During the recent Articulate User event at Devlearn, Sarah Hodge from SlideSugar shared a really cool example that she built in Storyline. She incorporated the 3D models from PowerPoint to create videos that she added to her e-learning course.

Click here to view the e-learning example.

It’s a great example with some really neat ideas. She also included a quick tutorial to show how she built it. There’s also a free download for practice.

Here are a few key things that stood out to me:

• 3D models are easy to work with in PowerPoint and when output as video, can add some interesting elements to your e-learning courses. Learn to work with 3D models in PowerPoint and bring them into your e-learning courses.
• Pay attention to some of the subtle audio and visual embellishments that she added to her demo such as the fog, background audio, and the water.
• In her tutorial, you notice that she added a hover state for the bear signs and then grouped those with transparent shapes to activate the hover state over the entire bear image and not just on the sign. That’s a clever trick.
• I talk a lot about “touching the screen” as a way to pull people into the course when building interactive e-learning. She has a lot of little things like that, such as getting the bear to roar at the beginning. Explore the ways she gets you to touch the screen.
• The core quiz slide she built (that she covers in the tutorial) could be stripped of content and be saved as a template for re-use. That’s something to consider whenever building custom interactions: how can it be converted to a template for the next project?
• The project is visually cohesive and consistent in it’s structure from section to section and in how animations and visual effects are used.
• When saving 3D videos from PowerPoint to use in Storyline, save them as .WMV and let Storyline convert them to .MP4. Sometimes the last frame seems jagged when using an .MP4 from PowerPoint, but it isn’t the case with .WMV.
• She didn’t use just the 3D bears. See if you can identify other places where she used 3D.

Check out the Grizzly bear demo. What are some things that stood out to you?

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.

At a recent workshop we discussed the popularity of working animated gifs and how they can be used in e-learning courses. Here are three reasons you can use them in your courses.

Animated Gifs for Novel Visual Design

E-learning courses are still mostly visual. And one part of engaging you learners is to create visually rich experiences. This doesn’t replace instructional design, but it does help make your course look more interesting and contributes to capture the person’s attention.

I love this example created by one of our community managers. She did a great job using animated .gifs to enrich the visuals in her Rise demo. How many animated .gifs do you count in her demo?

Click to view the Rise demo.

Speaking of novelty, in the example below I added an animated gif to a slider that represents the module progress. At a certain point, the state of the slide thumb changes from one walking character to another.

Animated Gifs to Add Humor

One reason animated gifs are so popular is they’re perfect for sharing funny things and memes. And they’re exaggerated with the looping animations. Why not leverage the humor that these offer and work them into your courses? A couple of considerations: many of the gifs probably violate some copyright laws and training isn’t supposed to be funny. Well, maybe it can be funny, but there’s a good chance that regardless of the content someone will complain. If you do use humor, you’ll really want to make sure that it’s appropriate to your audience.

Animated Gifs to Show Procedural Steps

The two reasons above are less instructional. This next one fits better with instructional design and training. Use animated gifs to quickly show procedures or steps in a process. If you’re showing steps, it’s good to add some reference points because the content loops and people may not be clear where in the process the steps fall.

Here’s an animated gif that shows the root canal process.

Click here to view the animated gif (19 MB)

And here’s a prototype built in PowerPoint that demonstrates showing four steps.

Animated gifs work well for e-learning courses. If you use them in your courses currently, feel free to share ways that they’re used. In the meantime, check out these previous articles on creating animated gifs:

• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free
• How to Make Animated Gifs from Video 
• Here Are Some Free Animated Gifs

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.