Quizmaker is a great tool for quickly adding surveys and assessments to your e-learning courses. In fact, Quizmaker’s form-based approach is so quick and easy, users often forget to explore the most powerful area of Quizmaker: Slide View.

Slide View is an e-learning designer’s best friend. It offers a blank slide approach to designing surveys and quizzes. In Slide View there’s even a timeline for animating and personalizing feedback. Slide View also includes layers so you can arrange your elements for visual hierarchy and stacking order.

Here are three Quizmaker projects designed to help you get the most out of this awesome quizzing tool.

Quizmaker as a storytelling tool

Sometimes you need your learners in the moment before they can perform their best. As e-learning designers, we can leverage multimedia storytelling techniques to set up our learning scenarios. And that’s where Quizmaker’s timeline really shines!

Combining Quizmaker’s timeline with ambient audio and dramatic imagery, you can effectively design a learning scenario’s back-story to set up your assessment questions:

View this screencast at Screenr
Join the conversation and download the source files

A few more ideas for storytelling with quizzes:

• Safety training. How about an opening scenario depicting a recent or near-accident at your facility? Using background, ambient audio, images of case files and even accident reports, you could create an engaging intro recreating the event.
• Legal training. Open your quiz with a court proceeding and slowly fade legal folders with news clippings into your slide. After several moments fade to black with audio playing “Guilty” before proceeding to your quiz.
• Leadership or performance management. Begin with a document on a desk. A hand animates over the paper to simulate writing. After a few moments it’s revealed the person is writing her resignation letter. Next her bullet list of reasons for leaving are revealed, followed by a provocative headline introducing the importance of feedback and coaching.

Quizmaker as a creative feedback tool

Quizmaker’s form-based feedback option makes giving feedback quick and easy. But there are times when a more personalized approach will make your quizzes more meaningful. This is where you can use Quizmaker’s branching feature along with Blank Slides to customize your quiz’s feedback slides.

Finally, multiple choice radio buttons, creatively applied to graphics, can be used to further customize the visual designs of your quizzes:

View this screencast at Screenr
Join the conversation and download the source files

Quizmaker as a flashcard tool

Flashcards are popular ways for skill and drill assessments. Although Engage offers a Flashcard interaction, there are times when you’ll want more options for customizing your quizzes.

A fill-in-the-blank question, combined with some images and the flexibility of the timeline, offers a great way to simulate flash cards:

View this screencast at Screenr
Join the conversation and download the source files

On your own

Hopefully you have a few new ides for using Quizmaker. Are you already using Quizmaker in out-of-the-box ways? Please consider sharing your examples or ideas in the Community Forums.

Being a great e-learning developer also means being a great project manager. The entire process from concept to evaluation can take many turns and can become overwhelming at times. And if you ask a dozen people how they set up and manage their e-learning projects, you’ll probably get a dozen different answers. But the important thing is to have a method in mind before you begin.

Over time, I’ve tweaked and adjusted my own process into a method that works for me. I’ve come to rely on six key practices to help ensure a smooth development cycle. I’d like to share them with you.

1. Decide How You’ll Manage Your Assets & Files

I consider this the most valuable tip of all. It used to be that whenever I’d receive documents, images, or other assets, in a hurry I’d save them off to some directory “I won’t forget” — but then later I’d have a hard time finding what I needed. Now, the first thing I do for any project is set up my folder structure so that I can keep everything well organized. Here’s a little bit about how I use folders to manage my project assets:

View this screencast at Screenr

2. Storyboard the Project

In PowerPoint, your list of slides is displayed vertically in a linear fashion on the left edge of the screen. For click-&-read courses this is fine. But for scenario-based or branching courses I find it best to build a visual storyboard before building my slides. My storyboards look a lot like flowcharts. I build them on a blank PowerPoint slide, using slide thumbnails that I’ve created by screen-capturing slide mockups in PowerPoint’s slide sorter view.

Here’s a sample of a storyboard I built for a branching course:

Once I build the storyboard on a blank PowerPoint slide, I save the file as storyboard_projectname. Then I immediately save a second copy, with just the project name. In that second file, I begin building my slides. The storyboard slide stays in the file as a reference during development. Later, once my slides are built and everything’s in place, I can delete the storyboard slide, knowing that I still have the original storyboard_projectname file on hand, in case I ever need to refer back to it.

There are lots of benefits to using a storyboard. First, it’s a great way to visually plan how the navigation works, and it’ll quickly show where there are bottlenecks or dead ends. Second, when I’m presenting a course design to SMEs or other stakeholders, doing it this way is intuitive, looks professional, and makes it easy for them to see how their course will function. You can even bring the slide up on a screen in a meeting and have a collaborative process of moving, adding, and deleting thumbnails until everyone is happy.

3. Decide on a Theme

Determining a theme for your course in advance can really help bring unity to its look & feel. I like to choose themes based on an environment or setting that helps convey & support the course content.

In a lot of cases the theme can also be a springboard for the learning scenarios you build into your course. For example, a course that teaches learners how to read a profit & loss statement might use the metaphor of a lemonade stand. This kind of theme can be a simple but fun way to walk learners through the basics of a P&L statement, including concepts like profit, expenses, supplies, equipment, etc.

4. Decide on a Style

Style is important, too. By style, I mean the kinds of images and fonts I choose for my course. These need to work well with the theme. For example, I wouldn’t use Arial Bold and photos of business people in the lemonade stand example. I’d choose a more whimsical, fresh style — like cartoon illustrations and a font that resembles handwriting.

Let your theme help drive the style of the images and fonts you choose. You don’t want your theme and style to seem mismatched, or else they’ll end up distracting the learner rather than enhancing the learning experience. And once you decide on a style, stick with it so that your course feels consistent.

If you’re struggling to find themed images of a particular style, Tom Kuhlmann wrote a helpful blog post last fall about finding styles of clip art in the Microsoft clip art library. And here’s a great post on choosing fonts.

5. Leverage Presenter’s Customizable Player Templates

Another way I’ve optimized my development process is by customizing a library of player templates in Articulate Presenter. This comes in handy because now I can reapply the same look and player functions across multiple courses. And I’ve customized the colors of my player templates too, based on the branding of the different departments I serve. The template shown below on the left is the one I use for new-hire courses. The one on the right is the player template I’ve customized for my company’s Loss Prevention department.

6. Leverage PowerPoint’s Slide Masters

Finally, it’s important to give some thought to how you’ll use slide masters. They’re a great timesaver because they prevent you from having to manually reapply global design elements like backgrounds, logos, and other persistent objects to each of your slides. This not only saves you development time, it speeds up your publishing time, since Presenter only has to process items on the slide masters once, rather than for every slide where they appear.

Below are a couple examples of slide masters that I use for a Loss Prevention module. You might notice that they’re similar to ones that Tom Kuhlmann gave away on the Rapid E-Learning Blog. I used Tom’s files as a starting point and then tweaked them a bit to fit the needs of my course.

Since the course is in two languages, the first master is used as the title slide so that learners can select their language. Once a learner makes their choice, a different set of slide masters carries them through the remainder of the course.

I save each set of master slides with the same name as the Presenter player template that I’ve built to go with them. This makes it easier to find and apply the same look to future courses whenever I need to.

Want to discuss?

I hope these tips help trigger some ideas that’ll help you streamline and improve your own development process, or inspire you in your next project. If you have questions or would like to talk more about what I’ve covered here, feel free to post a thread in the Articulate Community Forums or connect with me on Twitter or my blog. You might also want to review this recent thread where other Articulate users share some of their best practices for workflow.

We’re rounding out our second week of March Madness here on the Word of Mouth blog — a month-long series of tips & insights for Articulate users. And besides all the awesome blog posts, lots of other helpful tips have been surfacing in the Community, too. Check out what’s new this week:

Notable tutorials:

• Easy ways to manipulate & recolor photos

• How to insert your Articulate Presenter course into a WordPress blog

• Here’s a way to use PowerPoint’s pivot animation effect

• Two ways to create scrolling credits in PowerPoint: Tom’s approach | Jason’s approach

• Create a snazzy iPhone metaphor for your rapid e-learning course

Conversations in the Community:

• An example of a cool lockout/tagout course & a discussion about unique uses of video in e-learning

• Discussion of factors to observe when gauging learners’ use of technology

New blog posts:

• Who Should Decide How You Decide?

• 3 Ways to Use Articulate Engage as a Video Player

• 3 Quick Steps to Tracking Users in Articulate Online

• Try These Ideas for Adding Web Content to Your E-Learning

• The Beginner’s Guide to Quizmaker ‘09

Seen on Twitter:

• @onEnterFrame shares his free new Articulate Presenter chromeless skin

• @DarlaWigginton shares a nice example of an Articulate-published course

• @sumeet_moghe tweets about how to spice up linear course navigation

Quizmaker ‘09 is my favorite elearning application. One of the things I like best about it is that if I start in form view, I can create a decent quiz in just a few minutes. But, if I go to slide view, I can pretty much create a unique quiz that doesn’t have that block quiz look. Here are a few cool examples of Quizmaker’s flexibility.

Being able to build quizzes like you see in the examples above is easy because it doesn’t require any programming skills. I like to think of it as building Flash content in PowerPoint comfort. But it does take practice. In this post, we’ll do an informal walk-through of Quizmaker just like we did with Presenter ‘09. At the end of the post, you can download some Quizmaker files so you can break them apart and see how they were built.

Let’s start with a quick orientation of Quizmaker ‘09 (3:29). For a closer look at specific features, check out the tutorials below — they’re organized by the features in the toolbar. The tutorials were recorded in order, but you can jump in and out of them at your leisure.

Creating Quiz Questions

• Question Types: Overview of the different question types and some suggestions for when to use them (5:16)
• How to Create a Quiz Question in Form View: Quickly create a multiple-choice question in form view using the default settings (11:02)
• Overview of Slide View: Explore the features of Quizmaker’s slide view and its freeform authoring environment (7:01)
• Working in Slide View: Learn to modify the quiz question in slide view’s freeform authoring environment (11:56)
• Working with the Timeline: Use the timeline to manage when objects come in and out, and work with layers (10:19)
• Creating a Blank Slide: Create blank slides to augment your quiz and question feedback (7:41)
• Importing Questions: Import questions from previous Quizmaker quizzes, including older versions (5:06)

Managing the Quiz

• Working with Question Groups: Learn to work with question groups and how to create question pools that you can randomize (8:22)
• Editing the Pass & Fail Results Slides: Edit the pass & fail results slides that the learner sees at the end of the quiz (5:39)
• Customizing the Player Templates: Make customizations to the quiz’s player template (8:54)
• Setting Your Quiz Properties: Set your quiz properties, such as default feedback and passing score (1:58)

Preview and Publish

• Preview Quizzes & Surveys: Explore the various preview options for your quizzes and surveys (5:39)
• Publishing Your Quiz: Learn about the various publish options and features (5:26)
• Summary of Quizmaker Tutorials: A quick summary of the tutorials and how to get started with your next quiz (1:38)

Now What?

The quizzes you create in Quizmaker can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. But just like everything else in life, if you want to be good you need to practice. I’d start with some simple quiz questions. Go through the tutorials and practice what you learn. In no time at all, you’ll be creating some really nice quizzes.

Once you’re familiar with Quizmaker and its features, you can explore using it for mini modules and scenarios. To whet your appetite, check out the links below. I’ve also included all of the source files for you to download and break apart. If you don’t have the fonts I used, you’ll have to substitute them with your own.

• Common Question Mistakes: Good examples of animations, using video for questions, using blank slides for feedback. Download here
• Learning & Development Survey: Simple design and animations for this employee satisfaction survey. Download here
• Meet Jim Scenario: Built this in a hotel room right before a conference to show how Quizmaker can be used for elearning scenarios. I did all of the voices, including the woman. Download here

As always, I highly recommend that you:

• Join the user community. It’s free and it’s a great place to get help, quick answers, and learn from other users. Personally, I think the Articulate user community is the best out there.
• Follow the community tutorials. There are a few new ones added each week.
• Sign up for the Rapid E-Learning Blog, where you’ll get practical tips & tricks, and sometimes free assets like templates and fonts.
• Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher have written a very in-depth book that covers the Essential Articulate Studio ‘09, if you want a great reference and resource at your fingertips.

One of the great things about Articulate Presenter ‘09 is that you can easily bring any kind of web content right into your e-learning courses by using Web Objects.

In this article, I’m going to show you three examples of web content you can leverage in your courses, and how to insert them with Presenter.

Add a Google Map

Let’s say your client is a trucking company that’s going to start a new route from Texas to Wisconsin. You want to embed a dynamic Google Map into an e-learning course to show the new route. A Web Object is a nice tool for something like this.

Just go to the Google Maps page, enter your route, and click the Link button. Google will give you both a link and an embed code. The tutorial below shows how to use either of these as a Web Object in your course. As I explain in the tutorial, you can use the link to display the whole page, or you can use the embed code to create an HTML file of just the map itself. Though the second option involves a few more steps, you get the added benefit of being able to fully customize the way the map looks within your slide.

View this screencast at Screenr

Feature a YouTube Video

Another way you can leverage web-based content is by incorporating a YouTube video into your course. Check out the following tutorial, which includes instructions for making a YouTube video appear full-screen on your presentation slide. It just takes a simple tweak to the video’s URL.

View this screencast at Screenr

Add an Interactive PDF with Youblisher

Here’s another useful & free tool that works well for Web Objects. Youblisher will convert an uploaded PDF into a dynamic and interactive document that users can print, zoom, and leaf through. It’s a great solution if you need to include some documentation in your course but you want to make it look and feel a little more interactive. Here’s how to do it:

View this screencast at Screenr

Questions?

If you have questions about Web Objects, or you’d like to talk more about the ideas I’ve shared here, feel free to post a thread in the Articulate Community Forums. I’m there every day and would be happy to help you out. You can also feel free to connect with me on Twitter.

Articulate Online is our version of a Learning Management System — without the usual cost and hassle.

In this article, we’ll explore the three basic steps to start tracking your users’ activity in your Articulate Online account:

1. Create and publish content
2. Set content permissions
3. Distribute content

We’ll explore each of these areas below.

First, though, note that you’ll see references to content in this article. Content refers to any content item in your Articulate Online account created by one of the Articulate authoring tools. It could be a course, a presentation, a quiz, a survey, or an interaction. The rule of thumb that defines a content item: Every time you publish from an Articulate authoring tool, that’s one content item.

A course or presentation created with Articulate Presenter ‘09 can also contain any number of quizzes, surveys, or interactions (the course will count as a single content item). As with publishing for any other LMS, if you prefer to use quiz-based tracking vs. slide-based tracking and your course contains more than one quiz, you must select a single quiz to use for tracking purposes. (That said, there is a work-around for tracking multiple quizzes in the same course.)

1. Create and publish content

The first step to tracking users in Articulate Online is to get some content into your account. To publish content you’ll need to use one of the Articulate authoring tools. You can publish directly to your account from within Presenter, Quizmaker, or Engage, or you can manually upload content to your account.

Here’s a screencast about how to publish content to your account:

2. Set content permissions

The next step for tracking users in your Articulate Online account is to decide whether you want your content to be publicly available — so that anyone with the link can view it — or restricted only to authorized users or groups. (See also: User roles in Articulate Online.)

You can set your content permissions like this:

• Login to your account as an administrator or publisher.
• Click the Content tab and then the name of the content in question.
• Click the Permissions tab for the content and then the Change button to specify Public or Private.
• For Private content, select the Groups and/or Users who can access the content, then click Save.

Jeanette also covers this process in the above screencast.

If your content is public, a login is not required. So if your content is proprietary or not intended for anyone outside your organization to view it, make sure your content permissions are set to Private. Note that the default permission setting in Articulate Online is Public, so make sure you make this change if your material is sensitive.

With public content, you also will not get as detailed tracking capabilities when you run reports on your content since you won’t know who’s viewing the content. One way around this, which some of our customers do for public content that they’d still like to track, is to add a Guestbook in front of the content and require the email address from the user. With this method, you can still track quiz results and more with public content, but if users are sharing a computer, subsequent accesses of the same content from the same computer by different users will appear as the same user — since a local cookie is set on the computer.

If securing your content and ensuring the correct user is viewing it is important to you, be sure to set your content to Private.

Setting your content to Public is great for distributing a marketing presentation or a survey via your website, when it’s not as important to know who exactly is viewing the content, and when it’s not proprietary information.

3. Distribute content

Now that you’ve published your content and set desired permissions, the final step for tracking users in your account is to distribute your content to your users.

Here’s a screencast about the two primary ways users can access private content in your Articulate Online account:

If your content is public, you can still assign it to users in your User Portal or distribute it to users without private accounts by using the Link or Launch Button methods.

And that’s it! After you’ve distributed your content to your users, you’re ready to start tracking results and user progress, which you can do by running any of the available reports. Here’s a primer on running reports in Articulate Online.

Articulate Engage is a great tool for rapidly designing variety and interactivity into your e-learning courses. But did you know three of Engage’s interactions — Process, Timeline and Tabs — are a great way to bundle screencasts in your courses?

Most times, developers use Articulate Presenter to include screencasts in their courses. And for larger screens and fixed sizes, Presenter makes sense. But for smaller, shorter lessons, Engage is another great option for concisely presenting video lessons.

Let’s look at three ways you can use Engage as a video player.

Process Interaction

Most screencasts demonstrate a process. They show learners how to get from a starting point to an end point, usually in less than five minutes.

Engage’s Process interaction is ideal for bundling a series of screencasts into a standalone video player. Below is a screenshot of what the Urban Legends Quizmaker series might look like in an Engage Process interaction.

The numbered process buttons at the bottom indicate the video step, and the process titles enable learners to quickly identify the steps they want to review. Learners click the button corresponding to the video they need to view. It allows them to break their learning into manageable pieces.

Timeline Interaction

The Timeline interaction offers another way to bundle multiple screencasts. Similar to the Process interaction but with a twist: by strategically using different colors for each timeline period, you can creatively group a project’s high-level steps.

For example, the Urban Legends Quiz tutorial comprises eight screencasts. The eight screencasts roll up into three high-level steps:

1. Getting started
2. Animating and Syncing
3. Customizing

We can use the Timeline’s period colors to create three distinct sections, based on those tasks. Depending on the level of technical training you’re designing, you could also align each of the colored periods with your course colors. The color repetition makes a great design element while providing a visual reference for your learners.

Tabs Interaction

Another interaction for bundling videos is the Tabs Interaction. Those big, bold tabs provide a great way to summarize each step with a memorable word or phrase.

If your training is based around a recognizable acronym like S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely) you could use each letter to summarize the step. Not sure my example, C.I.S.T.I.C.F.P., works, but maybe if I repeat it enough it’ll catch on.

On Your Own

Remember, Engage as a video player works best for shorter videos. Take a look at the types of screencasts you’re including in your e-learning courses. Could a mixture of screenshots, written tutorials and screencasts be another way to add variety to your courses?

E-learning is a team sport. The best way to build an all-out winning course is to draw from the advice & expertise of your fellow e-learning developers. And the Articulate Community is the perfect place to do that. There’s always something new being shared around here.

Check out the list below and you’ll see what I mean. These are some highlights of the helpful stuff the Community shared this week.

And stay tuned for much more! This month is March Madness, Articulate-style, on the Word of Mouth blog. We’re featuring all kinds of special posts throughout the month to equip you with lots more tips for building better courses. Subscribe via email or RSS to be sure you don’t miss out.

Notable tutorials:

• Add Articulate-published content to a Google site

• Another way to create a mitred picture-frame effect in PowerPoint

• Save an “in project” Presenter player template so you can use it other courses

• Make your own animated avatars for your e-learning courses, for free

• How to work with multiple slide masters in Quizmaker

• How to set up your PowerPoint environment for rapid e-learning

Conversations in the Community:

• E-learning developers in the Community share their workflow best practices

• See how to build a cool animation from the Pallet Jack demo course (free source files, too!)

• How to work around the 8:53 Flash limitation in published courses

• How long does it take to build a course? Community members share their views

New blog posts:

• Become an E-Learning Pro without Spending a Dime

• Tips for using Articulate tools to build courses for non-English audiences

• The Beginner’s Guide to Presenter ‘09

• 3 Creative Ways to Use Engage Labeled Graphics

• Exercising Your Rapid E-Learning Design Skills

• The Fast Track to Custom E-Learning

• How Dave Mozealous created a Custom Articulate Presenter skin in less than an hour

Seen on Twitter:

• @getadam shares a post by Jeff Hendrickson on how to add Screenr videos to WordPress

• @joe_deegan shares 5 reasons why he decided to buy Articulate Studio

• @slhice shares how she built her website with Articulate tools

It used to be that choosing an e-learning development tool was like choosing between a Yugo or a Ferrari. You could use PowerPoint, which was easy and accessible but had lots of limitations (it was impossible to track with an LMS and hard to distribute online, for starters). Or you could use Flash, which was super-cool but costly, complex, and required special skills to really do things right.

Then came rapid e-learning tools like Articulate Studio. They’re the Honda of e-learning: affordable, stylish, and dependable. The tools make it easy for anyone to quickly turn out high-quality content that’s simple to deploy and LMS-friendly.

So we all stopped driving Yugos and bought Hondas.

Get the performance of a Ferrari and the value of a Honda

The thing is, while rapid e-learning works great, sometimes you might want to add an interaction or feature that’s more complex than the tools allow. This doesn’t mean you have to go sink your money into the Ferrari.

If you have access to a Flash programmer — or if you have Flash skills yourself — you can extend the power of your e-learning courses by plugging in bits of custom Flash in just the places where you need it.

This means we can have the best of both worlds! We’re not limited to choosing between custom and rapid. We can combine the two. It’s like driving that trusty Honda but adding some specialized Ferrari parts so you get exactly the features you want. It’s a low-cost, high-speed approach that’s also fun and powerful.

Adding custom parts

One way to add custom elements to a course is by building interactive SWFs and inserting them into your project.

Here’s an example. It’s a sorting tool I created to help learners think about a topic and discern data. The learner creates a list of related items and then sorts them into categories. (For you geeks out there, I used Flash’s _global property for this.)

View this screencast at Screenr

If this is the kind of stuff that interests you, feel free to visit my blog, frameEntered.com, where I often post code and files like the one used in the screencast above.

To see another example of a custom Flash interaction inserted into an Articulate Presenter course, check out this screencast from David Anderson.

What this means for e-learning development

As a Flash programmer, I’m thrilled about the idea of blending rapid with custom. It means that I don’t need to toil with things like programming my bullets to load at one-second intervals, or ensuring that the Next button actually loads the next slide. I can leave stuff like that to Articulate and spend my time doing the things I love: creating new interactions that are engaging, efficient, and effective (I borrowed those 3Es from my boss, Orva.)

All this is great news for rapid e-learning developers too. You don’t need to be a Flash expert, or hire a squad of Flash coders, to build great e-learning. You can build your courses with Articulate tools, and supplement with custom Flash if you need to — just insert the content as a SWF or a Web Object, and you’re good to go. And if you do have Flash programming resources, you can spread those talents across many projects. If you outsource, you can hire out for just the custom pieces rather than the whole course.

As Tom Kuhlmann has pointed out, this is a great way to make your e-learning budget go much, much further. You might even find that the custom stuff you need is already out there on the web, for free or for a small price.

Questions?

I’m active in the Articulate Community Forums, as are several other Flash developers. So if you have questions about how to create or incorporate custom Flash in your Articulate projects, post a thread there and we’ll do what we can to help you out. The forums are also a nice way to gain insights and ideas from other designers and developers who are using or building custom Flash for e-learning.

I’d also recommend checking out the work of Dave Moxon and Dave Mozealous, as well as Brian Houle. They’re each doing some really cool things to combine rapid e-learning with custom elements.

One of the ways I like to exercise my e-learning skills is by deconstructing and rebuilding creative and engaging e-learning courses. Each time I find something I like, I ask “How would I build that in PowerPoint and Presenter?” And then I try to build it.

For example, I found this interactive graphic the other day. It’s clean and simple, with many repeating elements. Something like this could easily be part of an e-learning course.

Click here to view the original interactive graphic.

While it might appear difficult to replicate, it really isn’t that challenging to build. Basically, there’s a main slide that loads a separate slide for each of the 50 states.

Essentially, all of the slides are the same with just the information specific to the state changing. In fact, once you have the first slide built, it’s more about e-learning production than anything else.

And that’s why it’s a great project to rebuild using PowerPoint and Presenter ’09. By replicating the graphic, you’ll learn some production techniques and shortcuts.

Here’s what I came up with

Above, you can see the original. And below you can see what I created. As you can see, you get a comparable product using nothing more than PowerPoint and Presenter ’09. You didn’t lose anything in terms of content or functionality, and visually it’s identical. I just added the borders for emphasis.

Click here to view the interactive created in Presenter ‘09.

Lessons Learned

This project helped me rethink how I approach some projects to consider the development and production efficiency. Testing out an idea, I rebuilt the example a couple times. And each time I found a few new ways to streamline my work.

Specifically, I learned three things:

1. Never underestimate the value of slide masters. It took a few passes before I fully recognized just how much of this course was persistent and didn’t need updating on each slide.
2. Leverage placeholder text. Only three text objects were changed on each slide. Rather than copying blocks of text to place on each slide, I could easily move static text to the slide master and use placeholder text for the slide-specific text.
3. Save multiple objects as graphics. I built the Teacher:Student graphics in PowerPoint. All together, that came to around 50 objects per slide. Saving those as single .png files rather than keeping them as PowerPoint objects significantly reduced the number of objects on the slide, which reduced the publishing time!

You Must be Willing to Play

There are some great resources available, from books to blogs to classes, that will help you learn to design better courses. But you must be willing to invest your time and effort into playing.

Make it part of your personal learning strategy to regularly rebuild existing projects. They don’t all have to be e-learning either. There are some wonderful multimedia projects that leverage the same design and technical skills we use to develop e-learning.

I’ll write more about this in a future post. In the meantime, you can download the source files from this thread in the Community forums. I invite you to share your own tips and strategies for learning to design better courses.