Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: Working out loud

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
Half-baked Ideas
This week is Work Out Loud or #WOLweek and the purpose is to be more open and share what you’re working on. So, in the spirit of the week I went to my notebook where I write down ideas and thoughts about what I see and read from the world around me. They’re raw, not fully formed and some not fully thought through (sometimes I was just venting) but they are things that at some stage I thought were important enough to write down. The idea is that they might become posts of their own eventually.

Here they are in no particular order:
- Too much time and effort is spent hypothesising about the future. No-one knows what’s its going to be like but geez, there’s a lot of people making money from painting a picture of the ‘ideal’ learning and development future.
- There’s also way too much pontificating about what learning and development folks should be doing and not enough practical advice from the more experienced that will actually help others to get to this ‘ideal’ future. Models are fine but give me something that will help me right now. Give me something that I can use to start bringing about change.
- Is working out loud really for everyone or is it just for people who work in offices and have access to a computer? When I look around me I see the person who collects my rubbish and the checkout person at the supermarket and the person working in a coal mine. Is WOL for them?
- I know that debate is healthy but dividing a profession isn’t. I wonder if other professions have the same problem.
- People need to take control of their own learning and the majority don’t. Too many rely on courses or someone doing it for them. How about figuring something out for yourself.
- I love using social media tools to connect and learn from others but the reality is the majority of people working in the learning field aren’t connected, don’t use them and therefore won’t introduce them into their workplaces. This doesn’t mean we should give up on using them and spreading the word but the reality is that for many organisations this is a long, long way off.
- I’m thinking about adding a ‘Downloads’ page for my blog site and creating some interactions the people can look at but also use in their own projects or learn more about how to use Storyline 2. I’ll need to get a few together first.
- Poor quality eLearning is not due to authoring tools themselves but due to the users of them not constantly wanting to improve, try new ideas and experiment. However, the fact that anyone can get their hands on one does mean that people think they can use them.
Well, that’s it. This is the first time I’ve written a post in one sitting and haven’t put it aside to work on later and it’s uncomfortable but it’s done now 🙂

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November 19, 2015
Looking Behind the Facade
Since I was young I’ve always enjoyed stopping whenever I come across a construction site. I’m interested in how buildings, from houses to skyscrapers, are put together. It really doesn’t matter what stage of construction the building is at either for me to pause to take a look. I like to see things like the depth of the footings or the size of the columns and supporting beams or the length of the cantilevered balconies or how the wall framework will divide an empty space or how the roof structure will finish off the building.

Image source:Shutterstock

While completed structures often look impressive, I find there’s more value in knowing how it all fits together (but that could be just me!). I think that’s why the practices of working out loud and showing your work appeal to me and I learn more from seeing how something was created as opposed to trying to figure it out when looking at the finished product.

Working in the eLearning space I often see people sharing some great samples of work and many times I wonder:
- How did they do that?
- Where did their ideas come from?
- How long did that take to create?
- Why did they do it that way?
I figure that I can’t be the only one who wonders these things and when someone shares this information, it’s like looking at their construction site and I’m happy to stop and take a look.

I’ve shared the ‘how’ behind some of the demos I’ve created, some examples are here and here and here. I don’t do it all the time and on reflection, it’s because I can be so caught up doing the work that I forget about sharing the work at different stages. So, it’s a habit I need to develop to make it part of the work.

From my experience, some ideas for showing your work are:
- Start with something small; share a part of a project or a tip or a discovery you’ve made.
- Find a method of documenting that works for you; it could be via blog post or a video or a photo or a tweet or a combination of these.
- Don’t worry about what other people think; the aim is to make your tacit knowledge visible.
- There’s no right or wrong way; I’m just making it up as I go but I do get ideas from what others do.
If we make time to document our planning and construction phases and then make this information public, there’d be many more opportunities for others to learn from our experiences. It might just encourage them to share what they know too.

After all, the best type of learning is when we learn from each other.

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September 2, 2015
Spinning Around with Storyline 2

A few years ago, before I was working with Articulate Storyline, I saw this cool interaction where you could spin a group of on screen images around in a circle. I later found out that this was referred to as a ‘carousel’.

While I liked the carousel when I first saw it, I haven’t see it around much – the closest I’ve come is where the images scroll from side to side. So I thought I’d try and build a circular carousel in Storyline 2. In my head, the way I saw the interaction working was by using a slider and as you move the slider along the images would rotate in a circle.

I was on the train on my way into work the other day and I started to sketch out my idea on paper. I always like to start this way no matter if it’s for a client project or a simple demo like this was going to be. I find that I can jot down ideas quickly and play with them on paper as I try to arrange and re-arrange my thoughts. So this is how it started:

Then once I have a bit of a clearer idea of where I’m going (it’s never usually finished or fully formed at this point) then I’ll start playing in the tool however I’m still experimenting at this point and I don’t actually know if my idea will work!

To start with I inserted a slider and four coloured rectangles onto a new slide just to get an idea of the layout. To help with the look of the interaction, I made the two rectangles behind the front one slightly smaller and the back one slightly smaller again to give the look of perspective – as the objects move around the carousel they’ll appear to move closer and then further away.

Initially, I thought I’d use a change of state and what would happen is that as you move the slider along, each rectangle would change its state and the new state would be the rectangle in the next position. I started with just two different coloured rectangles (so that I could keep track of which was which). Plus if I started with two and could get it to work, then I could add the other two. It turned out to be a good plan because using states proved to be unsuccessful.

The first two moves worked just fine:

But the next two didn’t:

The problem was that objects on a slide sit at different ‘levels’ depending on where they are in the timeline and in this case the blue rectangle is always going to be above the red one:

So it was back to the drawing board.

This time I thought I’d try it again but using separate layers for each position of the rectangle. That way I could control how the rectangles were arranged as each layer is shown. Thankfully, this way worked much better. Each time the slider moved a position, a different layer would show and because the rectangles are in a new position on each layer it gives the effect that they are moving in a circle:

The next step was to replace the shapes with images and see how it looks. I also decided to add a couple of extra pictures – meaning two extra layers. I wanted to make the front picture stand out so I increased the brightness of the front image and changed the back images to black and white and decreased their brightness. I did this on one image and then used format painter to apply the changes to the other images. I also adjusted the layout and sizing of the images slightly and in the end it turned out like this:

Click the image to view the working demo.

While it isn’t exactly how I envisaged it originally (in my head I wanted the movement from position to position to be much smoother but would be much more complex to create given the objects change size as they move) this method does give a revolving effect and I was happy with the end result. Maybe I could try using motion paths next time…

I reckon the slide could be used for images or videos or even as a different type of menu where you could click on the front image and jump to a topic. You can download the source file from here.

Note: I also want to develop more of a habit of working out loud so I tweeted my progress as I went. It’s the first time I’ve done that as I went along and not just at the end. It’s my habit in progress.

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July 19, 2015
Showing My Work #10

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 #52 – Using Interactive Sliders in E-Learning. The brief: This week your challenge is to show creative ways to use sliders in online learning. You can focus your slider on functionality or visual design.

I enjoy watching cooking competition shows on TV like MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules. Often on these programs the contestants are given the same ‘core’ ingredient and they need to create a meal that hightlights this ingredient. In a way, this is similar to the weekly challenges in that you create a demo based on a core theme or Storyline feature.

On the shows there’s always at least one or two people who don’t achieve desired outcome or as they say on TV ‘fail to make the core ingredient shine’. In other words, the core ingredient doesn’t stand out and gets lost among all the other ingredients in the dish. On reflection, this happened to me with this challenge and I’ll show you what I mean.

In this challenge the ‘core ingredient’ were sliders (not the tasty little burgers) a new feature for adding interactivity in Storyline 2:

In an eLearning project, a slider allows learners to reveal information, pictures etc. as the thumb is dragged along the track. When a slider is inserted into a project, you can customise it for your needs via the ‘Slider Tools’ tab:

In the above example, the slider is divided into 10 ‘steps’ which are the number of movements the thumb makes along the track.

I was struggling for an idea for my demo but I happened to see a tweet where a guy called Nick Barclay had recreated movie posters using circles and colour. So I thought that I could do something where movies were represented with colour and as you drag the thumb the colour changed. Then you need to guess the name of the movie.

I came up with four movies and I used state changes to change the colour of a rectangle as you drag the thumb along the track. I added triggers for each step on the slider:

Then, because the demo was about movies I thought it needed to be themed and set in a cinema. So I found an image of a movie screen, resized the rectangle to fit the screen, made the track transparent and changed the thumb to a popcorn image:

Then, because there were four movies it needed a ‘home’ screen to start from. Plus this would allow people to choose the order in which they completed the demo. I added a screen with four movie poster frames and some instructions and each movie branches from the home screen. Here’s how it looks in Storyline:

Each time you go into a ‘theatre’ you come back to the home screen until all four are completed. After each cinema was visited, I used a change of state on each movie poster along with some true/false variables to darken the colour of the poster which indicates that it has been completed.

Then, because I wanted people to enter their guesses for each movie into the demo I needed something that allowed for this, so I used a text entry variable. These are cool because you can type information into one part of a module and it can be used in another part (and this can be done more than once if needed). I jazzed it up so that it fitted in with the overall theme:

Then, if people were typing in their guesses, they needed to see if they were correct so I needed another screen that showed their answer (using the text variable again) compared to the correct response. I came up with the idea that you were playing for ‘free movie tickets’ for each correct response and I found a ticket image and duplicated it four times:

Then, to tie it all together I added some intro and closing screens along with some music to help set the scene!

Can you see what happened?

I started out using sliders but kept adding a little bit more, then a bit more and by the time the demo was finished I had variables, changes of state, branching and some sliders in there too. At the time, I was satisfied with how it had turned out but I didn’t realise how diluted the sliders demo had become until a few days after I finished it and I went back and looked at some other entries. By adding more and more to the demo, I’d lost sight as to what it was supposed to be about in the first place. So while I didn’t really make the slider interaction shine, I did learn a valuable lesson and that is to stay focused on the reason why you’re creating something in the first place.

I still think it’s a good demo but unfortunately it doesn’t really meet the brief and showcase the use of sliders. To see for yourself, click on the below image to view the demo:

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

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March 26, 2015