Hey there folks, Tim Slade here from the eLearning Designers Academy and Community. Thank you so much for tuning into this how-to workshop, a beginner's guide to articulate storyline. Now if this is your first time watching one of these how-to workshops, they're designed to be practical sessions to help you get up and running with all things eLearning design, instructional design, portfolios, and everything in between. Now, if you happen to be watching this on YouTube, make sure to hit that like, subscribe, and that bell button so that you'll get alerted the next time I publish a video just like this one.
And of course, make sure to join us inside the eLearning Designers community at community.elearningacademy.io, where you can see my full schedule of upcoming events and of course, connect, network, and learn from others in our industry who are looking to grow their eLearning and instructional design careers. All right. Thanks.
So are you looking to get up and running with Articulate Storyline, whether it's to build interactive e-learning courses, or maybe you're wanting to upskill yourself to build your portfolio or maybe land your first e-learning or instructional design job? Well, if that's the case, you're in the right place today to at least get a really, really good overview of Articulate Storyline so that you can at least get started with building some content in Storyline. Now I have to tell you. we're not going through everything that Articulate Storyline can do.
You know, I've been using and teaching Articulate Storyline since it first came out way back in 2012. And when I teach people Articulate Storyline, it usually takes a couple of days. So we're just going to cover some of the basics that can at least help you get up and running with navigating Articulate Storyline and maybe creating some simple content. And of course, I'll put a link down below where you can check out my full playlist of how-to workshops. that are focused on Articulate Storyline, and of course, I'll be adding to that in the future.
So let's start by answering this really basic question. What is Articulate Storyline? Well, this is something that a lot of people get confused with, because sometimes people refer to it as Articulate, some people refer to it as Storyline, and then of course, people refer to it as Articulate Storyline.
Now, Articulate is the company that creates Articulate Storyline, and they are an e-learning software development company, and they create different products like Rise, obviously Storyline and other products out there focused on the e-learning market. And they've been around forever and ever and ever since like the early 2000s. And in 2012, they released Articulate Storyline, which was a primary competitor to Adobe Captivate, which is for a separate day, separate topic for another day. And Articulate Storyline is a desktop-based e-learning authoring tool that operates very similarly to PowerPoint. And this is the special thing you need to know about Articulate Storyline is that if you already know how to do something in PowerPoint, then chances are you already know how to do it in Storyline.
And that was intentional with how they built Articulate Storyline. So let's start by taking a look at an example of a course that you might see in Articulate Storyline. And then what we'll do is we'll dive into Storyline. I'll show you how to navigate the interface. And of course, we'll learn how to create some basic content and storyline.
So I'm going to show you this course here on managing your health and wellness. And this is a sample course that I've built and I use whenever I'm teaching people how to use storyline, whether it's inside the e-learning designers academy or whenever I do in-person workshops. This is the course that we build from beginning to end. And I mentioned this a moment ago.
We're not going to go through all of Articulate's storyline today because, like I said, when I normally teach this, it usually takes me a couple of days. So we'll learn some of the basics here, but this is a good example of what you might see when you build a really basic course in Articulate Storyline. Now as we look at the course here, you'll notice there's a couple of different elements. Here we have in this square here, this is what's known as the slide area.
And just like PowerPoint is a slide-based presentation tool, Storyline is a slide-based e-learning authoring tool. And so in Storyline, when you build courses, you're actually building multiple slides. Not all that differently than when you would build slides in a presentation, right?
And they include text, it can include video and audio and interactive components and all sorts of really interesting things. Now, encompassing our slides here, we have what's known as the player. And the player includes things like the logo or the menu where the learner can navigate the course.
It might include some tabs up here at the top, our course title, maybe some navigation, a next button, a previous button. You might even see. a seek bar down here where the learner can play and pause the slide and that's really meant to allow the learner to navigate your course.
So here's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to hit the next button here and I'll show you an example of a slide. That includes audio narration and some animations here.
Here at Health Co., we believe that your health and wellness matters. Even if you're just starting to monitor your overall wellness, maintaining a balanced life can lead to a happier and healthier you. In this course, you will explore the importance of health and wellness, how to plan a healthy meal, and how to calculate your BMI.
If you're ready to get started, click the next button to continue. All right, so this is a really basic presentation slide that includes audio narration and some animations. And this is something that you could probably very easily create in PowerPoint.
But in Storyline, you can also create it where you sync animations with your audio to create kind of a self-playing multimedia experience. The other thing you can do in Storyline is you can create interactive content. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to mute my audio here so I can talk over the course here. And I'm going to jump to this slide here. And this is a great example of a really, really basic interactive slide where the learner has to take action.
in order to pull the content out of the course. And this is what I would call a click-to-reveal slide, where the learner clicks and reveals some content. And these are known as markers in Articulate Storyline, and they're a really easy way to create simple, basic interactions in Articulate Storyline. You can also create custom interactions in Storyline. For example, on this slide here, here's what I would call a tabbed interaction in Storyline, where we have different buttons, and if the learner clicks on one, it reveals some content in what's known as a slide layer in Storyline.
And this could be text, it could be video, it could be more animated content or audio or images or whatever we would want to put on our slide layers that the learner can reveal. And this is one of the cool things about Storyline is that you can create and program interactive content without having to write a single line of code. And I'll show you how to do that using triggers in Articulate Storyline. So I'll click go back here. And you can see we have a little check mark to indicate that I've viewed that section.
The other thing we can do in Storyline is we can create really interesting and simple and advanced quizzes and assessments or knowledge checks in Storyline. So in this example, we have a basic multiple choice question. So which of the following will not help with your health and wellness? Skipping a meal probably wouldn't help.
So I'll click submit here. And we can see we get some correct feedback. And if I get something wrong, I'll intentionally get this wrong here and click Submit. You can see we can also get some incorrect feedback. I'll go ahead and get this right and click Submit.
There we go. Continue on. And the other cool thing you can do in Storyline is create custom drag and drops.
So in this example, we have a sorting interaction where the learner has to sort which food items are healthy or unhealthy. So obviously our apple is healthy. Bananas are healthy. Donut not so healthy, I guess it depends on the day, whatever that is. And we'll say that is not healthy.
Click submit. Hey, we got it right. And of course, we can have a result slide where it shows how we scored ourselves.
And of course, if you're working with a learning management system, and your course is hosted in a learning management system, then this data can actually be reported back to the learning management system so that you can track how your learners do within your courses, right? So that's a really good example. of a basic course in Articulate Storyline. And I'll show you some of the basics of creating a new project and creating some of those basic slides, some of the presentation slides with the audio, and of course some of the interactive slides. But there's a lot you can do in Articulate Storyline.
So like I said, we're just gonna scratch the surface just to understand how to navigate Storyline and create some basic content. So let's jump over to Articulate Storyline and take a look at the interface. When you first launch Storyline on your computer, this is what you'll see. This is what's known as the start screen. And usually in this area here, this white area here that takes up most of the screen here, about 60% of the screen, this is where you'll usually see new features or announcements that Articulate puts out.
And then over here on the left-hand side, we have our sidebar. And this is where we can create a new project or open our recent projects or... browse for some additional projects.
In this case, I'm just going to go ahead and create a new project. And while this loads, I should mention that Articulate Storyline is a Windows-based e-learning authoring tool. So you have to have Windows in order to run Articulate Storyline. And I will mention this, I am using a Mac.
This is my Mac desktop, but I'm running Windows via Parallels. So if you happen to have a Mac, you can still use Storyline, but you have to go through the process of installing Windows on your Mac, which usually requires parallels, which allows you to emulate Windows on your computer. But if you have a PC and you're using Windows, then you can do that. you'll be just fine.
All right. So we've gone ahead and created a new project in Articulate Storyline. And when you create a new project, it brings you to what's known as Story View.
And I know I'm in Story View because I can see it listed here. It says Story View. And Story View is where you can see a high level overview of your entire project and all of the slides contained within it.
Think of it as, you know, if you were looking at PowerPoint, you see all of your slides there. Story view would be as if you could zoom out from all of your slides and see your full deck with all the little thumbnails of all of your slides in your presentation. That's kind of what story view is in Storyline.
Now, right now, there's not a lot here, right? Because we haven't created anything. But you can see I do have one slide here. It's a blank slide. And I'll show you how we can open that up and edit that here in a moment.
Now, across the top here is what's known as the ribbon. And if you've used any sort of Microsoft Office product, whether it's Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or Excel or any of the other Microsoft products, you're probably pretty familiar with the ribbon and the different tabs that are used within the ribbon. And you'll find that once we start editing slides here in a moment, that using the ribbon in Storyline is almost identical to using the ribbon in PowerPoint.
And I want to reemphasize, if you already know how to do something in PowerPoint, then you already know how to do it in Storyline. 90% of the time, which is fantastic. And then we have some additional stuff here on the right, the triggers, slide properties.
We'll talk about that a little bit later. So I'm going to go ahead and open up this slide here, slide 1.1 here. It's a blank slide.
And now it's taking us into slide view, where we can actually edit our slides. And this is when things start looking very similar to PowerPoint. We have our slide area here.
We have thumbnails for all of our different slides in our project. And then, of course, of course we have the ribbon up here. And the ribbon at the top is where we can insert content, edit content, again, just like you can in PowerPoint.
So under the Home tab is where we can change our fonts and change our paragraph settings. The Insert tab, this is gonna look very similar to PowerPoint where we can insert pictures or we can insert text or shapes or audio or even some interactive objects like buttons and sliders and dials and all sorts of interesting things. And we'll take a look at some of that here. as we work through building some sample content in Storyline. Then we have our Slides tab.
This is where we can insert slides. The Design tab, we can work on the design, transitions, animations. Those are just exactly the same thing as you would have in PowerPoint. And then our View tab and our Help tab.
Of course, we have our slide down here. And then on the right, as I mentioned earlier, we have our Triggers panel. Triggers allow us to program instructions for Storyline.
to tell it what we want it to do and when we want it to do it. And I'll show you an example of that a little bit later. And then we have our slide layers down here.
And then down here at the bottom, we have what's known as the timeline, which allows us to control when different things animate in and out of the screen. And the primary use of the timeline is to create animated content. And we'll take a look at that here in a little bit. Now, before I move forward, I want to show you what... an actual completed course looks like in Articulate Storyline.
So I showed you this demo course on building your health and wellness. Let me show you what that actually looks like in Storyline, the fully completed version of that course. So here I am in that project, and we're here in Storyview.
And this is a really good example of what a completed course looks like in Storyline with all of our individual slides in our project. And as I scroll down here in Storyview, you'll notice something interesting. You'll notice I have different slides grouped in different ways, but I also have slides that are grouped in a non-linear fashion.
This is really cool about Articulate Storyline. You can actually organize your content and your slides in a non-linear way. Unlike PowerPoint, you know, all of your slides are just in a linear way. It goes from one slide to the next to the next, right?
Well, in Storyline, you can actually create experiences, learning experiences that occur non-linearly. So for example, if you wanted to create a branching scenario, maybe the learner makes some sort of decision here in slide 2.3, and it can branch to different slides. So you can create some really interesting interactions using branching here.
Now, as I mentioned a moment ago, you'll see the slides are grouped here. So I have this grouping of slides, and then I have, oops, I have this grouping of slides. These are what are known as scenes in Articulate Storyline.
And scenes are simply a way for you to organize your slides in a meaningful way. So think about it as pages in a book, right? You can think of a book and each page in a book is organized into chapters. And it's very similar in Storyline.
So in Storyline, you have a course with multiple slides. Those are like pages in a book. And scenes are like chapters. Scenes, again, are a way for you to organize stuff in a meaningful way.
So for example, this first scene here is my introduction. Maybe that's chapter one in my course, right? And then if I scroll down, we have scene number two, which is, if I can click on it here to see the title, we'll click here, healthy living. That might be chapter two in my book, right? Scenes are just a way to organize slides in a meaningful way.
And you can organize your course however you want. You can have a lot of scenes. You can have no scenes.
It's really up to you. And then you can see here also we have arrows here to indicate where the learner might go throughout their course. Now, if I open up one of these slides here, I'll just open up this first slide here.
Again, this is going to look and feel very similar to PowerPoint. So I can edit my text here. If I highlight it, I can edit it just like I would in PowerPoint. If I go to this slide here, again, you know, we have images, we have text, and all of this is going to operate just like it would. in PowerPoint.
But the cool thing is that you have a lot of other features in Storyline that allow you to create even more interesting content. So what we're going to do here is I'm going to jump back to our Blink course, and we're going to create this very first slide here, this title slide for managing your health and wellness. Now, when you create a Blink project in Articulate Storyline, it's always my recommendation that you kind of want to establish the look and feel. And there's a lot of different ways you can do that.
You might be working with brand standards that your company has provided you, or you might be creating something totally from scratch. And there's different options to get you up and running with creating your very first course. One scenario might be is that you have some existing content or a template in PowerPoint. You can actually import PowerPoint slides into Articulate Storyline, which would also import all of the master slides. So for example, I could go to the insert tab, or I'm sorry, the slides tab.
and then do import and select PowerPoint. And this would allow me to select a PowerPoint file off my computer and import that directly into Articulate Storyline. Now, for those of you who are familiar with Captivate and importing content from PowerPoint into Captivate, you can't actually edit your slides in Captivate, right?
You'd have to go back to PowerPoint to edit it and then bring it back into Captivate. Well, with Storyline, when you import content from PowerPoint, it actually imports all the text and images into editable objects. However, I rarely do that because it's not always perfect. So I'm not even going to show you that today. That's something you could easily figure out if you had a PowerPoint file that you wanted to import.
I'm usually a bigger fan of creating my content from scratch, even if I have a PowerPoint. Oops, we don't need to restart. We're not doing that. Even if I have a PowerPoint file, I will oftentimes just recreate. those images, those assets, those master slides from scratch by copying and pasting it from the PowerPoint and into Storyline.
Because when you import from PowerPoint, there are times where it doesn't import animations properly, or font and colors and layout can sometimes get messed up. So one of the things you can do in Storyline is you can actually create your own master slides. Just like you can create master slides in PowerPoint. So under the View tab, if I go to Slide Master here, This is where I can actually edit my master slides.
And master slides allow you to create a consistent look and feel for your course that you can apply throughout your project. So for example, let's say I wanted to create a title screen just like I have here in my completed course here. If I wanted to create something like this, I can import my own background and edit the text and I'll do that right now. Let me jump back to Storyline here.
So I'll go ahead and insert an image and I have... Like I said, these are the files I use when I teach people how to use Articulate Storyline. So I already got some graphics here I'm going to use.
And I'm going to import this graphic here. This will be my background. And it's sitting on top of that slide title.
So I'm going to right click and send it to the back, just like you would in PowerPoint. And now I can adjust where I want my slide title here. Maybe I'll put it here.
I'm going to make it left justified. Again, if you already know how to edit text and stuff, In Articulate Storyline, you can do the exact same thing here. Or I meant in PowerPoint. You can do the exact same thing here in Storyline. Maybe I'll change the font.
I'll do like Roboto Black. Maybe I'll make it bigger. And then maybe I'll adjust this placeholder so it doesn't take up so much space, right?
I've built a master slide. It just took a few clicks, just like it would in PowerPoint. Let's create another slide master for a content slide, right?
So here's my slide layout. for title and content and I have another background I'm going to insert so I'll insert another picture from file and we'll do this content slide this is my background here and these are just graphics that I created myself to use for or this, you could use whatever you want. You can insert different images, create your own slide templates, whatever the case might be. Now for my slide title here, maybe I'll make that left justified. I'll make that Roboto black as well.
Maybe I'll make it white and maybe I'll make this a little bit shorter so it doesn't take up so much space and then move this down here so it doesn't overlap with my header, right? There we go. Now I've created a simple content slide. Now, if I close out of my master view, How do I actually apply my master slide that I just created?
Well, how do you apply master slides in PowerPoint, right? Under the home tab, we have the option to apply layout, and here are my master slides. So if I'm creating a title slide, I'll create a title only slide, and now I can title my course or my slide, Managing Your Health and Wellness.
And maybe I'll make that go to a second line like that, and I'll make this a little bit bigger so it's not so small, and there we go. Now I have a simple title slide. Now, before I continue forward, I want to show you one more way that you can use Articulate Storyline to give you kind of a springboard into creating content.
Let's say you don't have your own brand standards or anything to create your own master slides. Or let's say you really struggle with visual design, which is a very common issue that a lot of folks have in our industry. Well, one of the cool things that's included as part of a subscription to Articulate 360 is access to what's known as the content library.
So if I go to my slides tab here, I can actually create new slides from my content library. And the content library is an online repository of templates and graphics and stock photos and characters and icons, all of which that you can use for your projects, even commercial projects that you might be using for clients or projects at work. You don't have to provide attribution.
You can use these however you want. And so for example, if you wanted to start with a template, there's all sorts of different template types from opening screens to title screens to content screens. And you can see there's literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different templates to choose from that you could use to start creating content.
If I went ahead and inserted it, then it would bring that into my project and I can edit that content. So there's also the content library. And we'll revisit that here in a little bit once we start adding some stock images and whatnot. Now, before I move forward, I should save my project. This is another important thing.
Just like you're working in PowerPoint, you wanna save early and often. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit the save button here and I'll save this to my desktop and I'll call it health and wellness. And you'll see it's being saved as a storyline project here.
And you might be wondering, well, does Storyline have an auto-save feature? Well, yeah, sort of. Storyline has what's known as an auto-recovery feature. And what that means is in the background, Storyline is automatically saving your changes every 10 minutes.
And so if Storyline were to crash, you would, when you reopen Storyline, you'll get a window that says, do you want to recover your unsafe changes? And usually you'll be able to recover your work. But keep in mind.
It's doing that only every 10 minutes. And you can adjust it, but that can slow down your computer. So let's say it crashed at 9 minutes and 57 seconds, right?
You would lose 9 minutes and 57 seconds worth of work because it didn't meet that 10-minute threshold. So it works most of the time. So it's an auto-recovery feature.
All right, so we've created a basic title slide here. Now let's create our first content slide, one with some audio. and some animations and some other types of content. So we want to insert a new slide.
Well, how would you do that in PowerPoint, right? There's a lot of different ways you can insert new slides in PowerPoint, and there's a lot of different ways you can insert new slides in Storyline. So what I typically do is I'll simply right-click here in my sidebar here where it shows the thumbnails, and we have New Slide here.
And you can see there's a lot of different types of slides we can insert. We can do some from the Content Library. Again, those are those templates.
We have our own templates, so you can save off your own templates and insert those. We have Team Slides, which is an online repository. If you're on a Ticulit 360 Teams account, you can actually save your slide templates to the cloud and use those amongst your team. Then we have different layouts.
These are our master slides. Then we have graded questions, survey questions, freeform questions, result slides, record screen. We can do all sorts of different content.
That's one way to insert a new slide. Or you can go to the Slides tab here. And there's all of those same options as well.
What I typically do is I right click, do new slide. I'm going to do a basic layout. And this time I'm going to do my content slide here. And what I want to do is I want to recreate what we have here in our introduction for managing your health and wellness or your wellness matters.
where we have some animations, and then we have some images there, and then we have some text animating in and out. So for the slide title, if I come back to my project here, I'll type in your wellness matters. Okay, that's good.
I technically don't need this placeholder here. Just like in PowerPoint, you have all those placeholders that you don't use. So you can just delete those, you don't need it.
And let's start by adding some text to our project. So adding and editing text is really no different than adding and editing text in PowerPoint, right? So if I go to the insert tab, I can add some text here.
Here's a text box. And I'm just going to draw this text here. And I can type whatever I want. And I'll say, after completing this course, you'll learn how to dot dot dot.
And maybe I want some bullet points here. I'll do another hard return bullet point, you know, manage your health and wellness. Increase your mindfulness.
I'm just making these up. And plan better meals. Oh, that means meals, right? And we'll just give those periods because I think that completes the sentence.
I have no idea. I'm horrible with bullet points and periods. So I have my bullet points here.
Now, of course, I can edit this however I want. So maybe you want to make the text a little larger. Maybe you want to change the way this looks. So I'll bold that.
Maybe I'll make it that Roboto black text. Where was that? That's gonna be way down here. Roboto black. And then maybe I wanna change the text color.
I'll use my eyedropper to sample a color just like you can in PowerPoint. And then maybe for my bullet points here, I don't want them to be boring bullet points. So maybe I wanna change them to check marks.
Hey, there we go. Now we have some check marks. And just like you can edit text and PowerPoint, you can edit text in Storyline. All right, let's hit save because I don't want to lose what I've done. Now, what do we want to do next?
Well, let's add some images. Now, there's a lot of different ways I can insert images into my project. Just like you can in PowerPoint, you can insert pictures from file, or you can copy and paste in images, or you can drag images from your desktop or from your computer. But what I want to do is I want to insert some images from our content library.
Again, the content library... You'll see that section here under the insert tab. This allows us to insert different characters, photos, icons, other types of multimedia that I might want to use in my project. So I'm going to insert some photos. And this has a repository of literally millions of photos.
So I'm just going to search a word like wellness, a keyword there. And we'll search here and maybe we'll find some good wellness photos. She looks like she's doing some wellness, whatever that means.
So I'll go ahead and insert that photo. And it puts it on the screen. And let's go insert one more.
I'll insert another photo. And let's do healthy meal. And what looks like a really good healthy meal? I like that one. That's healthy, right?
Insert it. And now we have some stock images. Really nice, high quality stock images.
Now, just like you can resize images. crop images, edit images in PowerPoint. You can do most of the same stuff in Articulate Storyline.
So you'll notice here I have little handles here in the corner where I can resize my images. Again, if you already know how to do it in PowerPoint, you know how to do it in Storyline. I can resize this image here. I can even rotate my images.
So if I wanna rotate this, I can do that. Maybe I wanna rotate her a little bit. Maybe I'll put her down here. You know, I can do all sorts of interesting things. Now, If I have an image selected or any type of multimedia, I get the format tab up here in my ribbon.
And the format tab is where I can edit my image or other multimedia in different ways. So here I can adjust the brightness, contrast, recolor the image. I can also apply different effects.
So if I wanted to apply, say, a frame like that, I can do that same thing to this image here. I'll move it there a little bit. Let's move it down like that. Okay. And then I have different options here for picture shape, border effects.
Maybe I wanted to apply a drop shadow or reflection. Again, you can do all of that here in Storyline. I can also crop the image. So let's say maybe I wanted to make this square like this one.
So I can crop and I can start cropping this image just like that. And I have now a more square image on my slide. So all of the same ways that you can edit and adjust images in PowerPoint, you can do the same thing in... storyline with a few minor exceptions. Like you can't remove a background, you can't blur an image, that's not available to you in storyline.
But for most of the things that you might be doing, you can do that here in storyline. storyline. Alright, so we've created a simple content slide, right?
We have some bullet points, we have some images from our content library. Let's now go ahead and take a look at the timeline. So as I mentioned earlier, the timeline allows us to control when different types of multimedia enter and exit off of our screen. And the timeline gives us a lot of bit of information and I have a whole separate how-to workshop on how to animate graphics in Articulate Storyline using the timeline.
So I'm just going to show you some of the basics of working with the timeline. So the timeline shows us a visual representation of everything that's on our slide and the duration of that item. So by default, our slides are five seconds long in Storyline. And I can see that here because it says five seconds and it says the word end.
And that's how long my slide is. And I can see all of the different items that I have on my slide. Now, if I add additional types of multimedia to my project, then it might extend... the length of my slide. So for example, if I were to insert a video that was a minute long, it would extend the length of the slide to be a minute.
Or in this case, if I were to insert some audio narration, it will extend the length of the slide to accommodate that audio. So I'm gonna add some audio here. And I can do that by going to my Insert tab. And there's a lot of different ways I can insert audio. So for example, I can record my microphone.
So if I wanted to, I could record my own audio directly into Storyline. I can even do text-to-speech audio, which I'll be honest with you, I'm not a big fan of because it sounds quite literally like a robot. Nobody wants to listen to a robot.
But there's still time and place when you might want to use text-to-speech audio just for the sake of mocking something up. In this case, I've gone ahead and created and recorded some audio narration outside of Storyline. So I'm going to insert audio from file. And this is what you would do if maybe you were working with a voiceover artist to record your audio and they provided it to you. So I'll select audio file.
And I'll go to my project file here with my practice files. Here's some audio. I'll do audio 1-2, click open. And you'll immediately notice after it imports, and I'm going to hit save real quickly too, you will see down here on my timeline, it's extended the length of my timeline to, what is it? 25 seconds, just a little over 25 seconds.
And you can see the audio waveform here, and that's on my timeline. And you can see it also added a little icon here off the screen, which is an indicator to me that I have some audio narration. So now I have some audio on my slide. I have some texts, I have some images. Now, what if I wanna preview it?
Well, there's a couple of different ways I can preview my slide. The first one I'm gonna show you is how we can preview just the timeline. So you'll notice down here at the bottom, we have a play and stop button. I'm gonna hit the play button and it always takes like a good 10 seconds before it starts playing here, cause that's loading it.
And you'll hear the audio here in a moment. Here at Health Co., we believe that your health and wellness matters. Even if you're just starting to monitor your overall wellness...
I'll pause that. And you can see I have my playhead here, and that's moving across the screen to preview what's happening in my timeline. Now, the other way to preview a slide is here in the ribbon. No matter what tab you're on in the ribbon, you will notice that towards the end, you have this option for preview. And if I click the preview button, I have a couple of different options.
I can preview the slide, preview the scene, selected slides, or the entire project. In this instance, I'm gonna preview the entire project, and I'm gonna be previewing quite frequently here, because when you preview, it allows you to see what the actual finished product looks like for your learners, right? So I'll preview the entire project, and it's gonna generate it here.
And here's what our project looks like. Now here's our slide area. That's a slide I just created. And then outside of it is our player.
And by default, this is what's known as the modern player in Storyline. And it has this dark colored theme. But we can change that and we can edit that.
I'll show you that a little bit later on. So here's my slide. And if I click the next button, I should have that content slide with the audio. We believe that your health and wellness matters. Even if you're just starting to monitor...
I'll go ahead and mute that here. Now, while we're here previewing, and we'll see some other examples of this here as I preview other slides that we build, and as we build out the rest of this slide, you'll notice up here in the top right corner, we have different options for how we can view our course and the different devices we might be viewing our course on. And this is one of the cool things about Articulate Storyline is that the player in Storyline is mobile responsive. So for example, we can see what the course might look like if the learner is viewing it on a phone. And let me mute that audio here.
And it won't let me mute it because I'm on the phone. So I'll just turn it down like that. All right, we can see what it looked like in landscape mode or on a tablet.
And this is Here's what you need to know about the way Storyline handles mobile devices. The player is responsive, but the slides aren't. The slides will scale up and down according to the device and how much space there is, but it's always going to maintain the aspect ratio. So in this example, my slide has an aspect ratio of 16 by 9. So you'll see if even if I view it on this device like that, or I change it like this, the slide size is always fixed, but the player itself is responsive, right?
Okay. So your courses will work no matter what devices your learners might be viewing them on. All right. So let's go back and continue edit this slide. And to do that, I'm going to go ahead and click up here to close the preview to go back and edit my project.
I'll turn back up my volume because we're going to be working with the audio here on the slide. So we've created a title slide back here in slide 1.1. We've created a, oops, we've created a content slide here.
slide 1.2. We've added some text and some images. We also added some audio. Let's do some basic animations here. So just like you can add animated content or animate objects in PowerPoint, you can also animate objects in Storyline.
So let's say I wanted to animate in this text and these images here, right? So let's start with the images. So I'll select my image here and I see here I have my animations tab selected and the animations work very similar to PowerPoint.
We have entrance animations, exit animations, and of course we have motion paths. For today, we're just going to focus on some basic entrance animations. So let's say we wanted to have our images animate in. To add an animation, I can just click on the little star here. And you can see we have a lot of different animations we can apply.
Let's say we wanted to have it fly in from, I don't know, we'll have it fly in from the right here. And then maybe we'll have this image here flying from the right. And I'll just apply those animations.
Just like that. Now, unlike PowerPoint, Storyline doesn't preview the animation for us right away, but I'll show you how we can see the animations here in a moment. Let's also do the same thing with text.
Maybe we want to add an animation to our text. So I'll do a fade-in animation. All right, so that'll fade in. Now you may be wondering, well, what do these animations look like? Well, let's go ahead and preview the slide and see what they look like.
Now, let me pause this. Give me one second here. Now, you may not have seen those animations happen because they happen so quickly because they happen right at the beginning. And the reason why that is is because we haven't timed out our animations. So if we want to control when our animations happen, that's when we need to use the timeline.
You might have noticed these images over here faded in or flew in from the right. You might have seen this fade in. I'll replay it one more time.
And you kind of see how it happens right there at the beginning. So let me close out the preview and let's focus on timing out our animations. And this is where we use the timeline to do that. So I'm going to open up my timeline again. And this is where we can adjust when we want different things to happen on our screen.
So for example, let's say we wanted these two images to fade in or fly in maybe two seconds or three seconds into the slide. Well, I can do that by simply clicking and dragging that item down to two seconds. And then maybe this one will happen at three seconds, right?
And then we can do the same thing with our bullet points here. Maybe those are going to animate in at, I'm just making this up, let's say 12 seconds, right? Now let's preview what this looks like.
I'm going to preview it here in the timeline. I'll click stop to make sure my playhead here is at back at the beginning. I'll click the play button here and it's just going to go ahead and play. We believe that your health and wellness matters.
Even if you're just starting to monitor your overall wellness, maintaining a balanced life can lead to a happier and healthier you. In this course, you will explore the importance of health and wellness. Okay, I'll stop it there.
Now, of course, my bullet points don't match up with what it's saying in the audio narration because I made those up. But you can see how the different items animated in by me simply adjusting when those different items existed on the timeline. So I'm going to go ahead and click the Save button here. So that's how you can create really basic animated presentation slides that might include text and images and, of course, audio narration. to create a presentation slide.
The next slide I want to show you is how to create a really simple interactive slide using markers. So I'm going to go ahead and add a new slide to my project, but before I do that, I'm actually going to add a new scene to my project. So I'll go back to Story View here, and you can see here, here is my scene that I created. It's untitled, so I'm going to call this Introduction. Introduction.
And you can see here, these two slides already have titles because it automatically recognize the from the title placeholder so it's titled those slides for me. Now let's add a new scene for example maybe the second chapter in our course. So I'm gonna right-click and do a new scene and it's going to create a slide here and we'll call this you know building a healthy meal and let's go ahead and edit this slide here.
Now we're on 2.1 because we're in our second scene first slide and I'm going to apply my layout we'll do my title and content layout. And I'm going to call this healthy meal planning. Again, I'm just making that up.
I don't need that placeholder there. So I'm just going to delete it. There might be times where you want the placeholder. I usually just delete them.
I'm going to collapse my timeline there because I'm not going to be using that on this slide. And I'm going to insert an image of a plate with some food on it. So I'm going to insert an image from my practice files. So I'll do a picture, picture from file. And where is an image here that I want to use?
Healthy meal plate. I'll insert that. And I'm going to put that down here right at the bottom of my screen.
Maybe I'll make it a little bit larger here. Fills up more of my space. Now on this slide, I want to show you how to create a really, really simple interactive slide using markers. Now, if you recall, if I go back to my demo course here and we go to planning a healthy meal. I'm going to build this slide here, at least part of the slide here, with these different markers where the learner can click and reveal some basic content here.
And markers are the easiest, simplest form of interactivity in Articulate Storyline, and you literally can't mess up markers. It's so, so, so simple. So let's say I wanted to add a marker to talk about apples and why apples are so good, right?
To add a marker, I'll just go to my Insert tab, and you'll see my interactive objects here. So let's marker. And I have all these different markers I can choose from. So in this case, I'm just gonna choose one with maybe an information icon. Let's see if we can find that here.
There is my information icon right there. I'll click that one. And now I can click anywhere to add my marker. I'll just put it right here in my apple. And when you add a marker, it's made up of two components.
You have the actual marker. That's the thing the learner clicks on. And then we have our label here where we can add our content.
Adding content is simple. So I'll type in apples. And I'm going to add my text here and say, apples are a really, oh, didn't mean to do all caps there, really great treat for your health. They are.
Yummy, crunchy, crunchy, crunchy, right? I'm not spelling today, crunchy and amazing. Eat more apples today.
Let's see if we can figure out how crunchy works. And you can see if I misspell something, just like PowerPoint, you have spell check. And is it gonna spell check it?
Crunchy, there we go. Now I've added some content to my label and now I can adjust how my label and my marker looks and feels. So you'll notice up here in my format tab, I have different marker styles. So maybe I want my marker to be green and see how it changed it to green there.
And I can do the same thing with my label, right? Maybe I want my label to look like that and I can adjust that. And maybe I want to center this text here and maybe I want to make that bigger and maybe I want to make this bigger.
You can do all of that very easily. using and editing markers. And maybe I'll make this a little bit smaller and maybe I want my label to show up over here. So I'll drag it like that.
And without doing anything else, I've created an interactive marker. So I'll click away and there's my marker. Now, again, you wanna see what it looks like for the learner? We wanna preview it.
So I'll go up here and click preview, preview the slide. And literally how long did that take? That took like a minute.
And you can see, I have my marker, it's pulsing. I hover over it, it shows the word apples. And I can see the apples are a really great treat for your health.
Eat more apples today, right? That's how easy it is to create interactive markers. And of course, if I wanted to, I can just click on this, right click, copy, and I'll paste it on my screen and it creates a second one.
And now we can talk about, you know, onions. And you know, I really love onions. Not all people love onions, but Tim sure does. Eat more onions.
They're good, right? And I'll maybe put my label right there in the middle. And again, if I preview the slide, now I have a second marker for onions.
Easy peasy to create some basic interactive content. So that's markers in Storyline. I want to show you one more way you can create interactive content.
This one gets to be a little bit more custom. buttons and slide layers and triggers. And this is just kind of a precursor to show you some of the more intricate content you can create in Storyline.
And I'll have a separate how-to workshop on creating interactive content elsewhere and later. I'm going to add one more new slide. I'll right-click, do a new slide. I'm going to do a basic layout. And I'm going to do a title and content slide.
And for this slide, we're going to build out this one. The three components of a healthy life with these icons and these buttons here. So I'll go back to Storyline. We'll title this slide, the three components of a healthy, I don't know if that's how you spell components, components, oh I spelled healthy wrong, that's fun. Healthy, did I use the word components?
Yeah, I think so. Wait, where am I going? Components, yeah, it is today, if it's not.
Okay, cool. I don't need the placeholder, so I'm gonna delete it there. And on this screen, what I wanna do is I want to have some of these icons and then some buttons.
So let's go get some icons from our content library. And we're going to go to our insert tab. Again, the content library, that repository where we can get different assets. I'll do icons.
And I already searched up healthy meal earlier. Let's search fitness, see what comes up. And we're gonna go with this one. I'll insert that for our fitness logo icon.
I'll put that there. Let's insert one more or two more icons, fitness. What are the other ones we need to do? Let's do like heart health and then food. Oops, close that.
Didn't mean to open that. We'll do heart and highlight that text. Okay.
I want it to be like in an icon. Let's do... Heart health, let's see what comes up. Hey, there we go, I like that one.
Yeah, we'll just go with that one. Hit insert, it's gonna be for heart, and then we'll do one more, icon, we'll do diet, and it's gonna take its time here, and let's go with that one, that works, okay. Now, the cool thing about icons in Storyline is that we can change the color of them, right? So for this one, maybe I wanna change the shape fill to be this blue color. And maybe for our heart health, I want that to be a red color.
And maybe for our diet, I want that to be a green color. And I can do all of that here. And if I want to, I can select all three of them and I can start increasing their size just like that. And now I have three different icons. Let's click and move this guy over here.
Move our heart here in the middle. And we'll move that person heart icon or the fitness icon over there. And of course, if I wanted to, I can select all of them and use my align and distribute tools. Again, just like PowerPoint.
And I'll distribute those so that it's perfect. And maybe I'll make this one go out here a little bit more just to give it a little bit more breathing room. And of course, you could do this all day long to try and create the most perfect design.
Let's redistribute those. Perfect. Okay.
Now let's add a button. And we're just gonna focus with this fitness one here to create a simple pop-up window using our slide layer. So we wanna create this interaction where the learner clicks, gets a pop-up window, all right?
So I'll come back here and to insert a button, it's just like inserting a shape. So if I go to my insert tab here, we have interactive objects and we have buttons here and they all operate the same way no matter what they look like. Some, I like the rounded buttons here, so I'll select that and I'll click and drag to add my button here and we'll title this to be this like that.
I'll title it your fitness and we have a button. And of course I could customize the way our buttons look and feel. Maybe I want my button to look like a green button or maybe let's match this blue color here.
So let's do the button fill. Let's do it like this dark blue color, just like that. All right.
Now buttons are interactive objects and that means they're going to have they're going to look and feel differently depending on how the learner interacts with it. So if I preview the slide, you'll see that if I hover over it, it doesn't really do anything. But if I click down, you see how it creates that little border.
That's what's known as states and storyline and states allow us to change the way different objects look depending on how the learner interacts with it. And they're typically used for interactive objects. So if I wanted to, for example, and go to my states panel here in the timeline, And you can see I can change the way the button looks when the learner hovers over it, when they click down on it, when it's visited, when it's disabled. So in this example, let's say I wanted to change the button to change to a different color when the learner hovers over it. It's sort of like a visual indicator that it's interactive, right?
Maybe I want it to do... Just a subtle shade of blue. Now I'll click Done Editing States. And if I preview this slide here, you'll see that when I hover over my button, it changes its look and feel, and it's a visual indicator that it's interactive. And if I click down on it, we get that effect there as well.
And of course, I can do a lot more with editing my states. All right, so we've created a button. Now let's create our pop-up window.
So what we want to have happen is when the learner clicks the button, we get our pop-up window. This is where we use slide layers in Storyline. Slide layers allow us to essentially create multiple slides on top of a slide. So we can see our slide layers panel down here in the bottom right hand of our screen and this is our base layer here. This is our slide and I can add additional slide layers on top of it.
So I can create a new slide layer and I'm gonna call this slide layer your fitness because that's what I want it to display when the learner clicks the button. And now I can put anything I want on the slide layer and it will display when I choose to tell Storyline to reveal the slide layer. So for example, if I wanted to, I could insert a shape.
I'm just gonna make this up. Let's do a shape. I'll do a rounded rectangle here.
I'm just gonna draw that here and I'll kind of center it there. We'll adjust the radius of this corner so it's not so big. Maybe I'll change the fill of it, give it a white fill.
Again, this is all very similar to PowerPoint in terms of editing shapes. I can even give it a drop shadow just like you would in PowerPoint. So there's a little drop shadow, gives it some depth of field.
And let's say we wanted to add some text to it. So I'll add some text. I'll go to insert text, type in your fitness. And again, I can edit this, maybe make it bigger, make it that blue color, maybe make it...
the Roboto black font. Maybe I also wanna insert an illustration maybe, right? So I'll insert, let's do an illustration from our content library.
Actually, you know what? Let's do a character. These are another cool thing you can have in Storyline are different characters. So we're going to do a character, we'll do a photographic character. And I like this guy here, Joseph.
He looks very healthy and we're gonna change his pose. And he's gonna be really, really happy about his fitness. So let's do a really cool happy pose, insert that. He's very proud of his fitness. So we're gonna make him really big.
So we know that he's very happy about his fitness. And then maybe I wanna add some text and say, are you as fit as this cool guy here on the screen? Well, maybe.
You should work on your fitness, right? Of course, I'm just making this up, right? And there we go.
We have a slide layer. Now, how do we make it so that when the learner clicks this button, it reveals the slide layer? Well, if we preview our slide here, you'll see that it doesn't work.
And I'll show you. It doesn't work. Well, that's because we have to connect our button to our slide layer.
And we have to tell Storyline what should Storyline do when the learner clicks this button. And this is where triggers come into play. And triggers, as I mentioned earlier, triggers allow us to tell Storyline what we want it to do and when we want it to do it.
And what's special about triggers is it allows us to essentially write code without having to know how to write code. And so we can see our triggers panel over here. And if I want to create a trigger for this button, it's really simple.
I'll just create a new trigger, and we get our trigger wizard here. And this is where we can write our instructions. So all triggers are made up of actions and events. The action is what we want it to do. The event or the when is when we want it to do it.
And then there's conditions, and that's more of an advanced thing, separate how-to workshop on variables and conditions. Check for that on my YouTube channel. Okay, so the action, what do we want it to do?
Well, we want it to show the slide layer. So if I click on this link here, we can see we have action, show layer. What layer do we want to show?
Well, we only have the one slide layer for your fitness because that's the only one we created. So it defaults to that. When do we want it to do it? When the timeline starts?
No. We want to do it when the user clicks. You see that event here. There are a lot of other events, but when user clicks on what? Our button.
And we only have this one button here, right? Now I'll click OK. And now I have a trigger, a set of instructions that tells Storyline to do that.
So I'll preview the screen. I'll preview the slide. And if I click on my button, hey, there's my slide layer.
Now, there's a lot of other things I can do here. What if I want the learner to be able to exit out of the slide layer? Well, I can add another button here. So here's what I'm going to do.
I'm actually going to copy this button. Copy this button. I'll go to my slide layer here and I'll paste that button here.
And I'll change the text for it. And I'll say go back. And you'll see when I copied and pasted the button, it also brought over the trigger.
And I can edit my trigger here. So what action do I want it to take now? I don't want it to show a layer.
I want it to actually hide a layer. What layer is it going to do? Hide this layer when the user clicks what? Our button there.
So now if I preview this slide. Click your fitness. There's our layer.
Click go back. And now I can go back and forth, back and forth to show and hide that slide layer. Now I'll do one more cool thing on this slide layer because when I'm on the slide layer, there isn't a whole lot of visual. delineation between what's in the background and what's in the foreground.
So for example, if I really wanted the learner to focus in on the slide layer, one technique you might apply is inserting a whole shape on top of your slide layer, just like this. And And maybe I will give it a shape fill of black. I'll turn off the outline.
And maybe I want to adjust the transparency of this. So I'll right click, format shape, just like you would in PowerPoint. And I'll adjust the fill transparency.
Maybe I'll make it 50% transparent there. Click close. And I'll right click and send it to the back. And it's going to send it to the back of the slide layer, but not the whole slide.
So you'll see what this looks like. Now if I preview the slide. I click my button and there's my pop-up window and I have this transparent background on the slide layer so it really focuses in on the pop-up window and I'll go back and now I'm back to my base layer and I can duplicate all of that for if I wanted to create a button for your heart health or your diet with different slide layers, I can do that as well. So I can have multiple slide layers that the learner can click and reveal. So that's a really good example of creating a custom interaction, a click to reveal interaction using buttons and slide layers.
slide layers and triggers and storyline. And you can create all sorts of custom interactions with those different tools. So I'm gonna go ahead and click save here. And I'm gonna show you how to create one more slide type. And that's a quiz question and storyline.
And then I'll show you how to customize the player as well. Quiz questions are a really great way that you can test your learner's knowledge and again, create opportunities for interaction. So I'm gonna insert a new slide. And this time I'm gonna do a graded question, a question slide here.
And creating quiz questions in Story Land is super, super easy because Story Land does all of the work for us. We just have to fill out a form. And you can see there's several different question types.
I also have several different question templates to change the way the questions look and feel. In this case, I'm just gonna do a simple multiple choice question and I'll click insert. And it's gonna generate a new slide for me. And It's going to bring me here to what's known as form view for my question.
And this is where I can edit and configure my question. So let's say the question is, which of the following items can affect your health and wellness? Let's say your fitness, your income.
your mental health mental mental mental health I cannot spell today and we'll do your diet right or no wait which of the following items can not effect because it's only a multiple choice. So your income, we'll say that's the correct answer, right? So I've entered the question, I've added options, and I have some feedback down here. So I can change what happens when they get it right or when they get it wrong. I can also adjust the points and scoring system.
And up here across the top, I can change how it shuffles the answer, the number of attempts. So maybe I want to give it more than one attempt. And now I get some try again feedback down here.
it's really, really easy to configure questions. And without doing anything else, if I go over here and I click slide view, I can now see what my quiz question looks like. And of course, I can adjust how it looks and feels just like any other slide. So for example, if I wanted to go to my home tab and apply a layout, I'll do my content layout here.
And I have to do some adjusting, obviously. Here, let me delete this. Oops, delete that. Maybe I'll move my questions down here or my options and I can move my question around here a little bit.
And maybe I want to, this time we'll insert an illustration, right? We'll insert an illustration and I'll search wellness. And there's all sorts of interesting illustrations that we might use here.
Some of them are cheesier than others, which is to be expected. But let's go with this. That person's being very well. I will insert the image here. And now we have an image on our quiz question or illustration.
And I've gone ahead and created a simple quiz question in a few clicks. Now, if I preview this slide, it's going to take a moment to preview it. Here's my quiz question.
So which of the following items cannot affect your health and wellness? So your income. And I'll click submit down here. And we got it correct.
And of course, if I replay this slide, and I'm going to get it intentionally wrong. Okay, try again. Okay, your income. And now I get it right. And I can create multiple quiz questions just like that.
All right, the final thing I want to show you is how we can customize the player in Storyline. So as I mentioned earlier, the player is everything that encompasses our slides. And right now, this is the default player.
It's called the dark themed player, but we can change that. So if I go up here in my ribbon, I have the option for player. And if I click on this, it opens up my player settings.
And you can customize just about every aspect of the player. So I can choose whether or not I want there to be a menu in my course. I can change the title.
I can add a logo. So if I wanted to add a logo for my practice files, which I have here, let's find my logo, Healthco logo, I can add that to my player. And that's gonna be up here on my menu.
I can add a seek bar. I can add search or play and pause button. And you can see it's adding all of these items to my player. And of course I can customize the menu. I can include resources and attachments.
I can add a glossary. and you do all sorts of interesting things to customize the player. I can also change the colors and effects. So for example, if I wanted to go with a light-themed player, I can do it just like that.
I can edit the fonts, the accent color. Maybe I want the color to be green. You'll see it edits that there just like that.
So you can customize the player to match your branding very, very easily. And of course you can save this off, save it as a template and use it and share it with your team. So I'll go ahead and click OK. And now I've gone ahead and edited my player. So now I'm going to go ahead and preview the entire project here so we can kind of see what we just built.
All right, so here's my course, Managing Your Health and Wellness. You can see my edited player here. And of course, I can view what this course might look like on different devices just like that. Go back to our desktop view and I'll click next here.
Here at HealthCo. We believe that your health and wellness matters. Even if you're just starting to monitor your overall wellness, maintaining a balanced life can lead to a happier and healthier you. In this course, you will explore the importance of health and wellness.
Of course, I can pause the slide just like that with my player now. If I click next, I'll go to this slide here. Here we have our markers slide here where the learner can click and reveal those markers. Here's that custom interaction I built where we can reveal our slide layer.
And of course, we have our basic quiz question here that the learner can test their knowledge with and get feedback. So that's how easy it is to really get up and running with Articulate Storyline. Now, the final thing I'll show you before we finish out here today is how do you share and publish your course, right? So there's a lot of different options for publishing and sharing your course with others.
If I click the publish option here, you can publish your course for the web and host on the web. You can publish for a learning management system and all sorts of other options. One of the really cool features available to you is Review360 when you have a subscription to Articulate360.
Review360 allows you to publish your course to the web and generates a link that you can send to others where they can review and give you feedback. And it's a really fantastic option when you're working collaboratively with different stakeholders and subject matter experts. So I'm going to go ahead and publish this to Articulate Review. And it's just going to take a moment here. And then what it's going to do after it publishes and generates everything is it's actually going to upload it to my Articulate 360 account automatically.
Give it one second here. There we go. I'm going to click View Project here.
And now it's going to take me to Articulate 360 and Articulate Review. And here is my project. And what's great about this is I can share it from here.
I can generate this link here, and I can share it with anybody in the world. And what's great about this is if you're working with reviewers or stakeholders, they can actually provide feedback on your project. So for example, if they didn't like this image, they can say, Okay, can we replace those people on the right? Add a comment, I'll get notified and I can work through those edits. And of course, if I wanted to, I can disable comments and have no comments at all and just share a link to the course where somebody can view it online.
So that is a beginner's guide to articulate storyline. And if you're wanting to learn a lot more about Articulate Storyline, make sure to check out all of my other how-to workshops on different features of Articulate Storyline, everything from animations to working with variables and conditional triggers and creating interactive content. Those are all available on the YouTube channel. And of course, if you want a comprehensive how-to and guide on Articulate Storyline, you can join us inside the eLearning Designers Academy, where we have 12 plus hours. video-based content that walks you through how to build this course and how to build other courses and build your own course for your sample project.
So you can check that out at elearningacademy.io. All right, I want to thank you so much for watching today's how-to workshop, and I hope you learned that getting up and running with Articulate Storyline really isn't all that intimidating. So of course, if you happen to be watching this on YouTube, as I mentioned at the top of the video, make sure to like, subscribe, and hit that bell button so that you'll get alerted the next time I publish a video like this one. And of course, make sure to join us inside the e-learning designers community, where you can check out all of my upcoming live events and how-to workshops, and of course, connect, network, and learn from others who are working to grow their e-learning skills and their careers.
So thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned something new, and until next time, I'll see you around.