Articulate 360: Using the Desktop-Authoring Apps
The Articulate 360 desktop app makes it easy to install and open desktop-authoring apps, including Storyline 360, Studio 360, Replay 360, and Peek 360. Learn More About the Authoring Apps Install Authoring Apps Launch Authoring Apps Update Authoring Apps Uninstall Authoring Apps Learn More About the Authoring Apps The following desktop-authoring apps are included with your Articulate 360 subscription. Click the product links to learn more about each app. Storyline 360 Build mobile and online courses with any interaction you can imagine. Your course will look beautiful and work great on every device with the new responsive player, which includes touchscreen gesture support and mobile-friendly playback controls. The responsive player dynamically adapts to tablets and smartphones, giving learners the best view of your course on every device. You can even preview how your course will look and behave on different devices in Storyline 360 with new responsive preview features. Note: As of May 2024, 64-bit Storyline 360 is the default Storyline version in the desktop app. That means you get all the benefits with no extra steps. Studio 360 Rapidly transform PowerPoint slides into online and mobile courses with the Studio 360 apps, including: Presenter 360 makes it easy to add narration, annotations, characters, and more to existing PowerPoint content. Engage 360 lets you quickly create form-based interactions. Quizmaker 360 is an intuitive tool for creating any type of assessment or quiz. Studio 360 includes the new responsive player, so your courses look great and work perfectly on every device. Replay 360 Record and edit personalized training videos with Replay 360. Walk learners through on-screen content by capturing screen activity and yourself on webcam—at the same time or separately. Fine-tune your screencasts to flip between video clips, or show two at once with picture-in-picture effects. Separate, trim, and delete sections to tell the best story. And add text to the lower third of the screen to emphasize important information. Publish videos to Review 360 to collect feedback from stakeholders or publish as MP4 videos for your e-learning courses. Peek 360 Easily record brief screencasts with Peek 360. Peek 360 is always a click away in the Windows system tray. Simply select the app you want to record, then drag the recording frame to customize your view. Peek 360 automatically uploads videos to Review 360 with a unique URL, making them easy to share. Install Authoring Apps You can install the current version of any authoring app with a single click, or you can go back to a previous version when there's a design change or new feature that you're not ready to use. How to Install the Latest Version of an App Open the Articulate 360 desktop app by clicking the icon in your computer’s system tray (by the clock), then click the Install button for any of the desktop-authoring apps: Storyline 360, Studio 360, Replay 360, or Peek 360. It’s that easy! You’ll see a progress bar for each app while it’s installing, then the Install button will change to an Open button when the installation is complete. How to Install a Previous Version of an App There might be times when you need to install a previous version of an authoring app. For example, if there’s a new Storyline 360 feature that you’re not ready to use, you can go back to an older version of the app until you have time to learn more about the new feature. Here’s how. Open the Articulate 360 desktop app and mouse-over the app you want to change. Click the drop-down arrow that appears and choose Other Versions. A list of all the versions released in the past six months will appear. Click Install for the version you want to install. An optional "Product Feedback" dialog will appear. After your selection, the dialog will close and your chosen version will automatically install. (Tip: Click any date or version number in the list to see the change log for that release.) When you install a previous version of an app, you’ll see an Updates Paused tag in the Articulate 360 desktop app, as shown below. This is a visual reminder that you’re using an older version of that app. Future updates won’t install for paused apps when you click Update All. To update an app that’s paused, click Updates Paused, choose Other Versions from the menu that appears, and click Install for the most recent version of the app. Launch Authoring Apps One way to launch your authoring apps is to open the Articulate 360 desktop app by clicking the icon in your computer’s system tray (by the clock) and then click the Open button for the app you want to use. (When you click the Open button for Studio 360, you’ll see a menu where you can choose Presenter 360, Quizmaker 360, or Engage 360.) Another way to launch your authoring apps is to go to your computer’s Start menu and click the app you want to use. Peek 360 Tip Peek 360 runs in the background, so the fastest way to start a screen recording is to click the Peek 360 icon in your computer’s system tray (by the clock). Update Authoring Apps One of the benefits of an Articulate 360 subscription is that you get continuous updates when new features are available. If notifications are enabled in your preferences, you’ll get a Windows notification, like the one shown below, when an update is available. And even if notifications are disabled, you’ll always see when an update is available as soon as you open the Articulate 360 desktop app. A blue banner with an update option appears across the top of the app. If you’ve disabled automatic updates, you can snooze this notification. Otherwise, simply click the Update All button to update all your apps at the same time. Or, click Update Available next to any app and choose Install Update to update one app at a time, as shown below. How to Update Paused Apps When you install a previous version of an app, you’ll see an Updates Paused tag for that particular app, as shown below. Clicking the blue Update All button won’t update paused apps. To update an app that’s paused, click Updates Paused, choose Other Versions from the menu that appears, and click Install for the most recent version of the app. Uninstall Authoring Apps Uninstalling apps is just as easy as installing them. Mouse-over an app, click the drop-down arrow that appears, and choose the Uninstall option. (Tip: You can also uninstall Articulate apps via the Windows control panel.)Understanding WCAG: A Quickstart Guide for E-Learning Developers
If you go looking for e-learning accessibility standards, you’ll see a certain four-letter acronym over and over again: WCAG. In this post, we’ll cover what WCAG is, why it’s important, and how you can apply it to your e-learning. What Is WCAG? Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a set of standards for making web content, including e-learning courses published to the web, more accessible. Learn more about accessibility in this article: What Is Accessible E-Learning? Unlike Section 508, which is part of a U.S. law, WCAG standards are optional best practices maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization focused on developing open web standards. While not a requirement, WCAG is an important tool for e-learning developers who want to build accessible courses. That seems simple enough, right? But things can get tricky when you start digging into WCAG documentation. In addition to this lengthy document that lays out the WCAG 2.0 standards, there’s another, equally lengthy document to help explain WCAG 2.1 standards! At a high level, WCAG has four sections: the principles of accessible design, the guidelines themselves, success criteria for levels of conformance, and specific implementation techniques. Let’s take a closer look. Accessibility Principles & Guidelines According to WCAG documentation, accessible web content follows four principles: it’s perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Twelve guidelines fall under these four principles—each with their own subguidelines. Here’s how each of these principles applies to e-learning, as well as a sample of some relevant guidelines that fall into each category. Perceivable Learners need to be able to access the information that’s presented. All parts of your course should be available to them regardless of their ability to see, hear, or touch. Guidelines for making your e-learning more perceivable include: adding alt-text to images, buttons, and other objects in your course making sure color is not the only visual means of communicating information providing learners with the ability to resize text Operable Learners need to be able to perform all of the actions required of them in the course. Guidelines for making your e-learning more operable include: providing keyboard-only navigation options giving learners the option to skip timed exercises making it possible to navigate your course in multiple ways avoiding course design elements that might cause seizures, such as flashing lights using section headings to organize content Understandable Learners need to be able to understand both the content of the course and how to navigate the user interface. Guidelines for making your e-learning more understandable include: making it possible for screen readers to determine the language used in your course providing learners with good instructions when requesting their input building consistent navigation and identification throughout your course Robust Course content must make sense to assistive technologies such as screen readers. Guidelines for making your e-learning more robust include: publishing courses to well-formatted HTML output assigning names, roles, and values to all elements in your course Conformance Levels Each of the WCAG guidelines, such as the ones listed above, is organized into one of three levels: A, AA, or AAA. It’s a common misunderstanding that Level A guidelines are “good,” Level AA guidelines are “better,” and Level AAA guidelines are “the best”; in reality, it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The WCAG level system accounts for all the factors one might consider when prioritizing the list of guidelines, including their goals and any logistical, technical, and resource limitations they might have. Here’s how to think about the guidelines at each level. Level A Guidelines This is the low-hanging fruit. As a best practice, all of your e-learning should meet Level A guidelines. These guidelines are easy to implement, and doing so makes your e-learning accessible to a broad range of folks in different demographics. It’s a win-win! Level AA Guidelines These are more specialized, and trickier to implement. Applying these guidelines affects a smaller group, but the changes have a big impact on those individuals. You should strive to make your e-learning meet Level AA guidelines as much as you’re able. Level AAA Guidelines These can be tough (and sometimes expensive!) to implement, and the changes impact a very specific group. Whether you decide to follow Level AAA guidelines really depends on the needs of your learners and organization. How Can I Build WCAG-Compliant E-Learning with Articulate 360 Apps? When you understand which guidelines are important to implement, it’s easy to make your Storyline 360 and Studio 360 courses WCAG compliant. And to make it even easier, we created these helpful resources that walk you through the some best practices: Storyline 360: How to Design an Accessible Course Rise 360: How to Design an Accessible Course And if you want to dig into the details of how our apps meet WCAG requirements at the A and AA levels, check out these resources: Storyline 360: Accessibility Conformance Report Rise 360: Accessibility Conformance Report All of these authoring apps are available with a subscription to Articulate 360. You can read our Articulate 360 accessibility FAQs for more details. More Resources Want to deepen your understanding of WCAG even further? Check out these helpful resources: W3.org: WCAG 4 Principles Karl Grove: Understanding WCAG Level Articulate: 6 Best Practices for Designing Accessible E-Learning And remember to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and come back to E-Learning Heroes for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Getting Started with Articulate Studio
If you’re new to Articulate Studio ’13, this quick-start guide is for you. It’ll help you ramp up on core features, so you can begin turning your PowerPoint content into e-learning courses. You’ll learn how to: Create your first e-learning project, right in PowerPoint Make your slides more engaging with multimedia Quickly create cool interactions Show your learners what they need to know with simple screencasting tools Add effective quizzes and knowledge checks Publish your course to web or mobileThe Secret to LMS Debugging
Unraveling the chatter between your learning management system (LMS) and the content you’ve produced in your authoring app can be frustrating. What should you do when learners do one thing but the LMS says they’ve done something else? How do you handle it when the score or status isn’t recorded as you’d expect or when the course doesn’t suspend or resume the way you’d like? An important first step is to test your project in SCORM Cloud, but what should you do when your course works properly in SCORM Cloud but not in your LMS? That’s where LMS debug mode comes in! It’s an easy way to see exactly what your AICC, SCORM, or cmi5 content is sending to the LMS and how the LMS is responding. By default, LMS debug mode is disabled in your published output, but it’s easy to turn on. In this article, we’ll walk you through that process step by step. If you prefer, you can watch this video instead: Step 1: Locate Your Published scormdriver.js File First, publish your course in cmi5, SCORM, or AICC format (this debug process does not work for xAPI/Tin Can API). If you’re using Storyline 360, Presenter 360, Quizmaker 360, or Engage 360, the next thing you’ll do is click Open in the publish success window. From there, double-click on the lms folder. If you’re using Rise 360, export your Rise 360 course as a cmi5, SCORM, or AICC package and save it to your computer. From there, extract the zip file containing your course and open the scormdriver folder. From there, no matter which app you’re using, you’ll want to find the scormdriver.js file. Step 2: Enable Debug Mode Open the scormdriver.js file in a text editor, such as Notepad, and locate the following line: var SHOW_DEBUG_ON_LAUNCH = false; Replace the word false with the word true, as shown in the screenshot below: Then, save and close the scormdriver.js file. Step 3: Zip Your Content and Upload It to Your LMS Next you’ll need to zip your file so you can upload it to your LMS. If you created your course in Storyline 360, Presenter 360, Quizmaker 360, or Engage 360, simply go back to the publish success window and click the Zip button. This creates a zipped file of the published output in the same location where you published your course. If you created your course in Rise 360, you’ll need to do this manually. To do that, go back to the top-level folder of the published output and zip the files. Make sure not to zip the folder that contains your course, just the course files. Once you’ve zipped your file, upload it to your LMS. Step 4: Launch Your Course and Save the Debug Log When you launch the content in your LMS, it’ll open in one window, and the debug log will open in another. After reproducing the issue you’re troubleshooting, copy and paste the text from the debug window into a document for further investigation. Step 5: Review the Debug Log Your LMS provider is most qualified to interpret the contents of your debug log, so we recommend opening a support case with them. However, if you’re familiar with AICC, SCORM, or cmi5, feel free to take a look at the log. Sometimes an issue is obvious and jumps off the page. If neither you nor your LMS provider is able to spot the cause of the problem, submit a case to our support team and we’ll take a look. Be sure to include a copy of your project file so we can try to reproduce the problem. Need more help troubleshooting your LMS? Check out these other resources: How to Troubleshoot Your LMS with SCORM Cloud Learning More About Your LMS: Suspend Data and Resume Behavior Want to avoid the hassle of course and LMS miscommunications? Try out Reach 360—our frictionless LMS. It’s integrated with Articulate 360 apps, so you can publish directly and be confident that everything will work as expected. It’s fast and hassle-free!
