How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly!

Tom, I’m just about to download the examples to see how you did them (if it was how I think you did it!).

The Bandage example has a problem – your final page, the tree diagram is hard to get my head around. I’m going to have to wait until someone can point the boxes out to me on my screen.

You use green, dark green and red. I am red/green colour blind. Instead of the usual “red amber green” it can help to use something like “green yellow blue” or “red yellow blue”.

This is great Tom. This goes really well with Cathy Moore’s entry this week (http://blog.cathy-moore.com/)

I really appreciate this info!

Tom, I always love reading your entries…especially when they make me laugh out loud. Setting my giggles aside, this entry is timely as it is directly related for something I’m trying to work on/learn right now.

I love the presentation you created for the ASTD – thanks for sharing that with us.

How do you get your images to be so clear? When I output the same powerpoint, the images are always a little blurry.

Great tips on scenario building too, thank you.

I really enjoy your articles. They are always so helpful. I particulaly enjoyed this one because I would like to try some branching and was interested in how you created these. However when I try to download the zip file I keep getting a message saying the zip file is corrupted or invalid. I don’t know if it is as a result of our firewall or does the file really have a problem?

Thanks
Mike

Zips work fine here too 😀

Tom, two additional items now I’ve looked through the ASTD show. (Very good, BTW, as usual).

1. you push the title off-screen in the master, I’d make another master slide and change it for just those slides where I wanted it different.

2. the real key to this is in slide 12 where you show the Articulate settings. If you do it in straight PowerPoint, as you say, it causes you to go to the next slide when you click. If I wanted to do it in pure PPT then I create a box, no line, no fill as the top-most object on a slide and hyperlink this where I want it to go. Then I pull the objects that are “real” hotspots above that. Then a user clicks on a real hotspot and it goes wherever I want them to go, they click the background and it goes back to the question (still doesn’t fix them hitting page down!).

I’ve a question too but I’ll put it on the forum as it may get a bit wordy to respond to here!

Hi Tom,

This is good stuff. I like the presentation you did and the branching examples are great. I will definately try this with with my next e-learning project. Your articles, as usual, are always awesome!

I just wanted to say thanks for all this great info and the demos. I’m really learning a lot from you and the other sites and blogs you suggest.

I’m kind of the lone ID on our team right now and we’re trying to move from page-turners to interactive, but I was concerned it would just look prettier. Your comments about getting the interaction to use their brain is so important!

I’m also new to Engage and trying to think of creative ways to use it, so the info from Helene was most timely.

Thanks again. I really appreciate all you are doing and sharing.

I am learning, Master. 😉

Thanks for all your valuable help, Tom. We ought to be paying tuition for your newsletter! I am spreading the word. You rock!

Tom, timely posting! I like using cases and scenarios in my classes, both online and in-class and have found them to be valuable to learners. In the field of IDT we often have to work in areas that we are not SMEs. Thus scenarios help the learners envision possible scenarios in their practice, espcially those new to the profession.

I had figured out many of these techniques by trial and error. But several things I learned which were terrific were pre-building the scenarios, getting out of the “bullet rut”, moving the title off screen and using the outline format, color coding each scenario for easier management, and hiding the slides in the presenter slide manager but leaving them co-located with the lead slide. I had been moving the non-viewable slides to the end of the program and hiding a bunch of them together. It made for difficult navigation during the creation process. From now on I’m going to leave them in sequence and just hide them in Presenter.

You’ve inspried me to go further.

What fantastic demos to help showcase what can be done. Thank you for the laughs!

This is great. All your blogs are great. Tom, if I saw you in person I’d give you a big hug and a kiss!

Tom – I love your posts, especially the fact that you always seem to follow your training philosophy when sharing this information with trainers (which is rarely true of others for some reason).

I’m working on a Presenter project with several topics and would like to make some of them branching (others are Engage, etc.) I’m not finding a way to mix these topics when the navigation buttons will take them through the branching slides if they choose them instead of the hyperlinks on the slide? What am I missing?

While perhaps not quite as easily done as in Articulate, there is a PowerPoint-only way to force users to use only the hyperlinked navigation. It can be done in “3 easy steps.”

1. Prevent click-throughs by UNchecking the Advance Slide On Mouse Click option in the Slide Transitions dialog.(Be sure to apply to all slides.)

2. Prevent paging/arrowing through by setting all the slides except the challenge slides (or even just the first slide) to hidden.

3. Pat yourself on the back.

An alternative way to intercept mouse clicks is similar to Mark C.’s suggestion of slide-sized hyperlinks. Instead of just hyperlinking, one would set an action button with the link set to the slide of choice. One of the advantages that has is the ability to choose Last Slide Viewed if your branching is more complex, involving arriving at a common slide from more than one fork.

Kudos go to: http://www.cortland.edu/flteach/mm-course/ppt-yes-no.html for these ideas.

–Allen

PS. Depending how the ppt is used, you can also set “Loop continuously until ‘Esc'” under Slide Show > Set Up Show to send the user back to the first slide instead of being dumped unceremoniously out to the black “End of Show” screen when they’re finished.

Allen, that’s really useful. I didn’t know I could do that!

Tom, you asked for examples. Here is something awesome. I didn’t post this yesterday as I needed to ask my son for his permission 😀

He’s 11. The other day he was doing “the impossible quiz” http://www.addictinggames.com/theimpossiblequiz.html and wanted to make his own up.

He asked me if he could use PowerPoint on my computer. Sure. He was playing away and then asked me how to do a hyperlink and I showed him the invisible hotspot too. The rest is his own work.

I’ll say two things about this – 1. he tells me it isn’t finished. 2. he likes the word, concept, anything to do with “pie” so it features heavily 😉

If this is what an 11 year old can do with raw PPT imagine what can be achieved.

(Can you guess I’m a proud dad? 😉 )

Here’s the link http://www.studywright.com/temp/the_hard_quiz.ppt

I’ve just watched your presentation, Tom. As an aspiring brilliant presenter (vide Richard Hall) I think interactive PowerPoint is a cracking idea. Thanks very much for sharing it.

M

Thanks for yet another helpful article, Tom. I’m working a lot with scenarios at the moment, but using HTML and Javascript. I’ve written about the stage before – working with an SME to script the scenarios – at http://normanlamont.typepad.com/eellearning/2007/12/creating-rolepl.html it may be useful to someone.

Tom – you are the man! I’ve been wondering how to do this for the longest time. Thanks for sharing this info… I can’t wait to utilize these principles.

I was just coming to the blog to say “you are the man!” but Matt beat me to it.

[…] Wie man Szenarien in seine Kurse einbaut, zeigt “Tom” in seinem Rapid E-Learning-Blog. Hier im Bild “Sally, die sich am Daumen verletzt hat”. Der Lerner soll entscheiden, was zu tun ist: Verband oder Amputation. How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

Thanks for the presentations.
How did you remove the navigation button of the player Articulate?
Did you use the player SDK ?

[…] en savoir plus, je vous encourage

thanks for your good information!

Great information, Tom. The feedback from others have been invaluable also. I’ve gained some understanding of how branching works and plan on using it in future projects.

This is very true, children do go to the very basics and much can be learned by following their learning strategies. Scenarios simplify the learning by making the learner relate better. Like if I want to stress on relevance of colors, I can build around my morning stroll in the garden.

Scenario

A bunch of baby-pink roses swayed in the morning breeze. The light drizzle had sprayed the velvet petals with fine mist. The dew drops reflected the light green of the young leaves.Steel gray of the clouds blended with the darkening of the foliage.

If the learner is being taught about the relevance of colour scheme, he or she will appreciate this scenario and pay attention to the more structured learning this scenario will lead to.

Thanks for sharing, I may be wrong in this scenario, just learning from you! This is not getting posted I tried many times.Again submit, let’s see.

Tom: I love your blog. I’ve been working as an ID and eLearning developer for quite a while now, and your tips are always helpful.

Tom – I’m a first timer here and new(ish) to the industry. I have already updated my company’s materials to PowerPoint ‘modules’ but your advice is brilliant. I’ll be incorporating your principles into future ppt’s and also into our new self-authoring tool.

Thanks!

Hi Tom, as a very new subscriber to your blog I am amazed and so inspired by the depth of information and the great tips you impart in such an interesting way. As a learning designer I hope to incorporate some of the techniques you have demonstrated in the use of PowerPoint as an educational tool going beyond mere linear presentations.

In any of your blogs, do you have information or helpful guidelines for incoporating drag and drop interactivity within PowerPoint? I have searched the archives but have not found any blogs related to this. Any helpful hints would be great.

Thanks for your generous work!

[…] Building scenarios for your elearning courses is a good way to engage your learners and it helps place the course content in a real world context.  However, when using clip art to build your scenarios you run into a couple of challenges.  One is having enough characters and the other is having the right characters. […]

Thank you Tom! I have just created my first course and used same page branching. It’s pretty good, but on some clicks the entire page refreshes rather than the object looking like it’s appeared on the same page. It’s not the same link everytime. On one click it will move smoothly and on another it will jump. Did I do something wrong?
Thank you for all the great information you provide, your tutorials are inspiring!

New to elearning and to this website; congratulations I had surfed all the site without a pup up that ask for my CC number… thanks for sharing!

[…] How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

Hi Tom:

Great post! For the Techknowledge presentation, what tool did you use for the PPT demo starting on Slide 10? Is it Camtasia?

Thanks much!

I am in the testing process and loved the branching scenario. Thank you Tom.

Do you know if there is a library of basic scenarios that are downloadable? It would be good to not have to re-invent wheels.

Cheers!
Bill

Tom, what is your trick for making a graphic look like it’s reflecting off of a surface? I’m talking specifically about your slides with white graphics on black background in your ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 Presentation. The graphics look like they are reflecting off of an invisable black surface.

Are you just taking a screen shot and fiddling with it in a graphics editor (flipping it vertically and putting a fade on it) and dropping it back in your slideshow? Or is there some PowerPoint magic going on?

The effect is so subtle, I love it!

[…] Wie man Szenarien in seine Kurse einbaut, zeigt “Tom” in seinem Rapid E-Learning-Blog. Hier im Bild “Sally, die sich am Daumen verletzt hat”. Der Lerner soll in diesem Szenario entscheiden, was zu tun ist: Verband oder Amputation. Was hier pointiert gezeigt wird, ist eine interessante Methode, nicht nur Wissen zu vermitteln, sondern vom Lerner auch gleich Entscheidungen zu verlangen. How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

Hi Tom,

thanks for the post. I notice that you have disabled the player controls and create your own navigation in the PowerPoint slide using hyperlinks. I am constrained by company standards that require I use the Presenter controls and outline navigation.

How can I get a similar result with these constraints

Thank you
Lisa

Great post and awesome comments. It’s too bad Lively is gone, but I think Second Life can work very well too. Not to bring the learner into (there are many great examples though). In my work, we reach about 70,000 users in 110 countries, most people can’t hit SL due to firewall issues.

On top of that, we needed a way to make our content more engaging and yield higher retention. But, like many companies, our budgets (both in time and money) would not allow us to use full video. At that time, I had been messing with Blender 3D (what a learning curve!) and the rendering takes so long that it just was not feasible.

When I saw Second Life, I saw a 3d animation tool, not just an immersive environment. Well, after being heavily involved in Second Life (I now have 12 sims) and working with other corporations, I have started speaking at conferences on Second Life as a fairly rapid and very inexpensive development tool. You can easily build sets, script and film scenarios, and bring your video into most anything. My background is in Flash, but it’s easy to take the video and place it into PowerPoint as well (we do this for our conferences).

If anyone is interested, I have free tutorials on this and truly believe that helping people learn is a great thing. Thanks on your excellent post!

Hi Tom,

I have recently started using Articulate and have been following your tips and advise regularly. I saw one of your presentations on how to create a branching scenario and I noticed that you have a video included in the ppt demonstrating how to create scenario in power point.

I have been wanting to do this for a long time as we use a lot of internal softwares. I am using the previous version of articulate that does not have the video encoder.I tried to use a free software called WINK but for some reason when I publish my presentation, the size of the video is too small. I would love to know the software you’ve used in your demonstration.

Will look forward to your response.

Many Thanks,
Shivani

[…] If you do want more interactivity, check out the Rapid E-Learning Blog’s post on  How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

[…] How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

Tom,

I have so enjoyed learning from you and David. This has been so much fun and educational.

I created a PowerPoint that is similiar to what David created; where the pictures go up to the picture frame and you learn something. I thought this might give an additional way to use this.

Thought I would share it with you and your group. Not sure where it best fit but this seemed to be the place. Here is the Screenr number http://screenr.com/lPR.

[…] How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly! […]

[…] Create scenarios to engage your learners […]

[…] can read more about it in this blog post, How to Add Scenarios to Your Rapid E-Learning Courses…Rapidly!  I also included the .zip file in the downloads […]

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