighting. The current method uses a custom color that can't be changed by changing the style at the project level -- each highlight spot has to be edited manually.

3 - Allow all objects of a similar type, e.g. callouts, to be selected and animation effects edited at once. Possibly be able to search for, select, and edit all items with same label, e.g. "Caption 1". Better yet, let me specify whether I want callouts, etc. to have animation effects as a theme/style option at the project level.

4 - Since scroll actions are detected, it would be very nice to be able to add an object to a slide that automatically synchronizes with scroll movements. This is helpful when anonymizing screens. Better yet, be able to treat a screen recording as a slide master, add a blur or opaque block that will carry to all slides with that screen recording.

5 - When copying and pasting between slides, don't offset position -- paste to the same position as the copied items on the previous slide.

6 - Add transparent overlays as shape style format presets. Make it possible to save new shape style presets.

7 - Add a flashing overlay shape style? (Preferably not a jarring flash, sort of a pulsing glow.) This would serve to call attention to an action the participant needs to take to continue the tutorial.

  • Hi there, out of curiosity, have any of these features suggested by Elizabeth been implemented? I am doing a test of combining both View and Test Modes into one simulation for end user training. Cheers, Lisa

  • Hi Elizabeth and welcome to Heroes! 

    All of those suggestions sound like great ideas for a feature request, so I went ahead and submitted this on your behalf to our team (you may have already received the confirmation email). 

    You're always welcome to share those here and get feedback from other users on ways to make this easier, but you can also share your thoughts on feature request here. 

    If there is anything else we can assist with, please let us know! 

  • Thanks! I knew there was a feature request form somewhere on the site, but search wasn't finding it for me, and I thought it might be helpful for others to weigh in on these requests, as well, so Articulate could get a sense of whether anyone else would find them useful.

  • Hi Lisa,

    Thanks for reaching out and sharing that you are interested in the feature listed here as well.

    I wanted to share some information about how we manage these feature requests, which may be helpful. 

    We have not created a new mode that combines View and Test Modes, but I'd like you to share your ideas and use-case directly with our team here since it's been quite a while since we've seen this discussed.