Brandon Hall Technology Awards Gives Articulate 360 Two Gold Medals
We’re superexcited to share that Articulate 360 earned not one but TWO gold medals in the 2022 Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards: one for Best Advance in Content Authoring Technology and another for Best Advance in Technology Innovation for the Remote Workforce. But we couldn’t have done it without you—our amazing community! Thank you for all your support. It’s an honor to build apps and resources you love. 🎉 Not a subscriber yet? If you’re interested, you can try Articulate 360 free for 30 days. You’ll get access to authoring apps Storyline 360 and Rise 360, 22+ million course assets, an easy-to-use review app, and live online training with industry experts.Coming Soon: Articulate AI (With Video!)
Exciting news: We’re working on some AI features that’ll help amplify your creativity and accelerate course creation. Check out this short video for a quick preview of what’s in store: We hope you’re as excited as we are about these upcoming features! Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest product updates directly in your inbox. If you have questions, please share them in the comments.3 Ways to Track & Display Learner Progress with Storyline 360
You’ve been asking for a simple way to track and display learner progress in your Storyline 360 courses, and we heard you! With the new slide numbers feature, you can easily insert progress indicators so that learners know exactly where they are in your course. One thing I love about this feature is that there are so many different options for displaying learner progress. Let’s take a closer look at a few of my favorites. Slide Numbers The most common way to let learners know where they are in your course is by showing them how many of the total number of slides they’ve completed, as shown in the screenshot below. The best part about it is that Storyline 360 calculates the slide numbers automatically, whether your course is linear or not. See for yourself in this example. Percent Complete Another way to let learners know how they’re progressing through your course is by showing them the percent of the course they’ve completed, like you see in the screenshot below. And just like the slide numbers, Storyline 360 calculates this percentage automatically. All you have to do is decide where you want it to appear in your course. It’s so easy! Check out this example to see how it works. Visual Progress Meters You don’t have to display the actual slide numbers or percent complete to make good use of this feature. You can also use it to create a custom visual progress meter, as pictured below. Thanks to the prebuilt variables available in this feature, it’s easier than ever to create a personalized progress meter. Take a peek at this example to see one way to do that. Learn More Ready to take this new feature for a spin? Here’s a tutorial that’ll teach you how to set it up, step by step. If you don’t have an Articulate 360 subscription, you’ll want to snag a free 30-day trial first. And of course, be sure to come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. Questions? Comments? Let me know in the comments section below.Introducing the Articulate Beta Program
We’re committed to delivering you more value, more often—which is why we’re excited to introduce Articulate’s new beta program! Here’s what you need to know. What Is It? The beta program gives you—our customers—the chance to explore and offer feedback on experimental features across Articulate 360 apps. That way, you can help shape and enhance these features to truly fit your needs. How Do I Participate? If you have an Articulate 360 account, you’re automatically included in this new program! We’ll add beta features to our apps during updates and mark them with a Beta badge. From there, simply try them out and give us feedback via in-app surveys or in our E-Learning Heroes community. If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed that we already have a few beta features: Team Folders in Review 360—lets multiple authors publish a course to the same Review 360 link, so you never lose track of your comments. Request Review—allows users to request and track reviews all within Review 360. Integrated comments—lets reviewers browse, reply, and resolve feedback directly in Storyline 360 and Rise 360. Note that since features in beta are still evolving, they’re subject to changes in scope, pricing, and packaging, or discontinuation. Wrap-Up With incremental value, delivered more frequently—and with your helpful feedback—we hope to build products that meet your needs. Want to see how your voice can make a difference? Check out this update we’re releasing based on customer feedback: 11 New Articulate 360 Features To Celebrate. And if you’re not an Articulate 360 subscriber, you can start a free 30-day trial for access to the beta program.How to Fill Text with an Image in PowerPoint
Have you ever seen a text with an image fill, like this one, and said to yourself, “I wish I could do that”? Well, I have some good news. If you have PowerPoint, you can! Just follow the six simple steps below. 1. Add Combine Shapes Tool to Your PowerPoint Ribbon If you haven’t already, the first thing you’ll need to do is add the Combine Shapes tool to your PowerPoint ribbon. Check out this tutorial to see how to do that. 2. Insert a Background Image The next thing you’ll need to do is find and insert the image you want to use as the fill for your text. For this kind of project, it’s best to choose an image that’s easily recognizable. 3. Insert & Format Your Text The third step is to insert your text. Once your text is inserted, you’ll need to choose a font. I recommend using a bold font so that more of the image is visible. Then, increase the size and boldness of the font as desired. Finally, position your text on the part of the image you want to appear as the fill. In this example, I’m going to move the text over a little so that no green shows through. 4. Insert a Rectangle Next, insert a rectangle that’s the same size as the image. In my case, the rectangle covers the whole slide. Then, right-click on the rectangle, select Send to Back, and choose Send Backward. Your text should now appear on top of the rectangle. 5. Combine Your Rectangle and Your Text Now select your text, followed by your rectangle, click on Merge Shapes, and select Combine. At this point, your rectangle should have taken on the color of your text, and the place where the text was should be transparent. If you try and move your text, you’ll notice that the rectangle is still independent of the image, like in the screenshot below. If you don’t like the part of the image that’s showing through, move the rectangle around until you’re satisfied with the result. If you don’t need the image and the text to be a single object, then you can stop here. If you do, then move on to step 6. 6. Subtract the Image from the Text Select both the image and the rectangle, and then click on Merge Shapes and select Subtract. The image and text should now be combined in one object, like in the screenshot below. If you’re following these steps and the result doesn’t look quite right, try selecting your objects in the reverse order. Now you can go ahead and add any other text or images around it to finish off the look you’re going for. And you’re all set! Want to learn more tips and tricks for creating graphics in PowerPoint? Check out the tutorials below: Guide to Creating Illustrations in PowerPoint for People Who Don’t Know How to Draw Creating Custom Shapes in PowerPoint How I Created These Handy People Icons in PowerPoint And if you’re on the lookout for beautiful images, be sure to check out Content Library 360, the library of 10.3+ million assets that comes with an Articulate 360 subscription. Click here to start your 30-day free trial. Like this article? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (Formerly Twitter).2 Tips for Using Content Library 360 That’ll Save You Oodles of Time
I feel a bit like a broken record, but I can honestly say that Articulate 360 is jam-packed with timesaving tools for streamlining your workflow. And one of my personal favorite tools is Content Library 360. In case you’re not in the know, Content Library 360 is an ever-growing library of course assets. These assets include: slide templates for Storyline 360 and Studio 360 courses with flexible layouts and interactions that are prebuilt with all the object states and triggers in place; over 100,000 photographic and illustrated character combinations with different poses and expressions—many in industry-specific garb like scrubs, lab coats, or hard hats; access to a library of millions of stock photos, videos, and vector graphics—all assets available to you right from within Storyline 360, Rise 360, and Studio 360. Beyond the creative possibilities and sheer convenience of Content Library 360, I can’t stress enough what a huge timesaver it is to have professional-looking prebuilt slide templates right at your fingertips—especially when those last-minute change requests hit your inbox. Those urgent requests to shoehorn new content into my courses used to send me into panic mode. I’d either scramble to adapt an interaction from another project or try to create an interaction from scratch. And when you’re in a rush, it’s really easy to overlook things like pixel-perfect alignment or missing triggers, resulting in more hassles. But now, with Content Library, I can quickly browse for and insert an interactive slide template that fits the bill, and then easily customize the appearance, add my content, and go. It’s a game-changer! Here are step-by-step instructions (with video!) to show you just how easy it is to customize the Content Library 360 slide template for your projects. Step 1: Browse & Insert a Slide Template Don’t let last-minute changes derail your productivity. Save yourself hours of searching and design work by browsing for a Content Library interaction to customize on the fly. Here’s how it works: Click on the slide that will come before your soon-to-be-inserted slide. Select the Slides menu and click on the Content Library 360 option to open up the template browser. Speed up your search for the perfect template by using the filters on the left. In my case, I wanted an interaction, so I used the interaction filter. You can also filter by color theme, either light or dark. Click to select the slide you need and then hit the Insert Slide button. Boom! Your new slide is inserted into your project. Pro Tip: You can select and insert multiple slide templates from the Content Library browser just by holding down the Shift key while you click on the slides. Here’s a quick (silent) video I made to show you these steps in action. Step 2: Add Content & Customize If the idea of customizing the look and feel of a template seems a little intimidating, don’t sweat it. It’s actually a whole lot easier than you think. Here’s how I tackled it … First, I selected and then deleted the slide elements I wouldn’t need. Since I wasn’t creating a timeline interaction but rather a sleek click-and-reveal interaction, I took out the “date” boxes and the divider lines. Then I started swapping out images. I already had the ones I wanted to use saved in a folder on my desktop, so all it took was a quick right-click on each placeholder image to browse to the location of each new image. Next, I added my text. Because Content Library slides are professionally designed with all elements of the layout clearly named and easy to identify on the timeline in Storyline 360, all I did was click to select the textboxes I wanted to change and start typing. Bonus: If you’re new to e-learning, Content Library 360 slides use placeholder text that gives you pointers on how to get the most out of each layout so you can design more effective e-learning. With your newly inserted slide selected, navigate to the Design menu. Then, click on any of the prebuilt color themes or create a color theme that matches your project. I had one already designed for my project, so I just clicked to apply it to my slide. Never used design themes before or not sure how they work? Here’s an article about what they are and how to use them. A few more clicks to fine-tune the look, applying my lighter text color to the layer text, etc., and then … voila! Here’s another short and silent video to walk you through these steps. How cool is that? Adapting Content Library 360 templates instead of creating something from scratch makes a whole lot of sense when you’re a busy e-learning developer—especially when you’re a one-person training department. And if you'd like some more tips and timesavers on this topic, check out 3 Timesaving Tips for Customizing Content Library 360 Templates. There are so many more creative uses for Content Library 360 assets. Will you share your favorites with us? Leave your Content Library tips, tricks, and creative ideas in a comment below. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.Switching from Storyline 3 to Storyline 360? Here’s What’s in Store
If you’re making the switch from Storyline 3 to Storyline 360, you’re probably equal parts excited and anxious. I totally get it! Change can be scary, even if it’s GOOD change. It’s hard to know what to expect. The great news is that when you crack open Storyline 360, you’ll notice it looks almost exactly like Storyline 3. At first glance, the two are pretty interchangeable—aside from the color of the interface—so you’ll feel right at home. Of course, once you dig a little deeper you’ll start to see some differences. And these differences are what make Storyline 360 so much more powerful. Let’s take a look at a few of the big ones so you know what’s in store. Access Millions of Graphic Assets From the Insert Tab When you open the insert tab you’ll see options for adding characters, photos, illustrations, icons, and videos from Content Library 360. And while you already had access to some characters before, if you click on the Characters button you’ll find that you now have access to many more! Use the Media Library To Manage All Your Assets In the view tab you’ll notice another great new feature: the media library! If you’re struggling to find a good way to manage your course assets, you are going to love this feature. The media library lets you view, edit, and replace all the assets in your project in one window—without ever leaving Storyline 360. Not only is it a one-stop shop for all your assets, there are tons of great time-saving features built in. To learn more about the media library, check out this article: 5 Reasons You’re Going To Love the New Media Library Feature in Storyline 360. Create More Immersive Interactions With 360° Images Another thing you’ll notice in Storyline 360 is that you can insert 360° images to create a more immersive learning experience. You can also add interactive elements—like markers and hotspots—to these images and even embed supporting multimedia. Using 360° images is fantastic if you’re creating a course that requires the learner to interact with their environment or if you’re creating a guided tour of a location. To learn more and see some examples, check out the links below. 7 Immersive Learning Experiences That Use 360° Images 7 Tips for Creating Immersive Learning Experiences With Interactive 360° Images 42 Interactive 360° Image Examples in E-Learning Build Interactions Faster With the Updated Trigger Panel & Multi-Action Conditional Triggers While triggers are something you’re likely used to from Storyline 3, the trigger panel in Storyline 360 kicks things up a notch. Triggers in Storyline 360 are faster and easier to create and edit. You can copy and paste multiple triggers at once, temporarily disable them, or expand and collapse them. Also, triggers are now color-coded so you can quickly identify them. And that’s not all! The all-new multi-action conditional triggers, which give you the ability to define two actions for a single trigger, are another huge time-saver. That’s because now you can create a locked tabs interaction like this one with just one trigger instead of two—speeding up your workflow significantly. Before: Two Triggers After: One Trigger (with Else condition) To learn more about these enhancements, check out the resources below: 10 Reasons Why It’s Easy To Create Interactions With Storyline 360 Storyline 360: Trigger Panel Color-Coding Cheat Sheet Storyline 360: Conditional Trigger Enhancements Speed Up Your Workflow With Professionally Designed Templates In the slides tab of Storyline 360, you now have access to gorgeous, professionally designed, fully customizable templates in addition to the standard slide layouts you had in Storyline 3! And many of these templates include prebuilt interactions, so all you have to do is pop in your content and they’re ready to go. With thousands of Content Library 360 templates at your fingertips, you can create stunning courses in minutes—without paying a graphic designer. Learn more about our templates here: Storyline 360: Using Content Library 360 Templates. Collaborate With Team Members Using Team Slides If you’re an Articulate 360 Teams subscriber, make sure you check out Team Slides, located in the slides tab. Here you can save time and share slide templates you’ve created with your team, or use ones others have saved in your library. Team Slides are great if your company has a standard format for specific slides across all e-learning courses—for example, objectives or navigation slides. To learn more about Team Slides, head over to this article: Storyline 360: Using Team Slides for Collaboration. Give Your Course an Updated Feel With the Modern Player When you open the player settings, you’ll notice the player looks a little different than the one you’re used to seeing in Storyline 3. That’s because in Storyline 360 you have access to the Modern Player. Not only is this player responsive and accessible for all learners, it makes it easier than ever to customize the look and feel to fit your brand guidelines. Want to learn more about how this new player differs from the one you’re used to? Check out this article: Storyline 360: Choosing a Player Style (Modern or Classic). Easily Gather Feedback by Publishing To Review 360 When you click on Publish you’ll notice some new options. The first one is publish to Review 360. What’s Review 360, you ask? Great question! It’s a web-based project review app that works seamlessly with Storyline 360 to publish and share courses. That way you can get courses into the hands of stakeholders faster and easily gather feedback. Because it’s fully web-based, your reviewers and stakeholders don’t need to download an app—or even create an account—to use it. You simply share the link with them and they can view and add comments to your course. All they need to do is open the Comments bar and type their feedback. It’s super easy to use and makes the whole course review process go much more smoothly. To learn more about Review 360, check out this article: 3 Ways Review 360 Is a Big Gift for Course Developers. Create a Course Teaser in Seconds by Publishing To Video Another new publishing option you’ll notice in Storyline 360 is Video. This option comes in handyif you’re creating a teaser video for your course that you want to post on, say, YouTube. Or, maybe you need to create a GIF for a different project. If so, you can use Storyline 360 to build the GIF, publish to video, and then convert and embed it wherever you want. Want to find out more about how this works? Check out this article: New in Storyline 360: Publish To Video. Wrap-Up Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the features you’ll find in Storyline 360 that you didn’t have in Storyline 3, just the big ones that are likely to stand out as you make the switch. For a side-by-side feature comparison, check out this handy list. Hopefully this article has you feeling excited and ready to jump into creating courses in Storyline 360. But if you’d like a bit more information before you get started, we’ve got you covered! Just check out the links below: How To Find and Create 360° Images for Your Storyline 360 Project Make Your Storyline 360 Courses More Accessible With These New Features 3 Ways the Latest Review 360 Updates Make Managing Content Even Easier 3 Features That Make Storyline 360 Quick and Easy To Learn Set Yourself up for Success With These 5 Storyline 360 Project Time-Savers Want to try out these new features, but don’t have Storyline 360? Start a free 30-day trial of Articulate 360, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.6 Amazing Things You Can Do in Rise 360
Rise 360, the web-based authoring tool in Articulate 360, just keeps getting better! Like all the apps and resources in Articulate 360, we’re continuously adding features that save you loads of time and give you new ways to create whatever type of learning your audience needs. To give you a sense of how Rise 360 can boost your productivity and increase your agility, here are six totally amazing things you can do in Rise 360. 1. Boost Your Productivity with Content Library 360 Integration With Rise 360, you can access photographs and illustrations from the ever-growing library with millions of assets in Content Library 360, right within the app. You can even crop images in Rise 360 using the built-in cropping tool in the edit menu. Or change the aspect ratio, focus on a specific part of the image, and more. Check out this article for more examples of what you can do with the crop tool! Following is a quick Peek 360 video to show you just how painless it is to search for and insert the perfect image in Rise 360: 2. Create Branching, “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style Scenarios Easily create branched scenarios with scenario blocks in Rise 360. Scenario blocks let you choose from a selection of Content Library 360 characters and create dialogue, responses, and feedback to craft an engaging scenario. Scenarios can be as complex or simple as you need—anything from a single scene with a few pieces of content to multiple interconnected scenes, each with their own branching choices. Whatever you choose, scenario blocks uniquely engage learners, giving them the opportunity to practice new concepts or think more deeply about information they’ve learned. Learn more about building branching scenarios in this article, or watch Tom Kuhlmann’s video tutorial. 3. Tables and Charts Make Your Data Come to Life Did you know that you can add tables to your Rise 360 courses and format data as pie, graph, or line charts? It’s easy to do with table blocks and chart blocks. You can insert tables as a separate block or inside of almost any other block that contains text. You can easily format your tables exactly how you want them. Charts get their own category in the block library and give you tons of options. Add legends, label your axis, tweak custom colors—do whatever you need to help your learners engage with data on a whole new level. And because it’s in Rise 360, it’s easy to save your charts and tables as block templates and share them with your team. Learn more in this article: 4 Ways to Elegantly Display Data in Rise 360. 4. Control How Learners Experience Your Course with Continue Blocks A common requirement for compliance courses is that learners must watch, listen to, or complete every single piece of content in your course before proceeding. So how can you do that in Rise 360 and not make it feel like a drag? One way to exert a little more control over how learners experience your course without making them feel locked down is to use the Continue Block feature. Continue blocks not only allow you to chunk content and reveal it progressively, they also enable you to require learners to complete critical content before moving on to the next. Want to learn more? Check out this article: Create Compliance Training Like a Pro with Rise 360. 5. Use Templates to Get a Jump on Course Creation Don’t get stuck with “blank-page syndrome” when starting a new course. Build engaging, interactive lessons quickly with gorgeous, customizable templates. Templates are fully structured and contain relevant headings, media, and writing prompts; they just need your personalization. Templates cover a wide range of business topics such as compliance, workplace safety, human resources, information technology, and more. Select the Templates option from the New Course button to access the full library and quickly add them to your Rise 360 dashboard. Then sit back and relax, knowing the hard part’s already done. You just need to make it your own. Head over to this article to learn more: How I Created an Information Security Course in No Time Flat with Rise 360 Templates. 6. Embrace the Next Generation with cmi5 Support The latest e-learning software specification standard is cmi5. It combines the structure of SCORM with the tracking capabilities of xAPI. It’s more flexible, works well with offline solutions, and even reduces browser pop-ups! The e-learning industry has only just begun to scratch the surface of what cmi5 can do. With Rise 360, you publish to cmi5 and will be on the cutting edge of learner tracking. When you export a Rise 360 course with the cmi5 option selected, you’ll download a cmi5-compliant package that works seamlessly with your LMS. To find the cmi5 export option, click on Export, choose LMS, and select cmi5 as shown in the GIF below: Summing It Up With Rise 360’s flexible block lessons, inherently responsive output, and a host of new features being added all the time, the creative possibilities are endless. But don’t take my word for it. A quick scroll through E-Learning Heroes Examples will show you that folks are busy building everything from cool interactive resumes to seriously immersive case studies. Which of these Rise 360 features has captured your imagination? What creative possibilities do you see for Rise 360 in your organization? Share your feedback, ideas, or inspiring examples with us in a comment below. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to the blog for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.
