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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
More and more companies find they need to build their training courses internally. They are turning to tools like Articulate Studio because it is easy to use and doesn't have a steep learning curve. If you are familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint in any way, you should feel right at home with Articulate Studio."Articulate Studio Cookbook" will get you ready to add Articulate Studio to your enterprise toolkit. This book gives you detailed yet simple steps to complete your training course. By following the clear steps in each chapter, you will gain an understanding of the software but also be able to complete specific tasks and common activities.The good thing about this book is that you can start anywhere and get the information that you need for a specific activity. Cross-references are provided if there is a skill located elsewhere that you need to complete a task.It can be frustrating to pick up a new piece of software and not know where to begin. With Articulate Studio, there is a whole suite of software to work with. You need to know how to work with Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker and Encoder to make great Articulate courses. Then, you'll need to know how to put them all together in a way that makes a professional looking, cohesive and smooth-flowing course. We'll make it easy to follow step by step until you have a professional course."Articulate Studio Cookbook" will help you go from Studio newbie to Studio guru. Dive in and choose your recipe.
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Seitenzahl: 324
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Articulate Studio Cookbook
Articulate Studio Cookbook
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: November 2012
Production Reference: 1121112
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK
ISBN 978-1-84969-308-0
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Asher Wishkerman (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Robert Kennedy III
Reviewers
Eleanor Mante
Mary Pienzi
Acquisition Editor
Joanna Finchen
Lead Technical Editor
Kedar Bhat
Technical Editor
Devdutt Kulkarni
Copy Editor
Insiya Morbiwala
Project Coordinator
Vishal Bodwani
Proofreaders
Maria Gould
Bernadette Watkins
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Graphics
Valentina D'silva
Aditi Gajjar
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Robert Kennedy III is a former High School and College Educator turned Entrepreneur. He has owned web development and now e-learning/training companies, and has spent almost a decade as a trainer in topics ranging from music industry preparation to technology and learning. Currently, as the owner of RKCS Learning Solutions, Robert spends a great deal of time teaching others how to integrate technologies into their business workflow and training companies on how to develop effective learning modules for their employees.
Robert earned his Masters degree online through the University of Maryland University College and is currently completing his PhD in Educational Technology with Walden University. Although he was a former classroom teacher, he will tell you that online education saved his life.
He is an admitted tech lover; when not working, Robert spends his time playing with or catching up on the latest gadgets. Sites such as CNET, Tech Crunch, and Engadget are probably permanently burned into his screen at this point.
Robert grew up in Bronx, New York, and is therefore legally obligated to be a fan of the New York Yankees. He takes this obligation seriously and watches every Yankees' game on his phone, iPad, computer, or TV. He loves sports in general and can be found playing softball, golf, basketball, or bowling at any point during the year.
I'd like to thank some pretty important people, who have helped me with the production of this book through their time, their sacrifice, and their skill. I'm probably going to forget some names but I hope you'll simply attribute that to age rather than intent. Yeah, I'm getting older and I'm dealing with it. Anyway, on to the names, in no particular order, my wife, Nadia, my lovely kids (yes, this is partly what daddy does when he is in the home office), my parents, Robert and Seslie, and some other really important people, Tom Kuhlmann, David Anderson, Rich Murphy, Christine Abunassar, and of course the team at Packt Publishing, Sarah, Joanna, Vishal, and Kedar. This has been AWESOME!
About the Reviewers
Eleanor Mante is an E-Learning Development Manager for one of the UK's largest newspaper publishers. She has been involved in IT and training in Canada and the UK for over 10 years.
As a Project Manager, E-Learning Designer, Microsoft Certified Trainer, and CIW Associate, Eleanor has worked with colleges, universities, and businesses to help them design and implement solutions.
She has worked with the following employers:
I'd like to thank my wonderful family, partner, and friends for all of their support and encouragement over the years.
Mary Pienzi is an accomplished E-learning Developer who has been developing courses for 12 years. She began developing courses using tools such as Toolbook and Authorware, and then gradually moved into using Flash development as a courseware solution. Realizing that corporations were moving toward rapid development, she learned Articulate Presenter and its companions Engage and Quizmaker.
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Preface
Articulate Studio '09 is a powerful authoring tool built to help both the expert trainer and the novice developer to quickly create useful learning experiences. While they can all work together, Articulate Studio '09 is a suite that contains four pieces of software that may be used individually or together. Therefore, this book will contain sections that may be used non-sequentially.
This book is meant to provide technical guidance for building a basic or complex course using the suite. While you are not limited in the creativity you can use in your course, this book will only provide a basic foundation for helping to develop a solid, polished course. You may find many additional and advanced techniques by visiting the Heroes forum on Articulate's website.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Articulate Suite, covers the basics of the suite, what its capabilities are, and how to begin conceptualizing a basic course.
Chapter 2, Create Your Course with Presenter, covers the basics of creating a simple course using Presenter by itself. It teaches the basics of inserting media elements and assets, as well as preparing basic animations and finally publishing a simple course.
Chapter 3, Preparing Your Player, covers the features, setup, and capabilities of the Articulate Presenter course player. It provides guidance on how to edit color schemes, player elements, and functionality.
Chapter 4, Creating Assessments and Courses with Quizmaker, covers the core concepts behind the creation of basic assessment questions using Quizmaker. It covers the editing of the Quizmaker player and its functionality, and provides basic guidance on assessment creation using basic instructional design principles.
Chapter 5, Taking Your Quiz to the Next Level, shows the user how to use Quizmaker as more than just a basic quizzing tool. This chapter will include concepts on creating a more useful slide in the slide view, basic branching, and scenario concepts, as well as information on how to use Quizmaker to create a standalone course.
Chapter 6, Creating Interactive Content with Engage, discusses quick ways of adding interactive content to your course with Engage.
Chapter 7, Basic Video Editing with Video Encoder, guides the user through the process of basic video editing and file encoding using this tool. The user will learn how to perform basic tweaks as well as customize the video size and performance for your course.
Chapter 8, Combining All Three, shows the user how to finally combine all the three major applications from the suite into one cohesive course. They will also learn how to customize properties and course functionality.
What you need for this book
In order to get the maximum from this book, it is best to have the recommended software and hardware available, as well as an understanding of some basic concepts. It is recommended to have the following.
Software
Following are the software requirements:
Hardware
Following are the hardware requirements:
Concepts
Following are the basic concepts required for this book:
Who this book is for
The typical readers of this book would be involved in the authoring of training or presentations, and would have a basic understanding of Microsoft Office tools such as PowerPoint and Word.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "They must be recorded in either the .wav or .mp3 format."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To import these files, click on the Import Audio button in the Narration section of the Articulate ribbon."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Getting Started with Articulate Suite
In this chapter we will cover:
Introduction
Congratulations! You've just bought and installed Articulate Studio '09, one of the most popular and easiest to use e-learning development tools available in today's market. Sure there are other tools, but among corporate users, Articulate is a popular choice. Why is this? Because their organizations have already been working on the Microsoft Office platform and they are used to working in Microsoft PowerPoint. As a matter of fact, many of them have huge libraries of training materials that they have already developed for use in PowerPoint. When making the decision to transition to an e-learning platform, their familiarity with PowerPoint makes the transition easy.
Articulate Studio is a complete suite that comes with four applications, namely Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker, and Video Encoder. These four applications work together, and in some cases individually, to help you produce a Flash-based, e-learning course with minimal programming expertise.
We're going to start out by focusing on Articulate Presenter. This application is not a standalone application like the others in the suite; instead it is a PowerPoint plugin. In other words, you need to have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on your computer in order to use Articulate Presenter.
Note
Additionally, you need to be aware that Articulate Studio is a Windows-only application. It will not work with the Mac OSX versions of Microsoft Office. However, if you are on a Mac-based system, you may install Windows through the use of programs such as boot camp (which comes preinstalled in Mac OSX) or emulation software such as Parallels and VMWare Fusion.
Launching Articulate Presenter
Once you have Articulate installed on your computer, you can run any of the four programs that are part of the Articulate suite. Articulate Presenter functions as a plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint. Although the four programs are standalone applications, they are intended to work together. Articulate Presenter is the main program while Engage, Quizmaker, and Video Encoder can produce standalone, finished products.
How to do it…
When the Articulate suite is installed on your computer, it should provide you with desktop icons for all four of the programs in the Suite. This is the easiest way to access any of the programs in the Suite:
This dialog box gives you basic information about the application and how it should appear in your PowerPoint application.
Note
On the launch screen there are a series of buttons for View Tutorials, Join the Community, Product Support, and Visit Blogs. These buttons take you to recourses that are located on Articulate's website.
How it works…
If you need to perform this recovery feature, you will need to make sure to have administrator privileges on your computer. If you don't have such privileges, ask your system administrator for assistance.
There's more…
There is also another way to access Articulate Presenter. Since Presenter is a plugin of PowerPoint, it opens whenever PowerPoint is opened.
The other method of launching Articulate Presenter is simply by going to Start | Programs | Microsoft Office on your computer's desktop and double-clicking on the Microsoft PowerPoint application. Launching it in this way actually cuts out a step for those concerned about efficiency.
Recovering from startup errors
While Articulate Presenter is a stable application that works well, it is still a PowerPoint plugin. So like any software, from time to time, there's the possibility of errors happening. When these happen, don't be too alarmed. There are ways of recovering from most of the things that can happen:
Once these steps are completed, the Articulate tab should appear in PowerPoint.
Publishing a simple, slide-only course for a website
Articulate handles presentations differently from PowerPoint, creating a Flash animation video (a .swf file) out of it. This means that Articulate has to publish the presentation and not just save it as PowerPoint does. The published presentation consists of two parts, the presentation itself and the player. The player folder is the skin with the controls and other information about the presentation. In addition to controlling the slides of the course, it also allows access to other files if they have been added to the course.
When finished, each slide becomes its own Flash file. This allows for fast downloading by users who are accessing the course or presentation via the Internet. Additional content, such as a glossary, would be a separate Flash file accessible through the player.
Getting ready
Any presentation will consist of a number of slides. These slides may contain any of the text, graphics, and objects that PowerPoint can produce, along with other content that is created in Articulate Presenter or the other programs contained in the Articulate suite. We will be showing you how to add this material throughout this course.
In order to walk through the process of publishing a presentation, we're going to need a presentation that we can use. You can either open an existing PowerPoint presentation that you have on your computer or create a simple one. I've created a simple, three-slide presentation about the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
How to do it…
Once you have your presentation, there are two parts to accomplishing this recipe. The first one consists of creating the player template. Once we have created the template, we'll use that template to publish our simple course.
As you can see from this flow diagram, the process is a logical one. Typically, one starts by creating the presentation before creating or choosing the template. In this way, the template can be made to match the needs of the presentation.
Creating the template
Publishing the Course
How it works…
As you can see from the tabs in the Publish dialog box, Articulate can publish your finished Flash presentation in a number of ways. The first tab, the one we used, creates the necessary files for publishing to the Web. You can also use this option for publishing on your computer for local use.
Note
Before you start publishing presentations, it's important to realize that not everything that PowerPoint does is supported by Articulate; specifically, the slide transitions aren't supported. So if you're accustomed to using transitions between your slides, you'll have to forgo that in Articulate Presenter. Likewise, not all animations from PowerPoint are supported. Later we'll show you which ones are.
Once you start working in Articulate Presenter, it creates a second file for your presentation. So instead of only having a .pptx file from PowerPoint, you will also have a .ppta file. The name will be the same, and only the file extension will be different. If you need to move your presentation to another folder on your computer or put it on removable media for it to work on another computer, be sure to copy both the files, otherwise you will lose all the work that you did in Articulate.
The Flash presentations that Articulate creates are noneditable Flash files. This provides a great advantage over standard PowerPoint files, which can be modified by the end user. In training and sales presentation situations, where the user is viewing the presentation on their own, there is no possibility of the viewer accidentally or intentionally making changes to the file.
Once Articulate has finished publishing your Flash presentation, it will notify you by displaying the Publish Successful dialog box. This provides you with a number of options, including the ability to view your presentation, upload it to the Web via FTP, or compress it in a ZIP file.
If you open the folder that contains your presentation, you will see that it consists of a number of files. The folder will be titled with the name of the presentation, and it will contain two folders (titled data and player) and a player.HTML file. The player file is the one that you click to play the presentation. It will open in whatever program the user has selected as your default for Flash files, probably their default web browser.
You can rename this file as desired. However, don't rename the folders. If you need to copy, move, or upload your presentation, be sure to move the entire folder, including the subfolders and the player file. Otherwise, your flash presentation will not work.
Adding a background theme
Artistic design is an important part of creating a presentation. You want people's eyes to be attracted to your presentation, and even more importantly, you want it to hold their attention. That's pretty much impossible to do if your presentation isn't attractive.
You also want your presentation to provide some identity with the subject matter and/or your company's brand. Whether designing a presentation for a training session, corporate proposal, or sales, you need to be able to tie the whole thing together, providing visual continuity so that the viewer understands that it is all part of one continuous theme.
At this point, the theme we are creating only deals with the presentation and not the skin. That will be done at another time. For the best possible results, you want your presentation theme and your skin theme to go together. It is helpful to keep your skin theme colors in mind while creating your presentation theme.
There are actually several ingredients in creating this visual theme, such as the background image, the placement of objects on the slides, and the text size, style, and color. For this reason, it is very useful to start the creation of your presentation by applying a theme to the slides in the presentation. Microsoft PowerPoint has this capability built-in along with a number of themes that are available for its use.
How to do it…
Themes are created using PowerPoint's capability rather than Articulate's. However, the skin theme is created in Articulate:
Note
Please note that not all the themes are visible at once. Clicking on the scroll bar to the right-hand side of the shown themes allows you to scroll through all the themes you have installed on your system. The arrow with the line at the bottom of the scroll bar is for opening the drop-down that shows all the installed themes at once.
How it works…
Selecting a theme for a presentation gives us the following:
There's more…
The themes themselves are fully customizable. There are three buttons located to the right-hand side of the shown themes, which provide for the customization of the colors, fonts, and effects in the theme.
Changing theme colors
By clicking on the Colors button in the Themes section of the ribbon, a drop-down appears that allows the selection of the existing color themes. This may be divided into two separate areas depending upon the selected theme, the upper section showing the color themes that are available for that particular theme, and the lower section listing all of the color themes that are built-in to Microsoft Office.
For most themes, selecting a color theme doesn't affect the background color; it affects the text and bullet point colors. However, there are a few themes that change to match the color scheme selected. You'll have to play with the theme you are using to see what changes it allows you to make. If none of the included color themes satisfy your need, you can modify them by selecting Create New Theme Colors… from the bottom of the drop-down list. This opens a dialog box for creating a new color theme.
By selecting one of the existing color themes, you can use it as your starting point for creating your new color theme. The theme shown in the screenshot of the dialog box is the "Text" theme. Each type of Text, Accent, and Hyperlink theme can be individually changed. Your new color theme can then be saved under whatever name you choose.
To change the background color, one would need to select Background Styles in the Background section of the ribbon. Since in many cases the backgrounds are pictures, you are somewhat limited to the amount of color change that you can make. However, there are some themes that are not images, but rather are designs that are appropriate for being used as the background. In these cases, you can change colors, add a texture, or change from a solid fill to a gradient. This varies from theme to theme, depending upon what is built in to that theme.
Changing theme fonts
Selecting Fonts from the Themes section on the ribbon allows you to select any of the standard Microsoft Office font style sets. These are the same font style sets that are used in Microsoft Word and other office applications.
Just as with the color themes, the font themes are fully customizable. Selecting Create New Theme Fonts… at the bottom of the Fonts drop-down opens a dialog box for selecting the heading and body fonts that you want to use in your theme. These can then be saved as a new font theme.
Note
The reason that you can only select the heading and body fonts rather than select a variety of different fonts is that, artistically speaking, it is not recommended to use more than two fonts in a document. You still have the availability to individually change the font of a specific word, line, or page of text if you so desire, but that would not be a part of the font theme.
Changing theme effects
The final area of customization available for your theme is the effects, selectable by clicking on the Effects button in the Themes section of the ribbon. The Effects
