Thursday, 15 December 2011

REPOSTING - Articulate Interaction - How to Navigate an Articulate Based Course

This is a reposting of a previous post.  Someone requested the files because the links were not working. 

Here are 3 variations for "How to Navigate",  for those users that choose to look at it, how to navigate an Articulate course.  There is lots of discussion about the need for this and I am on the side that I would hope most users can figure this out on their own.  However, I have yet been able to create and launch a course without it in some form or another.  When I do I get complaints from someone that they didn't know what to do to get started.

At the least, when these are insterted as tab activies it is then there for those that need/want to work through "how to navigate" and those that don't need it can by-pass it.  It keeps the whole course less cluttered on the front end as well.

  • Simple 1 slide version (okay for simple and easy navigation points that are need to be pointed out)
  • Hotspot version - simple (used more often because user can click just the items they need information on)
  • Labelled image - complex (least favourite, trouble with this version is that the user has to watch each and every item that is labelled and there are a lot)
Links can be found on the Articulate Community site: here.

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Original Post
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I've been working for months and months to get an LMS up and running for my organization (do a search for LMS on my blog and you'll see the overall journey) now the real fun begins. I now have so many people coming to me asking for this course to be created and that one. Seems as if everyone has something that has to be taught by the end of the year to all staff because the Ministry of Health says so. Regardless of that fact the LMS is now slowly being populated with courses and not just classroom based.

One of my concerns though is not everyone in our organization is familiar with taking an online course. Many would be able to just sit down at a computer and know immediately how to navigate though a course. Some who have never taken an online course would still be technically savvy enough to work their way through on their own. But, then there are all the others who are less technically inclined and perhaps even a little afraid of trying this "new" method of learning.

These are the staff that I need to consider when creating a course and need to include a "how to navigate" lesson or tutorial. I'm using Articulate to create courses for our learners. During the pilot of the LMS one of the courses created had many slides at the beginning (that could be skipped) that explained all the components that the learner would see or could see while taking the course. Once the pilot was over I discovered that this was probably not the best method for delivering the tutorial piece. Letting them skip over it was good, but it still muddled the over all look of the course. So what I have done now instead was to create the same interaction, but have included it instead as a help tab that can be accessed at any point during the course.

I've included a short Screenr video below that lets you see the interaction as it runs within a course. I have tried to make it "neutral" so it could be inserted into any course and that anyone could use it in their courses outside of our organization.


It's all about REUSE! So, if you'd like to use the interaction yourself please feel free to download and use it in your own courses.

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