Designing More Engaging Software Simulations in E-Learning #194

Software Screen Recordings and Simulations #194: Challenge | Recap

Modern authoring tools like Storyline make it super easy for course designers to record screencasts that can be inserted as demonstration videos and screen simulations to give learners the opportunity to practice a series of steps. That’s the easy part.

The challenge for most course designers is finding creative ways to make screen simulations more engaging for learners. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about!

Software Simulations for Process Interactions

I like the way Jeffrey Riley resized his simulation slide to provide a performance support style interaction. The prototype is a good example of how screen simulations can be used for process interactions.

View demo | Download

Keep in mind that both examples are only concepts and not polished demos ... but that’s okay because this week’s challenge is all about finding new ways to present software simulations.

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an out-of-the box idea for working with software simulations. Your examples can be based on real-world projects or sandbox concepts to show what’s possible.

NOTE: New entries only this week!

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you jump into this week’s challenge, take a peek at the creative ways course designers are working with Storyline blocks in Rise:

Using Storyline Blocks in Rise

Using Storyline Blocks in Rise RECAP #193: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a simul-tastic week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

45 Comments
Dan Sweigert
Jodi M. Sansone
Emma Trantham
Joshua Petermann
Lloyd Hill

Here's an advanced solution we've used in some pretty big screen recording projects (1000+ slides). By rendering captions over Storyline, rather than from within it, we saved 50% of the work/time/cost creating try and test mode simulations. It also makes maintenance (when a screen changes) sooooo much easier/faster. And for another project we added multi languages, so a single storyline screen recording course can be viewed in multiple languages which saved about 80% of the work (based on 3 languages). We can even tweak the solution to render language text using Google translate. And best of all, from the published course you can export and save all the caption text dynamically rendered and downloaded as a Word formatted user guide. We are about the begin production of our next majo... Expand

Jeffrey Riley
Jeffrey Riley
Robin Weggeman

https://robinweggeman.articulate-online.com/3762066026 Here's a Softsim, mostly created with SL3. Its about adding Transparency to the background of images with Gimp2. I guess a lot of you might use PS for it, but hey, Gimp is FREE. The Softsim I did with SL, Audio with Audicity. (The evening I made all the audio, I did something wrong and had to change two slides, couple of days after...You clearly hear de difference , you never get it excactly the same.) The Video was more complicated, because DL doesn't have a video editor. audio is made first, I played it, while I made a screen recording ( To get the timing right) Combined the two together. In the SoftSim I always try not to make a Follow-the-mouse, or a Click-the-highlighted-area Training. Its a bit of a mix between... Expand

Tandiwe  Vaughn