How e-Mersion Earned Gold in the Articulate Guru Awards

Oct142010
Written by Jeanette — Posted in Guru Awards

This guest blog post is by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks.


Dave Richards and the folks at e-Mersion know a thing or two about building award-winning e-learning. Last week, they took home the Gold Award in the Articulate Guru competition for the second time in a row! Their 2010 entry, Diabesity, is every bit as compelling as the CPR course which earned them a Gold Award in 2009.

e-Mersion built the Diabesity course as a proof-of-concept for HealthStartIQ, an organization that provides health and wellness research, awareness, education, and enablement programs. They target at-risk youth, employee populations, and people who are socially or economically disadvantaged.

e-Mersion’s goal was to create a powerful, memorable pilot course in just a few weeks, with a limited budget. Take a look at what they delivered:

View the Diabesity course

Can You Tell What’s Custom Flash and What Isn’t?

e-Mersion is well known for artfully blending rapid e-learning with custom-developed Flash. And though the Diabesity course certainly has a polished feel, custom Flash appears only twice in this course: in the video intro, and in the rollover accents on the menu slide. Everything else was done in PowerPoint and Articulate Studio ’09.

Even the cool sliding-picture effect on slide 14 was created with just simple PowerPoint animations — and it all converts nicely to Flash when published from Articulate Presenter.

The course is a great demonstration of how powerful rapid e-learning can be!

You probably noticed that e-Mersion also used the Articulate Presenter SDK (available free to Articulate customers who have joined the Platinum Membership Plan) to develop their own unique and handsome player, branded with the HealthStartIQ logo. It’s not surprising that they did a fantastic job, since e-Mersion specializes in building not only great-looking Articulate-based courses, but also custom Articulate players.

For folks who prefer not to go the custom player route, you’ll note that the course also works great with the standard Articulate Presenter player. Here’s a look:

View the Diabesity course with the standard Articulate Presenter player

Cool Features of the Diabesity Course

Here are a few of the many things that impressed the judges:

Intuitive Navigation and Branching
A clean, simple design makes it really easy to navigate the course. A menu slide lets you jump to any of the three sections. And at the end of each section, e-Mersion used Articulate Presenter’s branching feature in the Slide Properties manager to take learners back to the menu. When learners are finished, they can click forward from the menu to go right to the course wrap-up.

Precision-Synched Animations
You’ll quickly notice how the compelling animations in the course are precision-synched to support the well-paced narration. Judges loved the fact that even though there’s a lot of animation in this course, it never feels distracting or overwhelming. The animations really help express and support the content, because each animation has purpose and meaning.

Annotations Create Emphasis and Focus
The course also makes great use of Presenter’s spotlight annotation to draw your attention to key facts and statements. Though annotations are easy effects to apply, this course shows how powerfully they create focus at just the right moments during the narration. When you view the course, watch how e-Mersion skillfully used spotlight annotations on slides like these:

Seamless Integration of Engage Interactions
e-Mersion used an Articulate Engage Labeled Graphic to show diabetes’ impact on the body. Their approach is a great example of how to visually integrate an Engage interaction with the rest of a course. The interaction’s transparent background allows the subtly stylized PowerPoint slide master to show through, creating a nice, consistent look. And for the image featured in the interaction, e-Mersion used a matching background with a slight gradient for contrast. They also tailored the Engage interaction’s color scheme for a super-seamless effect:

Tailored Quiz Slides
Another standout in this course is the Diabetes Self Assessment, built in Articulate Quizmaker. e-Mersion made great use of Quizmaker’s Slide View to tailor the look and content of each slide, including informative custom feedback and robust results slides.

Interview with Dave Richards of e-Mersion

We talked to Dave Richards to find out a little more about the project:

Dave, what inspired you to enter the Guru Awards?

“We really value the Articulate community, and the Guru awards are a great way to participate in the sharing that goes on here. We hope our course will give people some great ideas, because we’ve certainly benefited from many ideas that others in the community have shared. In a lot of cases, input from the Articulate community has helped us to solve e-learning challenges and ultimately keep our clients happy.”

What are some of your favorite Articulate Studio ’09 features?

“We’re impressed with how rapidly and easily we can create interactive courses and assessments with the Articulate tools. This frees us up to leverage our Flash programming resources in more targeted ways, like we did on the menu slide and the opening video in the Diabesity course. The other sections of this course might look high-end, but they were relatively quick and easy to build with Articulate Studio.”

Tell us a little about how you designed the Diabesity course.

“The Diabesity project shows our style for course design and development. Our approach is probably a bit different from a traditional instructional designer. In fact, some designers might even feel we’ve broken rules related to cognitive load. But we don’t confine ourselves to traditional design philosophies. Our approach is to combine principles of impact marketing with instructional design. The result is content that’s memorable, provides impact, and engages our audience.

“We used all of Articulate’s product suite to make this happen: Presenter, Engage and Quizmaker.”

Any course-building tips to share with the rest of the Articulate community?

“The course we built actually isn’t very technically complicated. We gave ourselves a short timeframe to build it, and for the most part we relied on pretty straightforward features, like PowerPoint animations, hyperlinks, branching, and the Labeled Graphic interaction in Articulate Engage. We also leveraged Quizmaker’s Slide View to very easily bring a customized look to the self-assessment.

“Based on the many other projects we’ve done, though, our best tip for other e-learning designers would be to really dig into Quizmaker as a tool for interactive scenarios. It’s got so much more than just standard quizzing functionality. The tools in Slide View are really worth experimenting with.”

Any other thoughts to share with the Articulate community?

“We want to thank the Articulate Community, HealthStartIQ, and the many other people and organizations that have inspired us to build great e-learning. We plan to continue sharing free assets as well as delivering for-fee custom design work and custom players that add value for Articulate users.”

If you’re attending DevLearn 2010 in November, you can connect with Dave there. He’ll be joining the Articulate Breakfast Bytes session on the morning of November 3, and he’s also planning to show off the Diabesity course at DemoFest on November 4.

Again, big congrats to e-Mersion for their award-winning course!

14 responses to “How e-Mersion Earned Gold in the Articulate Guru Awards”

1

Congratulations!

sealiz // Posted at 8:31 pm on October 14th, 2010
2

[…] […]

Articulate 2010 Guru Award « e-Mersion // Posted at 11:28 am on November 3rd, 2010
3

The Diabesity course is excellant and thank you for sharing some vary valuable tips. Not only is the PowerPoint to Engage interactions seamless but so is the recording.

I’ve noticed a “dip” in recording when I publish Presenter slides with embedded Engage interactions. Usually I utilize both recording capabilities (Presenter and Engage) which causes some slight recording degradation. Did you achieve this seamless recording affect by recording in Presenter and then syncing the engage interactions?

Kind regards, Julie

Julie Stalzer // Posted at 1:45 pm on April 13th, 2011
4

Can you elaborate on the production involved in placing the music and narrative in the quiz portion? The music was seamless over the entire quiz, even during the oral feedback. It would appear that there were two audio tracks on the slide. How was that done?

Curtis Kynerd // Posted at 2:34 pm on April 26th, 2011
5

Hi Curtis – great question, and it’s actually pretty easy. On the quiz placeholder slide in your PowerPoint file, you can use the playlist feature in Articulate Presenter to apply background audio to the slide. This will cause the audio to play continuously as long as the user is on the quiz (even if there is also audio associated with the individual quiz slides or question feedback). You can find out more about how to set up and apply a playlist here.

jeanette // Posted at 9:23 am on April 27th, 2011
6

This is great. I did not know anything about the Playlist and how it is used. Thanks very much!

Curtis Kynerd // Posted at 10:02 am on April 27th, 2011
7

Hi – I’m trying to look at the course, and keep getting hung up on slide 16, the quiz. The Articulate rotating circle appears, and the course never progresses. Is anyone else having the same problem?

Thanks,
Laura

Laura Takach // Posted at 5:10 pm on February 14th, 2012
8

@Laura: I just tested the quiz (self-assessment) on slide 16, and it worked just fine for me. Have you tested in another browser?

gabe // Posted at 10:00 am on February 15th, 2012
9

Thanks Gabe. I tried in IE and Firefox. It may be my firewall, so I’ll try on my home computer.

Laura Takach // Posted at 10:07 am on February 15th, 2012
10

Sounds good, Laura! Let me know how it goes.

gabe // Posted at 10:52 am on February 15th, 2012
11

How did you get the widgets at the bottom of the slide, example: CC, Menu, 7 Paperclip? Thanks.

Nicole Rivera // Posted at 11:06 am on March 26th, 2012
12

Hi Nicole! e-Mersion developed their own custom skin for the Diabesity course, and they used that in place of the regular Articulate Presenter player. Folks who have Flash programming skills and the Articulate Presenter SDK sometimes build skins like these to give their courses a more customized look. If you’re looking for some free custom skins to try in your own projects, you can check out the selection in the E-Learning Heroes downloads. There are several nice options there which Articulate users have created and shared with the community.

jeanette // Posted at 12:01 pm on March 26th, 2012
13

Could you tell me what did you do with slide no. 5 (Table of Content).
I want that exact feature in my presentation..
Thanks…

nikhil pednekar // Posted at 5:47 am on December 26th, 2012
14

Hi Nihil – Slide 5 in the Diabesity example is one of the few portions of the course that was created as a custom flash piece and then inserted into Articulate Presenter. There isn’t currently a native feature in Articulate Presenter that enables you to create a rollover-type effect like that. In Articulate Storyline, however, the effect would be very easy to build with a simple hover state. If you’re interested in learning more about how Storyline allows you to create object states (including a hover state), you could check out this tutorial: http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/adding-and-editing-states.aspx

Jeanette // Posted at 6:27 pm on December 27th, 2012

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