Forum Discussion
Articulate + Thinkific: what does your workflow look like?
Do you create with Articulate and publish through Thinkific?
I’d love to hear what that workflow looks like for you. What are you creating in Articulate, and how does Thinkific fit into how you deliver it to your learners?
Plus, if you have any tips or things you wish you’d known when getting started, I’m sure others would love to hear those, too!
5 Replies
TarynPierce, EllaM, WhitneyLowe, GenaJean-f0f457 - I've noticed you've talked about Thinkific before, wondering if you have anything to share?
I'm not a Thinkific user but I'd suggest the workflow and potential issues/things I wish I'd knew are the same for other platforms I've used. Here's a few things I would keep in my workflow for any platform:
Decide how completion is to be tracked. What is the platforms SCORM handling like or should I use web output and gate progress platfrom side.
Test on mobile devices inside the platform, not just in Articulate preview. I've been caught out by this many times. Scrolling issues, viewport height issues and frames cutting off content are common.
Try to keep SL files self contained if possible. Relying on platform resume data or anything platform specific for any interaction logic can sometimes be an issue.
Be really clear on versioning. Platforms I've used sometimes don't clear learner caches so you could have returning learners seeing old versions after you've made changes.
If I was to give one tip I'd say work out where the platform ends and your content begins before building anything. Anything the platform does natively (gating , certificates etc) should stay in the platform and let your Articulate content look after the learning...
Wonderful question. I am creating personality development course which is a straight course with no much quizzes but has multimodal formats. Thinkific has different flexible format that it can accommodate Articulate easily is what I could think of.
I think Articulate works really well for building the actual course content, while Thinkific makes the delivery side much easier. Keeping the design and learner management separate can make the workflow a lot smoother. One thing I’d recommend is testing the full learner experience before publishing, especially navigation, quizzes, and mobile viewing.
My team works in both Articulate and Thinkific a lot, so here's what we do. Note: In Thinkific there is a self-serve tier (web published files) and a Plus tier (SCORM files). There are 2 factors for the self-serve tier:
- From a design point of view, it's important to avoid the "dueling" navigation, so we look at how to make sure the experience isn't confusing for the learner.
- design decision: do you produce each chapter as a separate Rise course? It adds more work to your workflow if you do.
- turn off your Rise course menu.
- turn off the cover page when you publish (web)
- From a development point of view, when you publish you need to manipulate the published files:
- open the zip file and then re-zip before you upload to Thinkific or it won't work.
- Manipulate the complete and continue button in Thinkific using a 3rd party tool.
- From a design point of view, it's important to avoid the "dueling" navigation, so we look at how to make sure the experience isn't confusing for the learner.
