I have completed work on a fairly large project in articulate storyline. I have been publishing intermediate versions of this course for the client for months and have had no problems until now. I need to provide a final draft to my client, except that when I publish the course it refuses to play the audio. I have tried lowering the quality of the publication and have tried publishing it to a new course, however the same problem continues to occur. The only change has been that I have added captions and resources. Please advise ASAP.
Thank you for following up on my question. I was able to publish once I figured out that the project would not start either locally or in review 360, though every scene started correctly in preview mode independently. Best I can determine after reviewing each and every slide is that one of two things was preventing the course from starting properly:
1. I had recently added links in the resources section. These links are not accessible from my location as they are client intranet links and are accessible only from my client's site. The solution to this was to create a slide with the links at the end of the course instead of adding them to the resources section. 2. The only other possibility is that the results slide presented after the quiz had lost initial values for the quiz result variables. Fixing this did not resolve the issue on its own.
As a general comment, there should be a feature in articulate storyline that allows the author to identify broken links [slide links that are not set, uninitialized variables, incomplete triggers, etc..]. When you are creating a long course with complex interactions, it is not practical to have to manually review each and every slide to find uninitialized links [this is specifically true given the complete absence of error messages on course load]. This is a common feature in software and should be available in storyline. As a matter of fact, providing sensical and logical error messages when the course is loading would fix these types of issues for everyone. On this last suggestion, I am astonished that this is not currently implemented. This is a foundational principle of software development and seems to be absent in your product.
On another note, I am now proceeding with translation of the content. It is also disappointing that there is no way to export the caption files for the entire presentation and that it is necessary to go audio clip by audio clip. This is a again a huge waste of time in the development process and is indicative of the fact that the product has not been developed in consideration of e-learning best practices [which are two separate audio clips to make it easier to update/translate/make accessible].
This is the first course I have developed with articulate storyline. Given the cost of your product, I have been struck by how many common features remain unimplemented in your product. It is a very powerful tool. However, there are dozens of features that I would expect would be common in products such as these that remain unimplemented in articulate storyline [renaming of key points, exporting all caption files, etc.]. Further, articulate storyline seems to corrupt presentations relatively easily when the level of complexity increases. Over the course of the development cycle, I have been required to delete and reinsert several pictures, have had articulate crash on several occasions and have been required to re-create the file and reimport the entire course content on multiple occasions. Before you ask, I have a high-end computer with 16 GB of RAM, an Intel i7 processor and a 1 TB SSD drive. This makes the development process unnecessarily long and arduous and the frequent requirement to redo work increases frustration substantially.
It is also remarkable how many times clients ask for a feature and your organizations standard response is that "we will make a feature request". I would suggest that there is a problem when so many features are requested multiple times by multiple clients over several years.
Thanks for following-up and sharing how you were able to resolve the issues with your course.
It sounds like on top of these errors, you’ve been experiencing some corruption issues. I’m sorry this has been such a pain! Although having the right system requirements is important, we’ve found that working locally while editing in Storyline has been helpful in reducing corruption errors as you continue to work on your project from day to day.
I also appreciate the request on the features mentioned and will be sure to share your feedback with our team as we continue to prioritize them.
By the way, it looks like you may have replied by email where your contact information came through. This Peek video will show you how to edit it out if you’d like!
3 Replies
Hi, Jean-Marc.
Thank you for reaching out! I'm sorry to hear you are experiencing audio issues with your published file in Review 360.
Are you able to share your .story file either publicly here or privately through a support case so we can see what's going on?
Good afternoon Maria,
Thank you for following up on my question. I was able to publish once I
figured out that the project would not start either locally or in review
360, though every scene started correctly in preview mode independently.
Best I can determine after reviewing each and every slide is that one of two
things was preventing the course from starting properly:
1. I had recently added links in the resources section. These links
are not accessible from my location as they are client intranet links and
are accessible only from my client's site. The solution to this was to
create a slide with the links at the end of the course instead of adding
them to the resources section.
2. The only other possibility is that the results slide presented after
the quiz had lost initial values for the quiz result variables. Fixing this
did not resolve the issue on its own.
As a general comment, there should be a feature in articulate storyline that
allows the author to identify broken links [slide links that are not set,
uninitialized variables, incomplete triggers, etc..]. When you are creating
a long course with complex interactions, it is not practical to have to
manually review each and every slide to find uninitialized links [this is
specifically true given the complete absence of error messages on course
load]. This is a common feature in software and should be available in
storyline. As a matter of fact, providing sensical and logical error
messages when the course is loading would fix these types of issues for
everyone. On this last suggestion, I am astonished that this is not
currently implemented. This is a foundational principle of software
development and seems to be absent in your product.
On another note, I am now proceeding with translation of the content. It is
also disappointing that there is no way to export the caption files for the
entire presentation and that it is necessary to go audio clip by audio clip.
This is a again a huge waste of time in the development process and is
indicative of the fact that the product has not been developed in
consideration of e-learning best practices [which are two separate audio
clips to make it easier to update/translate/make accessible].
This is the first course I have developed with articulate storyline. Given
the cost of your product, I have been struck by how many common features
remain unimplemented in your product. It is a very powerful tool. However,
there are dozens of features that I would expect would be common in products
such as these that remain unimplemented in articulate storyline [renaming of
key points, exporting all caption files, etc.]. Further, articulate
storyline seems to corrupt presentations relatively easily when the level of
complexity increases. Over the course of the development cycle, I have
been required to delete and reinsert several pictures, have had articulate
crash on several occasions and have been required to re-create the file and
reimport the entire course content on multiple occasions. Before you ask, I
have a high-end computer with 16 GB of RAM, an Intel i7 processor and a 1 TB
SSD drive. This makes the development process unnecessarily long and
arduous and the frequent requirement to redo work increases frustration
substantially.
It is also remarkable how many times clients ask for a feature and your
organizations standard response is that "we will make a feature request". I
would suggest that there is a problem when so many features are requested
multiple times by multiple clients over several years.
Thank you and have a good day.
Hi Jean-Marc,
Thanks for following-up and sharing how you were able to resolve the issues with your course.
It sounds like on top of these errors, you’ve been experiencing some corruption issues. I’m sorry this has been such a pain! Although having the right system requirements is important, we’ve found that working locally while editing in Storyline has been helpful in reducing corruption errors as you continue to work on your project from day to day.
I also appreciate the request on the features mentioned and will be sure to share your feedback with our team as we continue to prioritize them.
By the way, it looks like you may have replied by email where your contact information came through. This Peek video will show you how to edit it out if you’d like!