North Texas Articulate User Group

A little over one year ago, I set wheels in motion to begin an Articulate user group in the DFW area. Based on a conversation with David Anderson of Articulate at an October 2012 workshop, he inspired me to gather a like-minded group of individuals for the purposes of nerding out on what we do for a living. Ok, maybe that was MY purpose for wanting an Articulate user group.  At any rate, for whatever intrinsic value I may receive from assembling this group, it has far exceeded my expectations.

One year later, I'm happy to report we are a group of 75 strong and have hosted 5 meetings thus far. Our conversations are lively, our discussions are informative, and our quest for learning better ways to create elearning is never ending.

We started of 2015 in February with Cyndi McCarty of NCR showing us how to effectively use color palettes and themes in Storyline. The May meeting was also a show of NCR greatness when Rebecca Fritzson taught us the finer points of making things "pretty." August's meeting was a treat with a guest appearance of an Articulate Community Forum's rock star--Ashley Chiasson. She walked us through the importance of creating an elearning portfolio and I followed up with the 'how-to' portion of the evening highlighting website building tools like this one (Weebly) and Wix.

For our final meeting of 2015, we deconstructed non-elearning inspiration. We discussed how each interaction could be recreated using Storyline. In my research to lead this session, I used David Anderson's curated elearning examples site. Since the group's Storyline experience ranges from still surfing the trial versions and watching tutorial videos to very experienced elearning experts, I broke up the examples into groups: easy, intermediate, and advanced.

Here are some of the sites we visited:

• Will You Be Selected on a Jury? - an interactive survey that asks questions and judges whether or not you'd be selected to serve based on your answers.
  

Group Discussion: Recreating this survey would depend on detailed discussions with subject matter experts and a well mapped out decision tree showing how each answer would affect the decision. The selection meter (shown below) could be created using SL2 sliders or even one repeated bar with states/triggers/variables for those without. This interactive survey is a fantastic way to highlight branching scenarios that could be easy (technologically speaking) to recreate in Storyline, but perhaps advanced to create depending on access to subject matter experts.

Source: New York Times (see link in description)

• The Downside of the Boom - a news article that portrayed the unfortunate side effects of life in a boomtown. About 20% into the article there is a various assortment of charts and graphs, one being an interactive map of North Dakota and the well site locations throughout the state. When a spot is hovered over, the information is presented.
  

Group Discussion: Everyone was astounded by the amount of time it would take to build that in Storyline. Of course this is an example that could be applied to many more uses than just oil well locations. It could be used for an interactive city map, an office tour, scatter plot data, and so many other visual displays. Recreation of the map in Storyline would of course require the data, an image, and either viable hotspots or the markers with callouts.

Source: New York Times (see link in description)

• JFK Assassination Timeline: In a subject near and dear to my heart, we looked at an interactive illustration of the events leading up to President John F. Kennedy's assassination in downtown Dallas in 1963. As the viewer advanced through the story's narrative, the image of the car moved through the streets.
  

Group Discussion: Everyone was excited that motion paths could be used for this recreation. Motion paths paired with layers or state changes.

Source: Washington Post (see link in description)

• Hangman: One of the most popular deconstruction topics of the night was Hangman, by former Articulate employee, Jeanette Brooks. As you can imagine, the player is tasked with trying to guess letters for the 5-letter word before running out of Hangman parts to draw.
  

Group Discussion: We had a very lively debate surrounding the creation of this game and how it was built. We guessed it was all states, variables, and triggers, but oh so eloquently done. At meeting time, we did not have access to the Story file to uncover the mystery, but we've since been provided access and I'm happy to say we were fairly correct with our assumptions.

Source: Articulate Website, creator Jeanette Brooks (see link in description)

Our group was extremely impressed with the beloved scenario queen, Cathy Moore's, brilliant military scenario and we simply marveled at the beauty of the interaction since the file build is a little more basic with new slides linking to related answers to the questions. While the file build likely doesn't require advanced techniques, such as variables, this course is the perfect example of extremely hard work with subject matter experts to determine the various outcomes and required a decision map, which she shares on the blog post linked above.

Other great examples we viewed were Sudoku and Zombie College. We also talked through a fellow member's multiple question on one slide issue. All-in-all, we had a great meeting with a lot of great dialog. See you all in 2016!