As you know, the Articulate community regularly shares all sorts of free downloads. We have elearning templates, free PowerPoint templates, graphics, and all other sorts of free assets that can be used for your elearning courses. Also, you are free to use them for your projects without attribution.

On top of that, many of your peers in the industry and elearning community regularly share free downloads. For today’s post I’d like to feature a few of them. Take advantage of what they offer and be sure to let them know you appreciate the files.

Joanna Kurpiewska

• Joanna Kurpiewska
• Get free templates here.

Alexander Salas

• Alexander Salas
• Get free templates here.

Linda Lorenzetti

• Linda Lorenzetti
• Get free templates here.

Jackie Van Nice

• Jackie Van Nice
• Get free templates here.

Montse Posner Anderson

• Montse Posner Anderson
• Get free templates here.

Matt Guyan

• Matthew Guyan
• Get free templates here.

Veronica Budnikas

• Veronica Budnikas
• Get free templates here.

Dianne Hope

• Dianne Hope
• Get free templates here.

Tracy Carroll

• Tracy Carroll
• Get free templates here.

Jeff Kortenbosch

• Jeff Kortenbosch
• Get free templates here.

Punab Parab

• Punam Parab
• Get free templates here.

Ashley Chiasson

• Ashley Chiasson
• Get free templates here.

Mike Taylor

• Mike Taylor
• Get free templates here.

Nancy Woinoski

• Nancy Woinoski
• Get free templates here.

Paul Alders

• Paul Alders
• Pending.

John Toh

• John Toh
• Get free templates here.

Meaghan Lister

• Meaghan Lister
• Get free templates here.

I’m sure there are more in the community who have freely shared their resources. If you share free elearning templates in the community, feel free to add a link in the comments. The only stipulations are that they’re original content, not spam, free to use for commercial work, and don’t require an account or some sort of login to access the free resources.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Creating great interactive learning experiences requires a few core building blocks: relevant content, pull versus push, and real-world decisions. With those building blocks you’re able to structure effective learning scenarios that are meaningful to the learner and helps meet the objectives of the course.

One of those building blocks in creating relevant content or content that is placed in a meaningful context. Essentially, you want to recreate the types of scenarios that are similar to the ones the learner has in real life. This allows them to see the content in a meaningful context.

Learning Interactions: What is the Learner’s Real World Like?

Most courses have the right content, but that’s all it is–content. And the content is usually plastered over a series of bullet point screens. To make a great learning experience you need content in the right context. It needs to be relevant to the learner’s needs and world. They need to see how the content fits into their world, the interactions they have, and the decisions they need to make.

• How is the course content used in the work environment of the user?
• Why would they use it? And when they use it what happens?
• Or if they don’t use it, what happens?

Learning Interactions: What Type of Environment Needs to be Built?

We make decisions all the time and they always produce some sort of consequence. These decisions happen in a real world and usually while interacting with other people like peers, managers, or customers.

When building relevant content that’s placed in the right context it’s important to understand the world of the learner.

• Where are they located?
• Do they need to use any equipment or machines?
• And who are they interacting with? Peers, management, customers?

Learning Interactions: What Triggers the Need for Action?

When I build interactions in Storyline I always talk through the triggers. I ask, “What do I want to do and when do want to do it?”

In the same sense, when you build relevant scenarios for your courses where the learner has to make decisions, it’s important to know what the triggers are for those decisions.

• What do they have to do and when do they have to do it?
• And at what point are they going to need the course content to make the appropriate decision or take the right action?

Learning Interactions: How to Collect the Right Content?

A great way to get this information is to meet with those people who will take your courses. Ask them to give you scenarios where the course content is important or when they would need to know it to make good decisions.

• Ask them what’s it like when things are going well? And then what it’s like when it not going so well. And what makes it go not some well? What types of things derail the day?
• If they interact with equipment, what do they need to know? Where do they go to troubleshoot? What types of cheat sheets or job aids do they reference?
• If they interact with people, what makes for good interactions? And what causes them to go sideways? How do they fix it?

The key in all of this is that instead of dumping a bunch of new content on your learners, find a way to put the content into a meaningful context–one that makes sense to their real world interactions. And when you do that you’ll be able to create great learning experiences.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

After last week’s post on the different drag & drop interaction examples, I had quite a few emails asking for tips on how to create drag and drop interactions for elearning. So now’s a good time to review some good general tips for building drag and drop interactions.

Why Are You Dragging?

There are a few reasons why we make onscreen objects draggable.

• Sliders are used as a means to make adjustments/selections or as a simple way to navigate content. They’re fixed on a track.
• Move objects from one part of the screen to another. For example, planning a seating chart may require the user to move seats around or placing utensils on the table. These are freeform drag and drop interactions with no specific drop target.
• Targets are probably the most common use case where you have an object that needs to be placed in a very specific area.

Drag and Drop Interactions Tips

• Where is the user supposed to drag and drop the object? In most cases, drag and drop interactions require a drop target. Drop targets can be an actual object, or it may be an invisible element (like a hotspot) that controls where the dropped objects lands.

• Do you want the object to snap to the drop target? There are different ways to work with the drop target. Sometimes, things may not be quite as evident onscreen, snapping to the target helps when the user gets the object over the target.

• Do you want to make the target visible? This makes sense if there are a number of drag and drop options and you have a very clear target for each draggable object.

• What happens when the user drags an object out of position? I like to add a ghost image or something to show where the drag object originally came from. It’s also an easy way to indicate progress.

• Are the instructions clear? Sometimes developers forget to put instructions for the interaction and what the user is to do. If you expect them to interact with the screen in a new way, you should include clear instructions. I like to use gate screens that stop the user and provides instructions.

Drag and Drop Interactions: Providing Feedback for Correct and Incorrect Actions

There are a few way to provide feedback when the user drops the object on a target.

• The easiest way is to allow the target to accept the object. Using a snap feature essentially pulls the dragged item to the target. That lets the user know that they’ve dropped the object on a target. And depending on how you structure the drag and drop interactions, it can also be the means to show feedback for a correct action.
• Another way to provide feedback to the user is to reject incorrect choices and cause the dropped object to return to the starting position.

• You can also provide immediate correct and incorrect feedback by changing the state of the object to reflect when it’s a right or wrong decision.

Here are some previous posts that cover drag and drop interactions in a bit more detail:

• Basic Building Blocks for Drag & Drop Interactions
• 3 Tips for Building Drag & Drop Learning Interactions
• How to Provide Feedback for Drag & Drop Interactions

Drag and drop interactions can help make course more engaging and interactive. Too often we limit ourselves to standard click-based interactions and decision-making. Next time, try to convert one of those to a drag and drop and see how it goes. What tips do you have for those creating drag and drop interactions? Share them in the comments section.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

It helps to look at what others are doing to get ideas and inspiration for your own work. Sometimes looking at what others have done also gives us confidence that we can do something similar.

Drag and Drop Examples

This week I’d like to feature a number of drag and drop interactions that people in the community have created over the past couple of years.

• Keyboard Accessible: try the regular way and then try using the keyboard.
• Choose the Fruit
• Learn About the Ear
• Procedural Drag and Drop
• Gamified Gardening
• Lab Experiment
• Plan Your Meals
• Letter Game with Counter
• Memory Game
• Sun Safety Tips
• How Many Cupcakes Can You Buy?
• Organizational Chart Activity
• Image Gallery
• Do You Know Your Cupcakes?
• Sport Uniform Activity
• Drag and Drop Assessment
• Star Wars Trivia
• Food Server Training
• Emoji Mood-o-Meter
• Truth or Lie?
• Number Jumble
• Movie Trivia
• Anatomy Quiz
• Quick Knowledge Check
• Customer Service Feedback
• Anatomy Explorer
• Design a Workspace

On a side note, there were a lot of interactions that I couldn’t share because it was either a broken link because the file was moved or the interaction was hosted on Google Drive. Google Drive links are not going to work in about a month. You can fix that here.

Drag and Drop Examples from Weekly Challenges

Here are two challenges that featured some drag and drop interactions. You’ll need to go to the following week to see the recap.

• Challenge #16: Custom Drag and Drop Interactions. You can view the examples submitted in the comments section of the challenge.
• Challenge #21: Beyond Basic Drag and Drop Interactions. Submissions are in the comments section.

There’s a pretty diverse selection of interactions. Many of the interactions submitted in the weekly challenges also come with the source file for you to review and deconstruct.

If you have an example of a drag and drop that you’ve created using Storyline feel free to share it via the comments link.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.