Articulate - Word of Mouth Blog

Let the Community Help You Brave the Toughest E-learning Challenges

david — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:53:19 +0000

Designing great e-learning isn’t always easy. A lot of things can influence how your project goes. Sometimes it’s too many reviewers, hiring voiceover talent or deciding the right type of course to build. Whatever the challenge, the Articulate Community has all kinds of tips and resources to give you the help—and courage—you need to build better e-learning projects.

Check out the lion’s share of helpful stuff your fellow Articulate users shared during the past week:

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

Seen on Twitter:

20 Tips to Help You Get a Handle on Building Better E-learning

david — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:34:19 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

Once again, it was another big week of e-learning goodness in the Articulate community. Articulate Storyline launched two weeks ago and already the Articulate community is sharing ideas, source files and tutorials for learning Storyline. If you haven’t already downloaded the free trial, now’s a good time!

How do you get started? First, download the free trial. Then, check out the getting started tutorials. We have a new forum dedicated to Storyline questions and a new downloads area where you can grab free interaction templates. New templates are added weekly, so check in often!

In case you’re wondering about Storyline pricing, especially if you already own Articulate Studio, there’s some great info in this thread. Take a look below for some of the highlights the community shared over the past week:

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

The Next Generation of E-Learning

Seen on Twitter:

Grow Your E-learning Muscles with These Tips from the Articulate Community

david — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:52:05 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

We’re in Denver this week for ASTD 2012 International Conference & Exposition. The team is hosting live, mini-sessions each day at our booth (#730). You can even get a sneak peek of our upcoming Articulate Studio ’12.

There’s even more big news: Articulate Storyline is now available! That’s right! You can now download a fully functional, 30-day trial of Articulate Storyline. Learn more about Articulate Storyline’s features and then head over to the showcase to see those features in action.

We added some Getting Started tutorials and screencasts, a new forum and some free interaction templates to help you get the most out of Storyline. In typical Articulate Community fashion, folks are already exchanging source files, answering questions and sharing published examples.

Have a great week, Heroes!

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

Seen on Twitter:

Articulate Storyline Available Now

Lucy — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:09:13 +0000

We’ve launched two amazing new products: Articulate Storyline and Articulate Mobile Player.

Hailed by industry luminaries such as former Adobe evangelist R.J. Jacquez as “game-changing,” Articulate Storyline is the first e-learning authoring software that’s simple enough for beginners and powerful enough for experts. So, as your skills grow, Storyline grows with you. Storyline makes it easier than ever to build interactivity, create software simulations, and assess learners any way you want. Check out these great examples of Storyline content to get an idea of what’s possible.

Once your course is done, you can publish content with a single click to multiple formats so learners can view it on their iPads, desktops, Android devices, and more. If you want learners to have the best possible viewing experience on the iPad, you simply publish your courses to Articulate Mobile Player. It’s a free iPad app that beautifully displays content created in Storyline. Articulate Mobile Player includes full-screen playback and gesture support, so learners simply tap, swipe, and pinch to interact with multimedia content, including full-motion video and software simulations.

More about Articulate Storyline:

Using Gamification To Transform Your Learners from Angry Birds into Learning Ninjas

jeanette — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:00:08 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks and is one of several stops on the Gamification blog book tour.

Have you been hearing the word “gamification” at conferences and webinars lately? Me too! And the people saying it aren’t just the ones sitting around playing Doodlejump or Words With Friends.

I often talk with course developers in the e-learning community who are asking important questions about gamification, like: Do learners really benefit from games? Can games improve my learners’ skills or recall? Or is gamification just another fad that costs money and time but doesn’t impact a course’s learning outcomes?

Karl Kapp’s new book, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, unpacks those questions. He gave us a sneak-peek at the book just before it was released last month, and it’s definitely a worthy read if you’re involved in designing or building e-learning courses.

As I was noodling over the concepts Karl shares, three big things stood out to me like an Angry Bird playing Minecraft on the Wii Fit Island:

It’s not just about points, levels, and leaderboards

Most people think of games as trivial activities involving stuff like Mario badges or pesky Farmville requests. If that’s the case for you, Karl’s book will give you some great new ideas for how to effectively incorporate gaming principles into your courses.

He explains that gamification involves crafting an experience where a player engages in a challenge and uses interactivity and dynamic feedback to make decisions and work toward a specific outcome.

Sounds like a great model for interactive courseware! It’s a lot like the 3C concept we use to teach interactive e-learning—where you present a challenge, the learner makes choices, and the choices produce consequences.

Gamification is a natural progression in the evolution of learning

If you think about the evolution of learning, it makes perfect sense that gamification is the new big thing.

I’m sure some of you (I’m not naming names) were around back in the day when almost all formal learning was delivered in a classroom, lecture-style. The learning was pretty passive, right? Then things shifted: training started moving away from the “sage on a stage” model, toward more interactive, engaging classroom activities—not just because they were fun, but because they made learning stick.

When e-learning came on the scene, it evolved in kind of the same way. For most course authors, the initial goal was just to digitize a whole bunch of content and get it online. So at first, most courses were very static (and yes, boring) click-and-read type experiences. Then software like Articulate Studio started putting easier and richer authoring tools in designers’ hands, and we saw things turn more explorable and learner-driven. Tom Kuhlmann calls this progression “the Rapid E-Learning Story.”

And now we’re seeing an even deeper dive into engagement: gamified courses which allow learners to practice and problem-solve as they strive toward goals and achieve rewards based on how they perform.

Click to explore the infographic (yep, it works on an iPad too)

Gamifying your content doesn’t mean you have to become a programmer or blow your budget

If you’re anything like me, one of your eyebrows just went up a little bit and you’re probably thinking,”Pfft! Sure, gamification sounds like a nice idea, but I have no programming skills and almost nothing left in my pint-sized budget.”

I’m right there with you! But hold on—being a non-programmer and having a small budget doesn’t disqualify you from leveraging gamification in your courses.

Granted, if you’re shooting for the e-learning equivalent of Halo or World Of Warcraft, you might need a crew of experts and a fair bit of money. In fact, Karl’s book talks of how some companies hire a small army—instructional designers, artists, programmers, animators, sound technicians, and so on—to produce gamified content. But a team like that comes with a price tag that’s pretty unrealistic for most of the learning professionals I know (many of whom have to jump through hoops just to get approval to buy 20 bucks’ worth of stock clip art).

So here’s the good news: It is within your reach to create gamified content that builds curiosity and engagement among your learners, and you don’t need a trainload of money or a multi-month production schedule to do it. All you need are the right tools and the support of a creative, imaginative community where you can learn and share ideas.

Case in point: We’re currently wrapping up beta testing of our new authoring tool, Articulate Storyline. With the help of an amazing team of beta testers from all over the world, many of whom work solo or in small-to-medium-sized learning departments, we kicked the tires on new and intuitive interactivity features, like triggers, variables, drag-and-drop interactions, slide layers, object states, simulations, hotspots, click-and-reveal effects, and more. These simple but powerful tools, created specifically for non-programmers like me, make it easier than ever for anyone to build rich, engaging interactions.

A few examples of what’s possible

Here are three examples of what I mean (all of these are viewable on an iPad, by the way).

This little Hangman game was one of the very first Storyline beta projects that I built soon after we began testing the product internally. It’s a simple interaction that responds to the learner based on their letter choices, and provides feedback and visual progress indicators along the way. I know, I know, games like Hangman aren’t necessarily the right fit for every e-learning course! I get that. The point is, this project was a fun and simple way to experience the power and ease of tools like variables, object states, and slide layers—and the exact same logic and tools can be used in the same way to build more complex and context-relevant games. The amazing this is, I know as much about programming as my cat knows about nuclear physics, but I was able to sit down and produce this fun little game from scratch in less than an hour. Picking the font and the artwork took longer than actually building the interaction.

Here’s another fun example, and although it’s a step up from Hangman in terms of interactivity, it was just as easy to build. And it includes similar gamified concepts: it presents learners with a challenge or task, provides feedback to guide their choices, and ultimately rewards them for completing the task or achieving the goal. My kids helped me build this one, and it made me think how powerful it would be if educators incorporated game-building as part of the learning process with their students. Trust me, my kids would never have gotten this fired up over a healthy green drink containing spinach, if I had just asked them to read some stuff or watch a video about it!

One more example for you. The Broken Co-Worker is one of my favorites from among the projects that our Storyline beta users created. You might’ve seen it recently when Tom featured it on the Rapid E-Learning Blog. What a great example of an immersive, gamified scenario! Ryan Martin and Anna Sabramowicz put a humorous twist on a serious subject, where learners are required to navigate through a series of challenging sexual-harassment situations. The result is a totally engaging, effective learning experience. It sure beats a typical information-based course where learners just read or listen to a bunch of guidelines or anti-harassment policies, don’t you think?

When Storyline launches, we’ll be showcasing even more great examples. We’re really excited about how this new tool puts gamification within easy reach of any e-learning developer. It opens up all sorts of new ways to give your learners problem-solving challenges, customized feedback based on intelligent variables, and multiple learning paths as they strive toward a goal—and these are the kinds of things that can quickly and easily take your course’s engagement level up a notch (or ten).

Ready to get your game on?

Gamification is around to stay, and it opens up powerful new opportunities to reach your learners. It’s still a new concept for most course designers, and there’s a lot to think about when you’re considering how best to apply gaming principles to a particular course. It’ll be fun to see where gamification takes the learning industry next!

Karl’s book is a great place to get acquainted with the essentials, and you can also check out what your virtual colleagues are saying about the book by checking out the other stops on his blog book tour.

When you’re ready to think about how to gamify your own courses, or if you just want to talk more about what gamification could look like in e-learning, jump into the community forums to learn and share with other e-learning designers. It’s an easy (and free) way to get friendly, constructive, meaningful feedback and inspiration.

Thanks Karl, for including us on the blog book tour—and also for raising an important topic that’ll help all of us rethink the way we engage our learners.

Game on, course developers!

Make a Splash with These Tips from the Articulate Community

david — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:10:49 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

Sometimes, e-learning designers are so busy building courses that they forget to take the time to discover techniques that could help them work faster and more creatively. That’s where the Articulate community is so valuable. Whether you’re looking for design inspiration, technical assistance or just want to test the waters with some other e-learning designers, you’ll find helpful experts ready to share their expertise.

Check out all the cool stuff the Articulate community shared last week:

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

Seen on Twitter:

Join us in Denver for ASTD 2012

gabe — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:00:55 +0000

The ASTD 2012 International Conference & Exposition is a premier event for workplace learning and development professionals, and it’s coming up soon — May 6-9, 2012 in Denver, Colorado. We’ll be there in full force.

In addition to ongoing demos and answering any questions that you may have about all things Articulate, the Articulate Community team will be hosting a number of live rapid e-learning tutorials at our Booth #730. The lineup includes a preview of our upcoming Articulate Studio ‘12 by Articulate CTO, Arlyn Asch.

We’ll also be featuring Articulate Storyline. In case you missed it, check out the recording of the recent webinar on Storyline by Tom Kuhlmann.

Be sure to say hi to the Articulate team headed to Denver:

We’ll look forward to seeing you there!

Did you know that you can keep up on all the latest Articulate events in our calendar or on our Facebook page?

17 Tips for Rocking Out Your Next E-learning Gig

david — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:42:49 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

If you’re looking to move your e-learning projects from opening act to the main event, then you should check out E-learning Heroes. Every week the Articulate community shares all kinds of tips, tricks and riffs to help you build better courses. It doesn’t matter what types of courses you’re building—read-only, comic-style, or branching—your fellow Articulate users will help you design courses that will leave learners cheering for encores. Check out the set list below for all the helpful tips and insights shared over the past week.

Rock on, E-learning Heroes!

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

5 PowerPoint E-Learning Tips & A Free Template

Seen on Twitter:

20 E-learning Tips to Transition Your Courses from Zero to Hero

david — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:30:17 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

Do you remember the first course you built? Whether it was last week or ten years ago, chances are you went about things a little differently on the next course.

That’s the great thing about about e-learning: no matter how much you learn, there’s always something new to discover. And that’s what E-learning Heroes is all about. Each week the Articulate community shares the best tips, tricks, and insights that will help you design better e-learning.

This week, Tom and David are in Virginia. Tuesday (4/17) we’re presenting a full-day workshop on rapid e-learning and interactivity. Wednesday (4/18), we’re hosting a free Articulate jam session. Jam sessions are informal meet-ups where you can ask questions, receive feedback on your projects and even get a sneak peek of Storyline.

Enoy your week, E-learning Heroes!

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

Here’s a Simple Screencasting Tip That Will Save Time & Frustration

Seen on Twitter:

Tips & Tricks to Help You Get Into the Full Swing of E-learning

david — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:00:31 +0000

This blog post is by Articulate Community Manager David Anderson.

In tennis, “no man’s land” is referred to the area between the baseline and service line—the most vulnerable court position for a player. Sometimes e-learning designers get caught between a great idea—scenario, activity, or interaction–and little time to execute. That’s why preparation and practice is so important.

How do you prepare for e-learning? One way is to know your resources. Resources include templates, storyboards, graphics and a supportive community.

How do you practice e-learning? Share a scenario, template or graphics idea and ask the community for feedback. You’ll get helpful and constructive feedback from the industry’s best E-learning Heroes.

If you need to work on some new shots or simply want to practice the basics, the Articulate community is ready to help you ace your next project. Check out the winning shots from last week:

Notable tutorials:

Conversations in the community:

New blog posts:

You Need to Know These Seven Tips If You Build Graphics for E-Learning

Seen on Twitter: