The Logical Blog by IconLogic

ARTICULATE STORYLINE 3 & 360: Forced Learner Navigation

by Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP

There are times where you don’t want your learner to leave a slide until certain criteria have been met.   For instance, there's an interactive game on a slide (a credit score game you'll learn to create in my Storyline Essentials book). The learner earns 10 points by clicking on slide objects that help improve a person's credit score; they lose 10 points if they click something that hurts a credit score. In the end, learners need to get a perfect score (100%) before moving forward with the lesson. (They can reset the game as many times as needed.)

Preventing a learner from skipping past a slide until certain conditions have been met is known as forced navigation.   In my scenario, I forced the navigation by creating one trigger that hid the player's Next button until the learner earned a perfect score. At that point, another trigger allowed the Next button to magically appear.   Notice in the image below that there isn't a Next button on the player (there's just a Previous button).

After getting a perfect 100%, a Next button automatically appears.

To accomplish the task, I needed to create a few triggers that will hide and then show the slide's Next button based on a few conditions.   First, the trigger to hide the Next button:   With nothing on the slide selected, I created a new trigger.   From the Actions drop-down menu, I chose Change state of and selected the Next Button from the On Object drop-down menu.   To ensure that the button isn't visible when the slide appears, I clicked the To State drop-down menu and chose Hidden. Then. from the When drop-down menu, I selected Timeline starts.

At this point, the Next button is hidden and it's not ever going to appear. So to ensure that the Next button appears only after the learner earned a perfect score of 100%, I created another trigger.   From the Actions drop-down menu, I chose Change state of. From the On Object drop-down menu, I choose Next Button again only this time I changed the button's State from Hidden to Normal.   Because I was using a Variable named "percentage" to display the percentage of correct answers, I chose Variable changes from the When drop-down menu and then selected the percentage Variable.   I only want the Next button to appear if learners get 100% after playing the game. That requires a quick condition. I clicked the Show Conditions button and added a new condition. From the List area, I selected Variables, from the Operator drop-down menu I chose Equal to. And lastly, from the Type drop-down menu, I set the Value to 100.

To test the triggers, I previewed the slide and there wasn't a Next button on the player. After I clicked each of the correct answers in my game and got my 100% score, the Next button appeared.

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the U.S. Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

Articulate Storyline 360: Modern and Legacy Players

by Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP

If you're an Articulate Storyline 360 developer, you’ve likely grown familiar with the publishing choices found in the Publish dialog box. Most notably, you can elect to publish as HTML5 only, HTML5 with a Flash fallback, Flash with an HTML5 fallback, or Flash only.

However, if you’ve just recently updated Storyline, you’ve likely noticed that when publishing, HTML5 is the only option.

The publish options you see has everything to do with the project’s playbar (the playbar is the frame around the slide content and contains such features as menu, seekbar, and previous and next buttons). Storyline 360 users have a choice of two players: Modern and Classic. The Modern playbar does not work with Flash (hence the reason that HTML5 is the only publish option. The Classic playbar (which is the only playbar available in Storyline 3), supports both HTML5 and Flash.

 

Switching between players is easy. From within the Publish dialog box, click the Player link.

 

 

From the Player drop-down menu, choose the player you'd like. Note that you can also switch players outside of the Publish dialog box by clicking the Player tool on the toolbar. 

 

 

 

To learn about the specific differences between the Modern and Classic players, visit the Articulate website.

Articulate Storyline 3/360: Beyond the Essentials (2nd Edition)

We're currently hard at work on an update to our Articulate Storyline 3/360 advanced book (we're enhancing/improving several lessons). The book should be ready in just a few short weeks.

"Adobe Captivate 2019: Beyond the Essentials" Coming Very Soon

My "Adobe Captivate 2019: Beyond the Essentials" book is with the beta team and should be available for purchase in just a few weeks.

TEACHING LIVE, ONLINE CLASSES: Asking Review Questions

by Jennie Ruby, CTT, COTP

 

Over and over, as we teach our ICCOTP Certified Online Training Professional course on how to teach online, I see students use our techniques correctly—but on the wrong topics. For example, we teach a very specific technique—the overhead question. The purpose of the overhead question is to review material you have already delivered or covered in the class. The purpose is two-fold: you are evaluatingwhether the students learned what you presented to them; and you are encouraging them to do an extremely important part of the learning process: to apply effort in trying to remember the content or skills they just learned.

 

Let me emphasize that last statement. The two purposes of asking an overhead question—where you ask a question first (so that all of the students are trying to think of the answer), and then call on one student to answer it—are these:

1. To evaluate whether your students are retaining the content you have delivered (to see if you need to teach it again)
2. To ask your students to apply the effort to remember it

The neuroscience of learning tells us that the moment of learning a concept or a new skill is not when we first hear or receive it. The moment of learning begins when we try to recall it. Learning begins when we ask our brain to remember. It’s as if only at that moment does our brain tag that bit of knowledge or that new skill as something to move into long-term memory. Something to actually LEARN.

 

Over and over, I see our COTPs-in-training ask the perfectly structured question: ask a clear question; then call on one student to answer it. But those up-and-coming COTPs regularly fail at using the overhead question to do the two things enumerated above. Do you remember what the two purposes of the overhead question are? Look away from this screen and see if you remember. I’ll wait.

 

Did you do it? Did you try to remember? If not, please give it a try now. Look away, and see if you remember the two purposes of the overhead question.

 

That’s right:

1. To evaluate learning
2. To ask the learner to go to the effort of trying to remember it

Here’s a memory aid: “Evaluation and Effort make it Easy to learn.”

1. Evaluation
2. Effort

So how are my COTP students failing at these two purposes? They are using their questions to their students for the purpose of engagement only. Wait. Not another E word! Yes, another E word. And one that is a constant mantra in the field of training. “We must engage our students.” “We must create eLearning that is engaging.” “How can we engage our students in learning?” On and on. 

 

Yes, engagement is necessary. But it is only the first step in the learning process for our students. Sure, they have to be awake, paying attention, and even interested in and thinking about the topic of the lesson. That is engagement. 

But without the other two E-words, learning may not occur. And it almost certainly won’t “stick.”

 

Make sure you are asking review questions—not just engagement questions to introduce a topic and get learners thinking about it—but review questions about what you have already covered. You'll be able to evaluate whether students are learning (you might need to teach the lesson again!). And most importantly, so that you are giving your students the opportunity to do what it takes to truly learn something: to apply effort. 

 

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Jennie Ruby, CTT, COTP, is a veteran eLearning developer, trainer, and author. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer and Certified Online Training Professional. She teaches both classroom and online courses, and has authored courseware, published training books, and developed content for countless eLearning projects. She is also a publishing professional with more than 30 years of experience in writing, editing, print publishing, and eLearning.

ADOBE CAPTIVATE 2019: Interactive Videos

by Kevin Siegel, COTP, CTT

 

I’m a huge video fan. In my experience, videos offer a higher level of learner interest and knowledge retention than just text and/or images. However, as much as I love videos, I’m not happy with a core video limitation… a lack of learner engagement or interactivity. Sure, learners can stop, rewind, and fast-forward through most videos, but those abilities hardly equate to interactivity or engagement. 

 

I was delighted to learn that Captivate 2019 has taken an awesome leap forward by allowing for videos (any videos) to include a high level of interactivity via knowledge checks, learner interactions, and more.

 

To begin, I created a new, blank project with Captivate 2019. On the toolbar, I clicked Interactive Video.

 

 

You can either link to an existing YouTube video or insert a video from your computer. In my example, I selected From your Computer and opened a video loaned to me by Professor Art Kohn.

 

I then added two more slides to my project: two Knowledge Check slides. These slides will become overlays on the video.

 

 

 

On the Timeline of the slide containing the interactive video, I positioned the Playhead where I wanted the interactivity and then inserted two bookmarks (one for each of the knowledge check slides) by clicking the square icon just beneath the Playhead. Bookmarks can be used as breadcrumbs or as targets for jumps. I've found bookmarks to be very useful when I'm working with a longer video and I tend to add them prior to adding any interactive components. (Otherwise I seem to always forget exactly where I want the interactivity to occur.)    

 

 

 

To add the knowledge check slides as overlays (which will then automatically become interactive components of my video), all that was left to do was position the Playhead at a bookmark, and then click the Insert Overlay icon beneath the Bookmark icon.

 

 

From within the Overlay dialog box, the last step was to select a slide and click the Insert button.

 

 

I repeated the Overlay process one more time for my second Knowledge Check slide. On the Filmstrip, notice that my two overlay slides are represented as such by the overlay icon just beneath the slide thumbnail.

 

 

If you'd like to experience the awesomeness of interactive videos for yourself, check out the quick sample I posted to the IconLogic website. And while you're at it, enjoy Professor Kohn's brief video on strategies for boosting learner retention.

 

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the U.S. Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.