Ask instructional designers if they are happy with engagement levels for their e-learning, and they will often answer: “No, but it’s the best we can do with time and budget.”
Some will lament that they have amazing ideas for e-learning that dazzles, if only they had access to a team of designers, animators, and a suite of high-end production tools.
They’re not wrong. With the right resources, timeline, and set up, it’s easy, if expensive, to create dazzle.
But what if you don’t have those? Are you really sentenced to producing ho-hum e-learning that is more of a chore than a joy for learners to complete?
We don’t think so. In fact, we know that fun and engaging courses can be produced by a small team, or even a single person, with access to rapid authoring tools, graphic smarts, and the ability to think outside the box.
The secret weapon
A few days ago, one of our IDs showed me how I, who cannot draw a convincing stick figure, could create simple “explainer video” animations using Storyline (our rapid authoring tool of choice). If you’re good with Storyline, your mind has already leapt to how this could be done. Maybe you’ve done something similar.
Or, you might be slowly shaking your head in disbelief. If so, here is the secret:
Learn to code.
“Aha!” you say. “I knew code was involved! Count me out.”
Well, yes and no. We all know that if you want to extend Storyline’s capabilities, you can (ugh) add snippets of JavaScript. Here’s the revelation: you don’t have to do that.
Storyline, like all rapid authoring, is a code-writing system. As you move objects around on the screen, create states and layers, and assign triggers to make the magic happen, you are giving Storyline instructions to write the code that will render it to life.
To make the most of what Storyline (or Captivate, for that matter) has already built in, it helps to understand how code works. This is how the animation referred to earlier was created. No additional code was necessary to persuade Storyline to create a rather elaborate animation.
No, you don’t have to code. But you do have to think like a coder.
Learning to code gets you to think in conditional statements (‘if… then…else’) in sequence, which is all Storyline triggers are. Once you understand this, you can leap out of the box to set triggers that will create the experience you are imagining. Learning to code also teaches you to think in terms of variables, what kind to create, where and how to create them, and how to get them to work together to make Storyline do more.
It’s easy to find coding courses online, for free. You’ll be surprised how knowing just a bit about coding can change your thinking about what’s possible in your rapid authoring tool.
A case study for pushing the limits
Evidence of the value of thinking like a coder is a game that our Creative Director, Kai Dean, created some months back. It enables the learner to move game pieces around a circular board based on randomized dice throws when they answer questions correctly.
The game won the DemoFest Best of Show Vendor award at the Learning Solutions Conference 2023 against dozens of competitors.
But the greater reward was to have someone from Articulate genuinely ask, “How did you do that?”
No one thought Storyline could do any such thing without additional code. But in Kai’s hands, it most certainly did, and beautifully.
Here’s the takeaway. Whether you use Storyline or some other advanced rapid authoring tool, don’t dismiss the software’s capabilities before you have completely thought them through. Storyline will not turn you into Pixar or help you take your learner through a timey-wimey universe of special effects. There are limits. But those limits are much farther out than you might have dreamed.
Instead of dismissing a dazzling idea as undoable, take a few minutes (or an hour or a day) to think through how you might bend your tools to your will to produce what you have in mind.
Or… you could work with us!
At Strategy to Revenue, our design and development team have a solid background in media design and production as well as instructional design and the expertise necessary to make the most of our rapid authoring tools. We analyze and plan using established instructional design principles and processes. Then we push the limits of our resources and tools to design and develop courses that are engaging, effective, surprisingly budget friendly — and often dazzling.
Are you concerned that, while your learning content looks great, it isn’t having any impact?
Are you able to scale up your projects, or are you limited by your supplier?
Try a new way ➡️ visit https://www.strategytorevenue.com/learning-content/
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