Animated .gifs are great for e-learning. Often, I like to use them instead of videos for e-learning interactions, especially process interactions that go through a sequence of steps.

Here are a few previous posts on animated .gifs with some free resources:

• 3 Reasons to Use Animated GIFs in E-learning
• How to Make Animated Gifs from Video
• Here Are Some Free Animated Gifs
• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free

Today I’ll show a simple way to convert a video of a process into smaller animated .gifs that you can insert into a slide, article, or process interaction.

Demo of the Animated Gifs in a Process Interaction

Here’s a demo I created using Rise and the Process Interaction.

 

Click here to view the example.

Animated Gifs Tutorials

Below are a couple of tutorials that go into it in more detail:

• How to cut the video into smaller parts using the free video editor in Windows 10.
• How to import and convert the video into an animated .gif.

Animated Gifs: Create a Procedural Video

Record a video of the process. Don’t worry about the audio as it will be removed. To keep the edits to a minimum, make sure to be clear on the steps and to not waste a lot of movement. Get to the point quickly.

At our workshop in Milan, David and I quickly recorded the process to make an espresso with the machine in the back of the room. While we pretended to be working, it was really a way for us to sneak in a few more shots of espresso.

Here’s the original video.

Click to play the video on YouTube.

Animated Gifs: Convert the Video to Gif

There are a number of ways to convert video to animated .gifs. I like to use ScreenToGif because it’s free (which is always good) and it is really easy to use.

The conversion process is simple: import the video and convert it. However, there are some key considerations.

The original .MP4 video is 159 MB at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Animated .gifs can be large, really large.  Without any significant edits, the 159 MB video becomes a 470 MB animated .gif. That’s just not manageable.

There are a few things you can do to decrease the file size of the animated .gifs:

• Scale the video down from it’s original resolution. There’s no need for an HD quality .gif. In this case 1920 x 1080 will be sized down to 500 x 281.
• Crop the video to just the critical pieces of info. The fewer frames the smaller the file size. You can always duplicate frames to keep something on screen longer with minimal impact to size.
• The less difference there is with the pixels from one frame to the next, the smaller the file will be. Unfortunately, video isn’t static and those millions of pixels are changing from frame to frame. You could try to shoot against a solid background and with a tripod. That may help, depending on your subject.
• Video runs at about 30 frames per second (FPS). When you convert the video to .gif, you can modify the frame rate to something like 10 to 15. It just depends on how much motion is in the video. The less motion, the more you can lower the frame rate.

Animated Gifs: Edit to Individual Steps

Unless the steps are very short and can be shown in one file, it makes sense to break the steps up to individual parts. That helps reduce the file size and keeps the focus on very specific parts of the process.

• You can import the entire video and then cut it down. Or cut the video into smaller videos first and work with them individually. It’s probably easier to edit the videos first and then import the smaller videos. This is more manageable and less strain on your system.
• Get rid of what you don’t need, cut out extra frames.
• The animated .gifs loop, so it may make sense to add a little buffer at the front or back end to let the user orient to the start and end of the process.

The original video was 1 minute long. Converted to an animated .gif without edits, it was 470 MB. After cutting it into pieces and creating four smaller gifs, the total ended up being about 15 MB. That’s a pretty significant difference and the output works well for the demo.

That’s basically it, shoot a video and then convert it to animated gif.

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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.

Subject matter experts often play a key role in the development of your e-learning courses. We’ve covered this quite a bit in previous posts and in a free e-book available to you through the e-learning community. You can find the links below.

A couple of weeks ago I did a workshop where we discussed working with subject matter experts and my computer crashed. Since I had to do the presentation again, I wanted to simplify the key points just in case I didn’t have the presentation file, so I came up with the three R’s when working with subject matter experts: relationship, role, and resources.

Establish the Relationship with Your Subject Matter Experts

• Be prepared and respect their time. Often, they’re not as vested in the success of the project as you are.
• Pull together a list of questions for them to review. Don’t give them 200 questions. Start with top five to ten questions so it’s manageable.
• Get them to share their ideas about how they’d approach the training. You want to understand how they see things so you can anticipate potential conflicts.
• Ask lots of questions and don’t make assumptions.

Define the Subject Matter Expert’s Role

• You’re trying to get them to help you build an effective course. Use a backwards design to get them to think like instructional designers. What’s the appropriate action that demonstrates success? How do you measure that action? What do they need to practice to be successful? What information do they need to practice? The point is stepping away from information and focusing on actionable performance.
• Establish clear expectations built around the project’s objectives. Who does what and when? What is does the subject matter expert deliver. What are their action items? Come to a documented agreement. Don’t schedule meetings with them unless there’s an action item.
• Who is the final reviewer of the content and course? Is the subject matter expert the one who signs off on the course? Or is there someone else? Get that person involved at the forefront.

What Resources Can the Subject Matter Provide?

• What existing training content exists?
• Have the subject matter expert provide assessment questions and viable choices (or the framework for viable scenarios).
• Identify supporting resources such as articles, intranet content, policies, etc.
• Who will collect the metrics to track before and after accomplishments?

Obviously, there’s a lot more to working with the subject matter experts when building e-learning courses. Most of that is covered in the resources below. However, if you lean on the three R’s you’ll remember to cover the basics: maintain a good relationship, establish clarity around the role and expectations, and collect the appropriate resources.

Free Checklist

Here’s a free checklist to help curate all of the appropriate content and resources.

Rapid E-Learning Blog Resources

Here is a list of relevant blog posts.

• How Subject Matter Experts Help Build Great Courses
• How to Build a Great Relationship with Your Subject Matter Experts
• How to Set Expectations with Your Subject Matter Experts
• How to Get the Most Out of Your Subject Matter Experts
• Here’s How to Help Your Subject Matter Experts Build Better E-Learning Courses
• What Everyone Should Know About Working with Subject Matter Experts
• Myth 3: A Rapid E-Learning Tool in The Hands of Subject Matter Experts Is Not Good!
• How to Overcome the Challenge of Working with Subject Matter Experts

Free E-Book

Here is a free e-book with all sorts of tips to know when working with subject matter experts.

• Essential Guide to Working with Subject Matter Experts (free e-book)

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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.

The other day I made some images for a course menu page in Rise 360. I spent some time playing around with different ideas. When I reviewed my final image, I realized that there were several iterations.

Today I’ll share some of the different ideas I considered and why I made changes.

Visual Design: The Set Up

I’ll start by stating that most of this is subjective, so there’s not a right or wrong.

With this particular menu, I needed an image that had a 10:3 aspect ratio. In this case, the images are 1280 x 384. The aspect ratio calculator is a good resource if you ever need to figure out an aspect ratio or the resolution of images.

The short but wide aspect ratio creates a challenging constraint with what you can show. And that’s why I played around with different ideas.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 1

Because of the dimensional constraints, I started with just text. But the text looked empty and uninteresting. Since these images were part of an interactive scenario, I wanted to add a bit more personality.

I added a character to the text. This creates a visual connection to the scenario. I also wanted some white space so it was easier for the eye to scan the screen. Generally, it looks good and the white space is nice as the Rise course responds to the mobile devices.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 2

I wasn’t keen on the smaller character but as noted before, the height of the image created some constraints. So I played around with making the character larger. This meant is had to go off screen.

I was also concerned that perhaps the larger image would be too busy if it remained in color. So I got rid of the color and then lighten up the image a bit.

I liked the gray image and text overlay. But it just didn’t feel right, especially in the mobile view with the top of the heads cut off.

The second design is OK. But it looks a bit unbalanced. The right side of the menu has text and a strong visual element with the button. It kind of fills the right side. But the left side just looks odds to me.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 3

Sticking with the grayscale, I played around with making the character image a bit larger to fill that side of the menu. It does add some heft, but I wasn’t fond of the way the faces were cropped.

I do like it in the phone view because it fills the column and the lighter image with the darker buttons works.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 4

In a previous post, I shared an easy graphic design tip that I call the transparent echo technique. The idea is to add the same image twice. One is muted and serves as the background and the other is a focal point.

The image above was my first attempt. The examples in the blog post linked above look nice. But this one felt a bit busy and the eyes were too big. It feels a bit creepy.

So I added a color overlay that I color picked from the button. I also moved the image around and used his shirt and not the face. I like the texture that the echo creates. You can see part of the shirt so there’s some very slight visual context and the texture adds depth which I like better than just a solid color. But the echo isn’t distracting.

The design seems blocky and the buttons are heavy. My original goal was to have white space. Now I have an image design I kind of like, but it’s just too square and heavy.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 5

To gain white space and get rid of the block I decided to play off the pill shape of the buttons. That gives it some visual cohesion by tying in the header with the button.

By extending the heads outside the pill shape, it creates additional white space. And the round corners with the characters poking out of the shape feel a bit more organic and informal, which lends itself well to an interactive scenario course.

I also lightened the buttons so that they were a little more subdued and not as heavy. They’re just a bit lighter than the pill shape.

Visual Design Principles

Again, most of this is subjective. But I thought I’d give you some insight into my thought process as I created the graphics and made iterations. While the images are subjective, there are a few core principles to consider when creating the visuals for your courses.

• Use white space to give your eyes a break. White space also helps to discern what content is there and how’s it related to other content on the screen.
• Visual consistency between design elements. I like the final image and that it works with the pill shaped buttons. The colors also work to tie the objects together.
• Play around with color. Remove colors from the images to neutralize them. Then add a few accent pieces or a single color to draw focus. It’s easy to do and a good basic tip for those of us who are visually challenged and opt to over work our images.

In the follow up post, I’ll show how I used PowerPoint to quickly create all of these images and make edits in seconds.

Which design do you like best? Is there something you would have done different?

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Even before I started working at Articulate, I made it a goal to answer five questions each week in the e-learning community. It’s a great way to connect with others, especially beginners, and offer some help as they’re learning.

However, for me, it’s a great way to stay on top of the tools as it forces me to think through the software in different contexts. It enables me to play around with different ideas and production techniques.

Here are three recent tutorials that I created to answer some questions in the community. The tutorials offer little bonus tips and focus on some production nuances that aren’t always apparent to new users. They’re good if you’re just getting started.

Here are the three files I used for the demos in case you want to look at them and follow along.

• Download here (3 MB)

E-Learning Tip: Simulate Right-Click Interactions on Mobile Devices

In this tutorial, we review how to go through software training on a mobile device when the software simulation requires the user to right-click which isn’t possible on a mobile device.

Features demonstrated:

• Setting True-False variables to indicate if the user is on a mobile device
• Use variables to simulate right-clicking
• Showing/hiding objects based on variable values

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

E-Learning Tip: Combine Animations to Create Fast-Slow-Fast Animations

In this example, the question was how to make an object slow down when passing through another object and then speed up when it was done passing through.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Features demonstrated:

• Create motion paths
• Set options
• Apply relative start points
• Relative animation
• Alignment

E-Learning Tip: How to Keep Objects Persistent and as the Top Layer

In this tutorial, we look at how to ensure that the custom course navigation is always on the top layer and not hidden when going to other layers.

Features demonstrated:

• Launch layer based on timeline
• Create persistent layers on top of other layers
• Use empty layers to trigger and redirect

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

I usually do 5-10 of these tutorials every week. If they interest you and you want to see more, let me know.

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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.

Building e-learning courses is usually a matter of pulling together the appropriate content, visuals, and some level of interactivity. Most courses I see are linear with some simple interactions like tabs and labeled graphics.

However, there’s a way to make e-learning content and the learning experience more dynamic when using variables. Variables help create custom user experiences such as personalized visuals, conditional navigation, and adaptive learning paths.

The challenge for many e-learning developers (who aren’t experienced programmers) is learning more about variables and how to use them.

Today’s post is a recap of some previous getting started content that introduces the basics of working with variables, a few practice activities, and additional resources.

Also, be sure to check out our upcoming e-learning workshops below. I just added a bunch of new sessions.

Learn About Variables for E-Learning

Here are some previous blog posts that go through the basics of variables and how to use them.

• The Case for Variables in E-Learning: what are variables and why use them?
• Simplifying Variables for Better E-Learning: understand the types of variables and common use cases.
• Consistency in Production: Naming Variables for E-Learning: learn how to name variables for easier management.
• How to Save Time When Using Variables in Your E-learning: time-saving tip using variable references to verify that the variable is tracking properly.
• The Answer to the Community’s Number 1 E-Learning Question: every day some sort of derivative of this question is asked in the community. Get your answer here.
• Here’s an Easy Way to Troubleshoot Courses with Variables: build a way to quickly access and manage variable values during the course production and testing process.

Practice Activities to Learn About Variables for E-Learning

Here are some resources from previous workshops where we learn to use variables in a simple gamified context. There’s a published version with practice files and a series of tutorials that go through each slide individually. If you want to practice using variables and need some resources, this is a good place to start. You’ll only learn to use them when you use them.

See a published example.

• Download the practice file here.

Tutorials

• Set up and overview (6:50)
• Slide 1.2: create a personalized badge (18:18)
• Slide 1.3: create conditional menu navigation (16:16)
• Slide 2.2: include progress indicators (17:26)
• Slide 3.2: add a timer (20:38)
• Slide 4.2: create risk and reward (17:09)
• Slide 5.1: ways to manage and test variables (24:16)
• Slide 7.1: how to set variables for testing (15:36)

E-Learning Community Activities to Practice Using Variables

Here some recent challenges to practice using variables in real-world contexts. Even if you can’t participate, look at some of the examples shared by community members.

• Using Text Variables to Capture and Display Learner’s Name #222 

• Using Random Number Variables to Create Dynamic E-Learning #188

• Share Your Tips for Getting Started with Storyline’s Variables #2

Tutorials to Learn About Variables for E-Learning

• Here are some community tutorials that show how to use variables in Storyline 3 & 360.
• Articulate 360 subscribers can always sign up for the 4-part webinar series. Our next series starts April 22. We go through the basics and answer your questions.

If you haven’t used variables before, now’s a good time to get started. If you do use variables, what do you find to be the most common use cases in your projects?

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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.

Between the blog posts, community interactions, workshops, and webinars one of the most frequently asked questions is how to get started with e-learning or become a better e-learning developer.

I’ve written about this in several previous posts that cover how to build your skills, create your personal brand, and maintain a portfolio. You can find previous posts and a really cool interaction below.

How to Build Your Skills

Here’s a list of some of the posts on personal development.

• How to Improve Your E-Learning Course Design Skills
• Do You Need to be a Programmer to Build E-Learning Courses?
• 5 Ways to Kickstart Your E-learning Career
• How to be Successful in the E-Learning Industry
• How to Hire an E-Learning Developer or Get an E-Learning Job
• The Role of Today’s Trainer
• Here’s How an E-Learning Portfolio Builds Your Skills
• Why You Need a Professional Portfolio
• Here’s What Needs to be in Your E-Learning Portfolio
• How to Create an E-Learning Portfolio
• 4 Ways to Build Your E-learning Skills This Summer
• 3 Ways to Save Your Training Job

Just Getting Started?

You know what’s better than reading a bunch of articles? Seeing it all in an e-learning module.

Sarah Hodge of SlideSugar recently shared a really great example of how to get started with e-learning. Not only is the content valuable, but it’s a demo worth deconstructing to glean ideas for your next e-learning course.

See e-learning example here.

Be sure to check out the articles and Sarah’s e-learning example above.

What tips would you give to those who are just getting started or want to improve their e-learning design skills?

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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.

“Help, I need to update my course, but I don’t have the source file. All I have is a link!”

This is a common issue. Here’s a solution that may work for you and it’s generally easy to do.

In a previous posts, we looked at how to copy text from old Flash courses and how to transcribe them using into new slides.

How to Convert the Course to HTML5

The secret to all of this is screen capturing your old e-learning courses. You can do what I am going to show with a number of tools. For example, Storyline has a screen capture feature where you can bring in one screen at a time. That works fine for smaller courses.

For this demo, I am going to use Screen2Gif because it works well for this demo that has a lot of slides, it’s easy to use, and it’s free.

View the detailed tutorial on YouTube.

Below are the basic steps. The video above has more detail. Essentially, we’re going to capture the old course screens, bring them into PowerPoint as images (because we can do a simple batch import), and then we’ll import the PowerPoint slides into Storyline.

Once inside of Storyline you can add interactive elements and additional content.

Basic Steps for Converting the Old Course

• Determine the original course slide resolution. Don’t include the player; just the slide. Most courses are usually 4:3 or 16:9.
• Create a PowerPoint file at the same resolution as the course images.
• Create a Storyline file at the same resolution as the PowerPoint file.
• Go through the course using a screen capture application. This will capture all of your course screens. If you have interactions, you’ll go through those as well. You want a copy of every possible screen. Just click on everything clickable. I’d even go through the quizzes, just so you have the screens. You can use that content later.
• Review the screens you captured and get rid of duplicates.
• Save the separate frames captured as image files.
• Batch insert the screen capture images using the album feature in PowerPoint. I like to force them to fit the slide. That way I don’t need to do any adjustments. Things should be aligned.
• Import the PowerPoint slides into Storyline.
• From there, it’s a matter or making some edits and adding interactions, quizzes, and whatever else the course requires.
• For example, you could take the screen for a tabs interaction and combine them into one slide with layers for each tab. Then add hotspot triggers to the layers.

Example: Course Converted to HTML5

I created an example course using the steps I outlined above. For the demo, I copied the old course screens and created new slides Storyline. Then I published in HTML5. It only took about 10 minutes and considering the time spend, looks pretty decent.

It’s definitely a good solution for a lot of the old compliance training that needs to go from Flash to HTML5, or if you need to update a course and don’t have the source files.

Click here to view the example HTML5 course.

Obviously, the best solution is to rebuild the course from scratch. That works fine if you have a handful of courses. But if you have dozens (or hundreds) that need to be converted to HTML5, then this is a viable solution for many of those courses.

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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.

I’m a big fan of the e-learning challenges posted each week in the e-learning community. Here’s one on game show style templates and another on various drag-and-drop interactions. They offer good examples and creative ideas for building e-learning courses.

Compliance training drives a lot of the demand for e-learning content. Unfortunately, most of it is linear, click-and-read content. Which means you don’t get to try new things or develop your skills in new ways.

The initial goal of the e-learning challenges was to get e-learning course designers to play around with the software and try new things. They aren’t expected to be big (or complete courses) and they’re designed to learn new production techniques.

Here’s what’s real for many of you. You may build a hundred courses, but you’re not building a hundred different courses. You’re just building the same course one hundred times. That means your skills may not grow and you’re probably a bit bored doing the same thing over and over again.

The weekly challenges are a great way to move out of the same-course rut.

• Commit to do at least one challenge per month. That’s my goal. I don’t always make it, but it’s still my goal. At a minimum, review the entries every week (posted on Thursday). There are some really good examples and creative ideas you can glean from others. Here’s a list of all previous challenges.
• Use the challenges to pad your e-learning portfolio. It’s important to have a portfolio where you document your skills and show your growth. Most people can’t share their current work for various reasons, but the challenge demos are yours and work perfect for portfolios.  The challenges provide a way to show diverse course development skills and experience.
• Build your professional brand. Start a blog or portfolio site. Show off your examples, share the sources files, and offer tips on how you created what you created. Many in the e-learning community can attest to the power of sharing your expertise. And you don’t need to be the best expert, just enough of an expert to share what you know. There’s always someone who can learn from you. And they don’t need to be revolutionary tips. Often the challenge entries remind me of things I already knew but just bring them back to the forefront.

As I stated, my goal is to participate at least once per month and from there I’ll share what I learned or some production tips that may help others.

Hope to see you in the e-learning challenges.

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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.

I’ve been playing around with ideas to get old Flash course content into a new HTML5 course. There are tens of thousands of old Flash-based e-learning courses where people no longer have the source files. All they have are published versions of the course and need to convert to HTML5.

Grabbing the media like images, video, and audio is usually not as challenging. But moving all of the text can be a hassle.

In a previous post we discovered how to use screenshots and OCR to extract the text from the old course screens. Another way to get the text into your slide is by reading it out loud to transcribe it and insert into your slide. I like this approach because you it’s easy and you have to go through the content anyway. Reading it out loud may help you think through the tone and some script changes you’ll make in the new HTML5 course.

There are applications you can buy to do the recording and transcription, but I want to focus on tools you already have that won’t cost anything more.

Use PowerPoint to Transcribe Text for HTML5 E-Learning

The new version of PowerPoint [this only works for Office 365 subscribers] has a dictate feature. All you do is press the button and start to read. PowerPoint transcribes the text and adds it to the slide. Then you make your edits. You can also send the file out to be verified and edited by others who use PowerPoint. Once it’s ready, import the slides into Storyline.

• View the tutorial here.

Use Google Docs to Transcribe Text for HTML5 E-Learning

Some of you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office. In Google Docs, under the Tools tab, you’ll find a Voice Typing feature. Just press it and it starts to record. If I speak clearly, I find it to be very accurate. Once the text is on the page, send it around to be verified and approved. And then copy and paste it into your HTML 5 course.

• View the tutorial here.

Use Windows to Transcribe Text for HTML5 E-Learning

Microsoft Windows 10 has a transcription feature that works to transcribe text right into Storyline. Press Windows + h keys to open the narration window. Start talking and it will do the transcription. It’s not quite as fast or accurate as the solutions above, but it makes up for it by recording right into the Storyline slide or Rise lesson. If you’re using Windows 7, you can leverage the speech recognition feature.

• View the tutorial here.

So, there you have it, three easy ways to read the text from old Flash-based courses to get them into your new HTML5 course that you can update and edit as needed. Then publish it for HTML5 and you are all set.

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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.

Many of you have to convert old Flash courses to HTML5. All you have is the published course but not the original source files. It’s easy enough to extract the media (like images and video) from the published output. But adding text from the old course isn’t as easy because most Flash courses don’t allow selecting text to copy and paste. And who wants to spend hours retyping the text?

Here are a couple of simple ways to copy the text from old Flash e-learning courses that you can add to updated HTML5 e-learning courses without having to retype everything. This works whether you’re using Storyline or Rise.

Use OneNote to Convert Text from Image for Flash to HTML5 Courses

Many of you have OneNote. It’s a great application included in the Microsoft Office products. OneNote has a screen capture feature and the option to copy text from the captured image.

• Play the old Flash-based course and capture screens using OneNote’s screen clipping feature (or insert an image captured from some other application).
• Right-click on the image to copy text from the picture.
• Once you have the text copied, paste into your new slide.
• Watch the tutorial on YouTube.

Use ShareX to Convert Text from Images for Flash to HTML5 Courses

ShareX is free and works great. I use it quite a bit to do screenshots for uploading to various image sites. It also has an OCR feature where it can pull text from an image that can be copied and pasted into a new slide.

• Choose text capture (OCR).
• Select the course slide.
• ShareX extracts the text from the image.
• Copy and paste the text into the new slide.
• Watch the tutorial on YouTube.

Those are two free to low-cost options to quickly get the text from previous e-learning courses.  Many of you already own OneNote, and if you don’t, you can always use the free ShareX application to do your screen grabs and OCR text conversion. Once you have the text, it’s easy enough to copy and paste it into your new course.

Obviously, this is still a bit tedious, but it is an easy way to get the text from your old e-learning courses when you no longer have the source files or original content.

I hope that helps.

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.

The other day someone asked how to convert their Storyline course into a PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint and Storyline look similar but they are two separate applications. You can import PowerPoint slides into Storyline, which makes it easy to convert some existing PowerPoint content into an interactive e-learning course. However, PowerPoint doesn’t offer a way to import Storyline files.

With that said, there are some ways to convert your Storyline course content into a format you can bring into PowerPoint.

Setting Expectations for PowerPoint Conversion

One of the reasons people like to convert the Storyline content to PowerPoint is so they have a presentation version of the course that they can share with other presenters. If this is something you need to do, I’ll share a few ideas, but you do need to understand that there are some constraints.

• Storyline content is usually interactive with triggers showing layers and object state changes. PowerPoint presentations can be interactive, but they tend to be linear presentations of content. So it’s not an apples-to-apples conversion.
• Whatever you export from Storyline will not be interactive. It’ll either be a video or series of images. That means you can’t isolate text boxes, shapes, or other media to edit on the PowerPoint slides. However, the opposite is true if you want to import your PowerPoint slides into Storyline.
• You can simulate interactions in PowerPoint with hyperlinks to other slides using hotspots, but you can’t get the type of interactivity you get in Storyline. If you really need to retain the interactive elements, then it probably doesn’t make sense to convert to PowerPoint.

With that clear, let’s review a few ideas for getting your Storyline content into PowerPoint.

Save the Storyline Course as a Video

This is easy to do. Publish the Storyline file as an .MP4. As you can see in the image below, you have a number of resolution and quality settings. Once published the final output will be video.

If you do have interactive elements in your Storyline course, you’ll need to set the triggers in Storyline to account for the change from interactive content to a linear video. That includes triggers that show layers and other objects that aren’t initially visible on the base slide.

As far as PowerPoint, all you need to do is insert the video onto a slide.

Screen Capture the Storyline Course and Save as Images

Open the published course in a browser and do a screen capture of the slides (just the slides and not the player). Here are a few options:

• Capture the slides individually by going from slide-to-slide. This is a lot slower, but gives you more control when capturing.
• Capture the course as a video and then output the video as images. Most video editing software has a way to export the video as a series of images. You’ll get an image for each frame. No need to capture at 30 frames per second (fps). I’d capture at a really low frame rate like 2-5 fps so you have less noise when pulling out the images you want.
• Use a tool like ScreentoGif to create a .gif which consists of images and can usually be output as a series of images. It’s an easy process and the software is free.

Once you have the images you need, insert them into PowerPoint slides.

At that point, you can review the pictures and make edits. For example, where you have interactive instructions like the image below, you either add an interactive element to move to another slide or you add a colored shape to cover the instruction.

I like working with images better than video because there’s more flexibility. Video gives you a single file, whereas it’s easier to work with multiple images. You have more control over some customization at the slide level and can more easily introduce interactive elements in PowerPoint.

The one thing you can’t get in the conversion is a PowerPoint slide with separated text, pictures, and shapes. It doesn’t work that way. However, if you need the content in a PowerPoint format, the options above should work.

In a follow up post, I’ll show how to make the video interactive and how to add interactive elements to the slide images.

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.

Before committing resources to your course, it’s important to understand what type of e-learning course you need to build.

E-learning courses tend to be one of two types: information or performance

• Information-based courses are more like explainer courses where the main objective is to share information or offer a linear explanation of the content. This is common for new initiatives where awareness is a key objective to the course. It’s also typical of a lot of compliance training that are less focused on changing behavior and more on awareness of key policies. I tend to think of these less as courses, and more like awareness marketing content.
• Performance-based courses focus on changing performance or some sort of behavior. They’re tied to performance metrics where you can measure before and after changes.

Types of E-learning Courses

Within that context, there are generally three types of courses:

• Information. These courses share information with no performance expectations or changes in behavior. They’re more about awareness such as a company’s policy around certain issues.

Performance-based courses tend to be of two types:

• Procedural. These courses are performance-based as they have a required sequence of events or procedures that need to be followed. This is typical of a lot of machine or software training. There’s not a lot of nuance to the training. There are ten steps and everyone follows them exactly the same.
• Principle. These courses are built around decisions that are more soft-skilled in nature. A procedural course has a clear critical path of steps. However, principle-based training is focused on general guidance or principles that are not always black and white. They’re nuanced where the application to each situation may be a bit unique.

Once you understand what type of course you need to build, you’ll be able to commit the appropriate resources. Information/awareness courses require fewer resources. Often, you’re just re-purposing existing content. Which begs the question why you’re building a course (but that’s a different blog post). Performance courses require more focus on measurable objectives, metrics to determine success, and a nuanced understanding of the content and real-world decisions the learner needs to make.

When I meet with clients, I always try to determine what type of “course” they want to build. I focus on the objectives and try to make sure they’re actionable. Information-based courses don’t always need to be built and performance-based courses usually take longer to build and require more resources. By determining which type of course to build you are better able to allocate and manage your 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.