Using Articulate Storyline to create Learning Hub resources There are many short, well-‐produced video tutorials and ‘how-‐to’ guides available here1 and from the start-‐up screen of Storyline. There are also lots of forums and templates on http://community.articulate.com . This document does not aim to replicate this guidance; rather to highlight the features of Storyline most likely to be useful to you.
Articulate Storyline licences The Learning Hub has a limited number of Articulate Storyline licenses, which we are pleased to be able to loan to help you develop resources on a four-‐monthly basis. In order to ensure we are complying with our license terms: 1.
We need to record the IP address of the computer it is installed in. (Google what is my IP address) and computer name (click on computer at bottom of window). If you can’t get to the computer name please liaise with IT helpdesk.
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Each license can only be used on one computer. Please do not distribute the license key.
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The license will need to be deactivated after four months. (We are happy to extend the license for an additional four months if it is still required. For longer term use, we can help you obtain discounted licenses on a shared plan.)
Finding your way around in Storyline If you are confident creating slides in PowerPoint, you are likely to find Storyline easy to use. Articulate’s ‘Getting Started’ video provides a visual tour of the following information.
Similarities to PowerPoint
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A Storyline ‘scene’ works much like a PowerPoint presentation, with thumbnails of each slide visible down the right hand side.
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Instead of PowerPoint’s ‘slide sorter’ view where all slides are shown in order, Storyline offers ‘story view’ – a map of how the slides connect. In simple linear scenes, this will just be a long column, but it’s a useful way of visualising branching pathways if you add these.
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The Home tab replicates most of the functions in PowerPoint’s home tab: adding slides, editing text and objects.
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The Insert tab allows you to insert text boxes, illustrations and various multimedia like PowerPoint, but also characters, interactive objects and embedded webpages.
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The Animations tab covers both object animations and slide transitions.
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The Notes pane beneath the slide can be used to write explanatory notes and queries to other people involved in working on the project. They can be included beneath each slide image when publishing the project as a Word file. However, the notes can also be made visible to end users alongside the final resource. This is a useful place to put a transcript of any audio included in the slide, to improve the resource’s accessibility.
http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/getting-started-with-articulate-storyline.aspx 1
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Key differences to be aware of There are several useful features/concepts that you probably haven’t seen in PowerPoint, which Articulate makes good use of: 1. Timeline: This can be used to organise how long each object on the slide appears for – it provides an easy way to coordinate visual and audio elements. 2. Layers: Instead of making single objects appear and disappear, it may be easier to switch between different layers of the slide. These work in a similar way to Photoshop layers – you can control whether they are completely hidden when inactive, or merely dimmed. 3. Triggers: These are the key source of interactivity – you specify (a) what you want to happen, and (b) when you want it to happen. It’s possible for one condition to trigger several simultaneous actions. 4. States: Any object can have multiple ‘states’, and triggers are needed to control when it switches state. Certain objects (characters and buttons) come with pre-‐loaded ‘states’ to make use of.
Starting a new project ‘New slide’ will give you a choice of template designs, layouts, recording options & import options. However, we have already developed a simple clean template style for the Learning Hub, which we would encourage you to use. The Learning Technologist will send you a copy. Please open this to start a new scene in the Learning Hub style.
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Planning your resource It’s very important to design your resource before you start creating it to avoid investing time on slides that you end up not including. You will probably have already discussed your plans with the Learning Technologist and other colleagues by the time you start working with Storyline. If not, please set up an appointment. Think about how your users might want to learn and what kind of resource would appeal most to them – would they prefer to sit back and watch an attractive presentation, or to take control and actively seek information, skimming for what they need? How would you like them to behave differently after using your resource? Are there opportunities you could add for them to practice skills or decision-‐making?
Importing slides from Powerpoint (see Articulate’s video) If you are adapting existing teaching material, you may want to import a PowerPoint presentation or just selected slides. In this case, you will need to convert them to the Learning Hub style before importing them into Storyline. The Learning Technologist will send you a PowerPoint style template. It is a simple process to open the template and them import the desired slides from your existing presentation – please contact the Learning Technologist if you would like any help. If your PowerPoint presentation contained any hyperlinks to other slides, Storyline should automatically convert these to triggers to form a branching scene. Hyperlinked shapes will act as buttons (see p.5).
Viewing your work Once you start adding items to a slide, particularly if there is interaction or several items in succession, you will want to see how the end-‐user will view your slide. A preview button is available on the right-‐hand side of all the tabs. Click the arrow below it to choose to just view the particular slide/scene you’re working on.
Presenting material in Storyline Static slide content Creating and editing text and images is very much like working in PowerPoint, with many pre-‐set formatting options to help save time. However, if you are not familiar with PowerPoint, there are many useful tips for these functions in Storyline here . You can also include the following objects in Storyline: • • •
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Characters – both illustrated and photographic, including medical characters. Each character is available in different poses and expressions and can be cropped and resized. Speech or thought bubbles – choose from pre-‐set formats and reformat easily. Screen shots – Storyline will take a screenshot of any other window open on your desktop. Use the ‘screen clipping’ function to select just the section you want, or use the cropping tool on the Format tab. See the screenshots tutorial. You can put text and images in a scrolling panel if there is too much to appear in one screen. However, it’s best to keep text short, where possible.
A note about copyright! Please remember that images found in Google searches are copyrighted and need permission to reuse. If you need help sourcing images, please discuss this with the Learning Technologist. King’s Health Partners have some stock photographs. There are also many sources of free ‘clip art’, including http://www.clker.com/, and it’s possible to do a modified search for these on Google images.
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A note about Characters: We have access to a few medical and plain clothes photographic and cartoon characters. However, your audience needs to be considered carefully as some people are likely to find the characters engaging and fun, while for others they may appear cheesy and alienating.
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Audio: it’s easy to either add pre-‐recorded audio clips or record a narration within Storyline. o The program helps you time your narration to fit any slide animation, and can display any text in the Notes beneath the slides as a narration script – see the tutorial. o Stock sound effects may be useful as feedback for quiz exercises. There are some free sites or please contact the Learning Technologist if you would like to use any of these: http://library.elearningtemplates.com/search-‐78
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Video: the Storyline video editor is very limited and it’s best to edit video clips in another program before adding them to your resource. Please contact the Learning Technologist if you would like advice on which one to use. o Ideal video format: mp4 files (if available) in the highest resolution possible – we may convert to lower resolution to reduce file sizes, but a high quality archive is useful. o Storyline compresses all videos to a very low quality when it publishes a resource, but it’s possible to substitute better quality versions into the final resource.
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Screen recording is probably only useful to demonstrate how to use a particular computer program or website. Storyline can also embed active web pages within slides, but these are slow to load – a hyperlink may be better.
Copyright reminder! You need permission to use any multimedia you didn’t create, incl. websites.
Pacing presentation of material within a slide You may not want everything on a slide to appear at the same time if there is a lot of material: • You can add animations to transition items in and out of the slide, just like PowerPoint –it’s best to keep these simple. • If you animate a text box by first level paragraph, text will appear one paragraph at a time. • You can zoom into a particular region (or regions) of an image if you want to start with the big picture then direct users’ attention to a specific point (see tutorial). The timeline allows you to adjust the timing of the above changes and to coordinate audio and visual items. This tutorial will walk you through how the timeline works. • It helps to rename items to keep track of them and to assign any interactivity to them • Objects in the slide foreground will appear towards the top of the timeline; reordering rows in the timeline will move the objects ‘backwards’ or ‘forwards’ within the slide • Press ‘c’ while audio/video is playing to add a timeline cue to synchronise other items to. These pacing features will help break down complicated material into smaller chunks for viewers to take in. It’s worth including a ‘seek bar’ in the Storyline player so that users can jump ahead within a slide if revisiting to check a particular part. Alternatively, you can allow users to control the pace and order of material using the interaction features explained below.
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Creating interactivity in Storyline Markers are a valuable tool for allowing users to explore an image, whether this is a photograph of equipment, an anatomy diagram, a form or charts. See tutorial. • Icons are animated by a swirl to indicate they are interactive; you can change this to a pulse.
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An icon’s label appears when the user hovers over the icon, and the full label text appears when the user clicks on the icon. Images or video can be included in the label, or audio can be used instead of a visual label.
Buttons enable users to make choices. Chose from clickable buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons:
Buttons are pre-‐set to change appearance when clicked; they can also differ when hovered over, held down or already visited. • Any object can behave like a button; use the format painter to copy formatting from a button to another object/button. • Several radio buttons will act as a ‘set’, meaning users can only choose one. You can group other buttons into multiple sets per slide. Add a trigger to control the consequences of pressing a button. E.g.: • Buttons can give users choice over navigation between slides • A set of buttons and a display pane can be used to present multiple materials on one slide, i.e. the user selects the order and pace they view the material. See tutorial and these examples for inspiration. • In interactive scenarios, buttons might trigger feedback on choices (e.g. written feedback in a slide layer and/or audio feedback and/or a character’s expression changing) or move the user to one of several possible results slides (i.e. a branching scenario). •
Hotspots respond when the user hovers or clicks there, or drags another item to that spot. See tutorial.
Quiz questions can be added by inserting a new slide and choosing from various simple quiz options However, this route seems to have limited formatting options. You can create more attractive tests by creating your own buttons or other items for the user to select or move to show their choices, then converting to ‘freeform’ quizzes, including selection questions, hotspots and drag and drop. A customisable results slide can be inserted to give users feedback on their overall score. Tutorial. A note about quizzes! Storyline is best used to create self-‐test quizzes – it may not be possible to extract users’ answers to review them. Storyline will just record one score per project. Variables are data entry fields that capture text or numbers entered in one slide for use in other slides if you insert a ‘reference’ to that variable, e.g. to personalise a quiz results page. Variables can also be used to record users’ actions or set up more complicated interactive scenarios. See the list of tutorials on variables or contact the Learning Technologist to discuss what you’d like to achieve. They can be used to: • control a user’s pathway through a branched scenario based on an earlier choice • record whether a particular slide was viewed or how many they viewed (by adding a true/false variable to the ‘next’ button’ on the previous slide) • set up a simulation where a users’ actions adjust a number, e.g. administering treatments to affect a patient’s measurements (can adjust the number by simple addition, subtraction, multiplication or division using a ‘counter’ variable).
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How your resource will be viewed Navigation between slides This can be adjusted for individual slides or controlled for multiple slides via the story view. • In most cases, it’s best to allow users to control their own progression through the resource (set slides to advance ‘by user’). • Consider how slides should behave if users revisit them. The default settings are for any audio or simple presentations to restart from the beginning, but this could be altered, e.g. to return to the point in a video the user last viewed. The default is for any interaction to be remembered, e.g. quiz questions completed or buttons selected.
The Storyline Player We use the following standard design for all Learning Hub resources. Note that: • the table of contents lists scene titles and then slide titles • a transcript can be included in the ‘Notes’ field • ‘Resources’ (top right corner) can be used to supply relevant files for users to download, or websites to visit. You may want to customise certain aspects: • additional tabs can be added to the left side-‐bar, and they can be renamed • the ‘prev’ and ‘next’ navigation buttons can be deactivated on selected slides (e.g. if you want user to answer a question before progressing or to record they viewed the slide) • the volume button and seek bar can be removed if there is no audio/paced material.
Sharing drafts for feedback You can simply send the ‘.story’ file to the Learning Technologist for feedback. However, if you want to share the material with people who don’t have Articulate, you can publish the file as a Word document containing screenshots of each slide and any notes. Alternatively, the Learning Technologist could host an active version in a private ‘sandbox’ area of the Learning Hub and give selected people access.