I was so enthralled with the immediate results we saw from Articulate Presenter (an authoring tool) after we began using it several weeks ago that I wanted to share its capabilities with this e-Learning Guild audience.
Then I saw Greg Kearsley’s recent article on “The e-Learning Department of One.” In that article he identified several problems and issues that a small e-Learning shop faces. The appearance of Greg’s article was a nice coincidence with my excitement about Articulate. He provided a great framework for showing how this new tool is helping us, so I’ll refer to Greg’s article throughout this one.
Let me be very clear from the start: I am writing this from the view of a user — I have no ties to the vendor other than being an enthusiastic customer, and I’m the one who initiated this article. I did invite the vendor to review a draft for any technical corrections, but until then they didn’t know about this article.
Problems and strategies
As Kearsley pointed out, a small e-Learning department faces challenges that include limited budget and resources, lack of management support, lack of IT support, time needed to implement and evaluate, and nobody to consult with.
In our case, we recently went from a department of two to a department of one — me! We do have a few performance consults/trainers within the company, but a “power SME” and I have been the only ones developing online instruction — until now. We develop internal training for employees and managers. We do not develop training for external use.
I am an instructional designer at heart and not a computer guru. I don’t like programming unless I have to, and I don’t like solving technical problems in courseware. Sure, I do these things out of necessity to the point that some of my clearly naïve friends call me a “techie,” but what I like to do best is to help solve people performance challenges by designing effective job aids and instruction. I like designing online instruction because it can provide learners some advantages that elude them in environments where it is difficult to take them away from their job for training.
A couple of years ago we chose an authoring tool that, while very powerful, just seemed to require more technical know-how than I felt was necessary for a lot of the cut-and-dried training that we need to develop. So during this time I’ve been continually scanning the marketplace for a tool that would be simple and elegant to use, at least for some of the things we need to deliver. Our company is a medium size, entrepreneurial one that moves quickly and doesn’t expect perfection right out of the gate. We often need to pump out training pieces quickly, without much time for development and pilot testing. These pieces don’t need many bells and whistles and they often have a short shelf life, so an authoring tool that would provide simple development and engaging delivery would greatly enhance my individual productivity. If it could enable instructors and business process SMEs to leverage the PowerPoint presentations they produce as a normal course of their work, then that would give us even more leverage.
Voila! I found what I was looking for in Articulate Presenter. Let me be careful to point out that I conducted neither an exhaustive nor a scientific comparison of other products. What I did was to occasionally check Websites, visit vendor’s displays at the few conferences I attended, and try a few free download trials over those two years. If I ran into any problem at all in downloading or running the product, I quit that evaluation.
I think I even reviewed Articulate during that time. I became very interested when Articulate Engage joined the suite, for a total of three integrated products. When I downloaded the free trial earlier this year, I was amazed at the simplicity and elegance of what I could produce. I liked several features at once, but the ones that stood out were the ability to author in PowerPoint (zero learning curve for other trainers and SMEs!), the ease of adding and editing voice narration (right on my laptop, which I can take into a sponsor’s or SME’s office), output in Flash (fewer end user issues), and very cool “engines” for visually engaging delivery mechanisms such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), exploded view diagrams, step-by-step procedures, and a host of question types. In addition, the user can publish from the same source for LMS or Web-hosted delivery, CD, or even Word documents.
After studying the Articulate Web site and then downloading a trial version, I showed some coworkers what I had produced in the first half-day. They wanted to get it too! I published a couple of short demos to see how it would work in our LMS and on our intranet site. Yes, I hit a couple of snags, but the Articulate technical support folks were quick to set me straight, and it all worked!
Budget and management support
Greg Kearsley mentioned budget and lack of management support as two constraints. Since we already have an authoring system, sure, I had a budget for another one: zero! But I learned in a previous life to hook up with key projects, so I showed Articulate’s capabilities to the sponsor of an important project. He immediately agreed to purchase the first license for me so his project would reap the benefit. After the head of IT saw it, he agreed to buy enough licenses for the other trainers (who previously had not developed any online training directly) and two “power SMEs” who communicate changes frequently to their respective audiences. Articulate is not just a training tool, it’s also a communication tool.
In a nutshell, what I like about the Articulate suite is that it enables me to do what I like best — design instruction — and not spend much time on programming or troubleshooting. Its functions are intuitive to use for both developers and end users. It has the right elements to be very useful instructionally, with fewer limiting qualities than some products I previewed. And it has enough variety and animation to be interesting without being complex to design or use. Finally, its price is very reasonable.
Getting started
This will not be a “trip down menu-y lane.” Instead, I’m going to reconstruct the way I jumped into this tool as a new user with emphasis on how its features benefit us, rather than describing how to use it. But first, a little background on the three main components.
Articulate has three components: Presenter, Engage, and Quizmaker. Presenter is the anchor and is a Power-Point plug-in. Figure 1 shows the Articulate drop-down menu as it appears on the PowerPoint toolbar. Articulate Presenter enhances PowerPoint presentations with easy-to-record audio narration that ties automatically to screens or animated components. These features appear together in the top half of the drop-down menu.
Figure 1 Articulate Presenter drop-down menu
Articulate Engage is a toolbox that enables you to quickly add content to ten interactive “engines” such as FAQs, exploded view diagrams, step-by-step processes, etc. You can incorporate these into the presentation or use them as standalone pieces for communicating or training.
Articulate Quizmaker is similar to Engage except the “engines” are a variety of question types commonly used in training: multiple choice, true/false, matching, and “click-on” hot spots. Again, as the developer you only have to worry about entering the content and selecting a few options. You can import questions into presentations individually as embedded questions, or as an intact quiz or test. Unlike Engage, which becomes an integral part of the presentation file, Quizmaker modules are separate folders or files, individually called by reference from within a presentation. Quizmaker also contains a set of common survey questions; I have yet to use these.
Here is how I started using the Articulate suite. The first feature I wanted to use was audio. We had not used much sound in our online learning courses, in part because it seemed to be a big deal. We had to schedule talent, get them and our media guru into our sound room, record the audio, and then import it into our authoring system by attaching files to specific objects on-screen. There may be a simpler way that I’m not aware of yet.
Articulate Presenter, on the other hand, makes audio a snap. With a headset/microphone plugged into your computer, you just click “Record Narration ...” on the drop-down menu.. Figure 2 shows an example of what you see. At this point, start speaking. The button caption changes to “Stop Recording” so you don’t have to move the cursor — just click the same button when you’ve finished the narration for that slide.
Figure 2 Record Narration controls appear on the bottom portion of the slide as you narrate, so that you do not have to move the cursor.
You can immediately play back the recording and do an instant retake if necessary. The recording automatically ties to the screen unless you have animations, in which case each recording is tied to the animated objects. In this case, the Record button changes to “Next Animation” until you’re on the last one, and then it changes to “Stop Recording.” When you play the slide, the narration automatically synchronizes to the appearance of each animated object. You don’t have to give it a thought.
I should add that using narration raised the question of whether we should have the voice narrative repeat the text on screen verbatim, or make the narration text different from the screen text. I’m sure there is research or guru advice; our early tests suggest that verbatim is best, with just a word changed here and there for added emphasis or clarification. However, if the bullets are truly summary, and we want folks to get the bulk of the content from the audio, we write the script in the PowerPoint speaker notes to make it accessible to the hearing impaired. Articulate has a button above the slide list on the left side of the screen to see those notes.
Behind the scenes, Articulate Presenter saves each slide’s narrative as a separate file in both WAV and MP3 formats. So if you need to re-record the narrative for a slide, it’s easy to replace just that — you don’t have to re-record the entire presentation! This is good because we found that even with short segments it’s often necessary to do several takes before getting a “keeper.” Articulate recommends scripting all the recordings first, but of course we impatient users don’t do that, so we pay the penalty by doing retakes!
Keep in mind I’m doing this right at my workstation — or the sponsor’s, or the SME’s — not in a recording studio! When we would be bothering others, we’ve used a nearby office. Articulate recommends using a microphone with a USB port. I’ve been using the microphone I had on hand, which connects to the mini-phone jacks. This arrangement has worked fine with the exception of a steady hum that I’ve managed to suppress by adjusting recording levels (with help from Articulate’s responsive support team). I did find one convenience with the phone jack variety of headset: when taping SMEs or business sponsors, it was convenient to have only the microphone jack plugged in. This way, the SMEs or sponsors could record their narrative, then immediately play it back through my laptop’s speakers. They could then decide if they wanted to keep it or do a retake, slide by slide. The combination of Articulate Presenter, a laptop computer, and a headset/microphone, makes it easy to add key executives’ or SMEs’ voices to presentations; and it’s convenient in terms of technical ease, time, and place. Learners have already expressed pleasure at hearing the CEO’s emotion in key messages.
I won’t go into all the technical details here, but refer back to Figure 1 and notice the Timeline Audio Editor option in the Articulate drop-down menu. You have virtually all the power of a full audio editing suite in this option. The suite gives you a visual wave form of the sound, which you can edit (using standard Microsoft Windows interface and keyboard shortcuts), and adjust volumes, etc., with ease. This feature enabled me to correct a few glitches in a key executive’s recording without having to infringe on his time to re-tape those segments. Both in the initial Record box and in the Audio Editor, recordings are time-synched. The Audio Editor also shows page and animation breaks. Speaking of animations (such as bullets flying in one by one), I found it much easier to build the animations into the PowerPoint presentation before doing the audio recording, but you can synchronize them after the fact if necessary.
