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Category: ELH Challenges

4 Ideas for Combining Text and Images in eLearning

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #152 – Combining Text and Images in E-Learning. The brief: This week, your challenge is to share an example to demonstrate how text and images can be used in e-learning.

For this challenge I shared four simple ideas that were all created within Storyline. Click the image below to see what I shared for the challenge:

Slide 1: Text coming out of the image

For the title page, I wanted the text to look like it was coming out of the skyline and to create this effect, there’s actually two of the same images placed exactly on top of each other. However, the image at the front has been cropped:

In the timeline, the complete image is at the bottom and the cropped at the top:

Placing the text box in the middle creates the effect that it’s coming out from behind the buildings but really it’s just coming out from behind the cropped image. There’s a ‘Fly In’ animation on the text with the duration set to 3.5 seconds and coming in from the bottom (set in Effect Options).

Slide 2: Text overlay 1

This slide full screen image with a rectangle shape containing some text) placed to the right. The shape has a ‘Fly In’ animation (1 sec duration and coming in from the right). I also made the shape slightly transparent by right-clicking on it, selecting ‘Format Shape’ and adjusting the transparency to 25%.

Slide 3: Text overlay 2

On this slide, I coloured the background pale grey, and positioned my image at the top of the slide. Then I added a rectangle that slightly covered the image and didn’t completely fill the space at the bottom. The text itself sits in a text box on top of the shape and I applied a fade animation (1 sec duration). From the ‘Effect Options’ dropdown I chose ‘By Paragraph’ which makes each paragraph of text appear separately.

Slide 4: Question

This slide wasn’t built using a quiz slide (but it could be) which meant I needed to create everything from scratch. I started with my background image and added two new states – a correct and incorrect:

For each of the new states, I went to the ‘Format’ tab and increased the brightness by 10% and recoloured the images:

Then I added four rectangles, one for the question and one for each answer. For the demo, Option C is the correct answer, so I also created a state for each option:

Lastly, I added a layer that contains a button to replay the demo (the trigger is to jump to the first slide when the button is clicked) and also prevents another answer being selected (go to ‘Layer Properties’ and tick the box next to ‘Prevent the user from clicking on the base layer’).

Then I needed to add triggers to each answer option to make it all work:

So that’s how I created each of my slides for this challenge. There were lots of other creative ideas shared by community members in this challenge and you if have ideas, please share them in the comments area below.

All images used in this demo came from Death to the Stock Photo.

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December 4, 2016
Learning About Screencasting

A few months ago David Anderson started a new type of E-Learning Hero Challenge – creating screencasts (which are short ‘how-to’ video clips). I mentioned in an earlier blog post that one of the areas I wanted to build knowledge and skills in was screencasting so these new challenges would be a great opportunity to get started.

Another reason why these challenges appealed to me is that most of my role at B Online Learning is about teaching others – how to use Storyline 2 and the process of creating an eLearning module – so the challenges also seemed like a good fit in that regard just a different way of teaching and sharing what I know and a way to help develop my communication skills.

Creating these short how-to videos is something new for me so these early ones were a bit rough but I figure they’ll get better over time. Anyway, here’s a few of things I’ve learned so far when creating my screencasts:

Planning

I’ve found that the recording works better if you plan what you’re going to record and have a run through to make sure that things work the way you want them to and you know where you want to click. I don’t have a word for word script but I like to think through what I’m going to say as I do the practice. I tried off-the-cuff but it didn’t work for me.

Sound quality

I record my screencasts in my office at home and I shut the door and window to reduce any background noise. Initially I found the audio still wasn’t that great but I was using an old headset with a mic. I do have a USB microphone (Audio Technica) but when I tried it, it seemed to pick up ambient noise. So, I went to JB Hi-Fi and I found a Skype Headset (it has a USB connection and a noise cancelling microphone) and I’m much happier with the quality.

Recording Window Size

I use Articulate Replay to record my screencasts as it came with my SL2 licence and meant that I didn’t have to buy another program. It’s easy to use and I’m happy with the output. When you open up Replay you can set the size of the recording window to whatever size you need and initially I was recording at about 1000 x 700 but I found that when I looked at the recording on a larger monitor that it became a bit blurry and I think it was because the recording was being enlarged to fit on a bigger screen? Anyway, I asked my friend Veronica (another regular screencaster) what size she used and she said was using around 1430 x 860. Hers looked cleaner so I increased the recording size and it seems to have helped in the latest recording – ‘Using Master Slides’. So I’ll keep experimenting.

Click on the image below to see my most recent screencast and you can see all the recording that I’ve created in the Videos section of this site. Let me know what you think.

If you’re wondering about the circle animation that you see in my recordings, it’s a setting on your computer. Go to the Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options tab > select Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key > Ok. That’s it!

To see all of the screencast challenge topics, click here.

If you’ve done any screen recording before please share any tips you have in the comments below.

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May 21, 2016
Sliding Along with the Force

A few weeks ago I was delivering a Storyline 2 session in Brisbane and we were looking at the slider interaction and how you can use a slider to change the state of an object and also use it to show layers. In the change of state example we were looking at, you slide the thumb along the track and the colour of an image changes. One of the participants asked if it were possible to change the colour of the thumb to match the colour of the image and my response was “I’m not sure, I haven’t tried that before but let’s check it out and see if it can be done”.

So, I clicked on the slider and went to the states area and I was pleasantly surprised to see that sliders have ‘states’. As it turns out, you can add new slider states and then format the slider for your new states (in our class example, I could change the thumb colour to match the image colour). Cool! I was also happy that person asked this question or I may never have known about slider states!

Flashback to late 2015, and David Anderson created an ELH Challenge to coincide with the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. E-Learning Heroes Challenge #110 – Awaken Your E-Learning Force. The brief was to build a Star Wars-themed interaction, this week your challenge is.

Sometimes ideas for challenge demos come to me quickly but sometimes I need to percolate ideas in my subconscious for a while and this was one of those challenges. I did have some illustrated Star Wars characters that I wanted to use for the demo and an idea of a trivia type interaction, just no solid idea for bringing them together in a different way.

Jumping back to the present and after I discovered that sliders have states, I thought that’s it! I could create a slider state for each character (six in total) and I could also have a question for each character to correspond with the change in image.

So this is what I did:

I inserted a slider and in the Thumb Fill area, filled it with a picture of my first character. I had to play around with the sizing of the thumb so that it wasn’t too small. For the track, I chose no fill and no outline which made it transparent. Then I created a new state for each character and named each state to correspond with the character:

The thumb picture changes using a change of state trigger (one for each character):

Each of the questions is built on a layer:

I used shapes for my questions and feedback with 40% transparency and shapes for my answers choices too. As there was only one correct answer, I grouped the choices in a button set which only allows one answer to be selected at a time. The correct/incorrect feedback boxes are on this layer too and they both start as ‘hidden’ and change state to normal depending on which answer is chosen. This is what it looks like for the Stormtrooper layer:

To save some time, once I had the first layer working the way I wanted, I duplicated it and then changed the information and adjusted the triggers. A show layer trigger based on the slider position makes each layer show. So as you slide the thumb along, the picture changes to a different character and a question for that character is also shown along with some feedback (and where possible, I used a quote from that character from one of the movies).

You can try the demo yourself by clicking on the image below:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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March 7, 2016
Looking Closer at Images

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #114 – Interactive Video: Zooming and Magnifying Images in E-Learning. The brief: This week, your challenge is to share a solution to allow learners to zoom in or magnify parts of an image, graphic, document, or video.

This was one of those challenges that I wanted to have a go at because even though Storyline has built-in zooming (which is pretty cool) to make parts of an image larger or to get a close up of a section of a scene, I wanted to try to create a way of making parts of an image larger without using the zoom feature. I had this coffee machine image that I’d used for something else and I thought I could use it again this time to explore the different parts.

I kind of flipped the challenge idea on it’s head because rather than zoom in to look more closely at the parts, why not have the parts become larger so they can be seen along with a description. Because it’s a demo, I didn’t build out the interaction completely but just made a couple of the parts clickable – the control panel and the handle where the coffee goes.

Initially I tried to build all of the interactivity on the slide (base layer) but I ended up needing to use a couple of layers. I created my first layer for the control panel and copied my image and pasted it onto the layer (when you do this, the image is pasted in exactly the same position as it is on the base layer). Then, while still on the layer, I cropped the image so that only the panel section was visible. Next I added a motion path to the cropped image to make it move away from the complete image.

I decided to use a change of state to make the cropped image appear larger, so I created a new state for the control panel:

The great thing about motion paths is that you can add triggers to make other things happen once an object reaches the end of its motion path. In this demo, the image of the panel changes to the large state, the text box description changes state (from hidden to normal) and the whole coffee machine image also changes to a washout state – I added that later – when the motion path animation completes. I repeated this process on the second layer (the coffee handle).

It was a bit of trial and error to get the large versions of the cropped images to appear in the right place but it didn’t take too long to get it right. I also added a trigger to hide each of the layers when the timeline ends. This worked ok for the purpose of the demo but I’d probably add an object for someone to click on to hide the layer if I was going to use this in a project.

Then back on the base layer, I inserted two freeform hotspots that give the user something to click on to show their respective layers:

Interesting fact: Hotspots are 53% transparent!

That’s it, an interaction that makes part of an image larger without using the built in zoom. You can try the demo yourself by clicking on the image below:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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January 26, 2016
Pushing My Buttons
Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #89 – Creative Button Styles and Effects. The brief: This week, your challenge is to have fun with buttons! Play with different shapes, styles, and effects to show how you can use buttons creatively in e-learning. Be sure to include the Normal, Hover, and Selected states in your work.

In this challenge from a few months ago, we had to design some buttons. I came a little late to the party with this challenge and lots of great ideas had already been shared so I thought I’d try something a little different. I was on the train on my way back to Newcastle from Sydney so, with some time to kill I played around with some ideas. The brief was straightforward, our buttons had to have at least three states:
- Normal (how it appears on-screen)
- Hover (how it looks when you hover your mouse over)
- Selected (how it looks when it’s been clicked or pressed)
As usual I sketched my initial ideas on paper:

I had an idea (from the imaged used in the challenge that week) that maybe the buttons could react to each other based on what was happening at the time i.e. being hovered over and being selected. The illustrated characters in Storyline have in-built expressions and I thought that I could use these for the different states for each character.

So I opened up my laptop and began to experiment with my ideas in Storyline 2.

The design itself is pretty simple – a plain background, a headshot of my three characters (to do this I inserted each character and cropped them) and a rounded rectangle shape with a light fill and a thick border.

In Storyline, ‘states’ allow you to the alter the appearance of an object – think the Incredible Hulk is the angry state of Dr Bruce Banner – and by default when you insert an object onto a slide in Storyline, how it looks is called its ‘normal’ state. So for my buttons, the normal state has each character with a neutral expression:

Note: I couldn’t group the character and the rounded rectangle shape together because grouped objects don’t have a state.

For my hover state, I changed the expression of my character to ‘thinking’ like it’s getting ready to be chosen. I also thought it would be fun to have the other two buttons react because the mouse wasn’t hovering over them, so I created a state where they have a ‘worried’ expression on their face and they also look towards the button being hovered. To cater for the different combinations, my first guy would need to look to the right, my middle guy would need to look left and right and my third guy would need to look towards the left. So I created a left and/or right state for my characters.
Because I added the in-built hover state to each character, no trigger was needed. But I needed to add triggers to the characters for their left/right states when one of the other characters was being hovered over. Here’s an example:

I also thought I’d like to change the colour of the border when the mouse is hovering over the character. I couldn’t use the in-built hover state here because I didn’t want the state to change when I hovered over the shape so I created a state for it called ‘roll over’ and added another trigger:

All I had left to do was the selected state and unexpectedly, this took this longest to figure out. The way I wanted the buttons to work was that once a button was selected, it stopped reacting with the other ones. I created a selected state where the character looked happy because he’d been chosen. It worked in that it changed state (to looking happy) but it also continued to react when it was hovered over or one of the other buttons was hovered over.

I tried adding disabled state with a happy expression on my character but that didn’t work.

I tried using a button set on the characters and that didn’t work either.

Finally I tried adding a layer with a new rounded rectangle (with a green frame) and a copy of my character with a happy expression and success! The only thing I had to then do go into the slide layer properties and untick the ‘Hide other slide layers box’.

Whilst I probably won’t ever use buttons like this in a project, this was yet another example of how participating in a weekly challenge can help build your skills in using Storyline. All up this demo was pretty much done on the two and a half hour trip home (it was probably closer to 90 mins). You can see it for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.

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October 18, 2015