Guru Honorable Mention: What About Roundabouts? by Joseph Suarez

This post by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks features one of the Honorable Mentions from the 2010 Articulate Guru Awards. To see other award-winning courses from the Guru Awards, check out the posts here.

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What goes around comes around! When you build a unique, eye-pleasing, easy-to-understand e-learning course, it’s only natural that it’ll turn some heads — which is exactly what happened with Joseph Suarez’s course, called What About Roundabouts?

Joe’s course earned an Honorable Mention in the recent Articulate Guru Awards. His course takes a potentially confusing topic, boils it all down into simple principles, and uses a visual design that not only looks cool but is meaningful and informative.

Joe saw the Guru Awards as an opportunity to get creative with PowerPoint and the Articulate tools, and the judges definitely felt he succeeded. Take a look at what he built:

View What About Roundabouts?

What did the judges like? For one, judges loved how Joe leveraged a clean, consistent visual design and a straightforward instructional approach. The course gets right to the point by allowing learners to “pick a destination” on a hyperlinked menu slide. The animations Joe leveraged throughout the course were just right — they added a creative and lively edge to the course, and they supported the content without being distracting or over-the-top. Judges also liked the way Joe incorporated a nicely designed Engage Labeled Graphic. And several judges noted that this project is a great example of how a course can be engaging without any audio.

In the following screencast, Joe shares some of his design inspiration for the course’s opening animation, and how he created it:

View this screencast at Screenr

Joe also shares how he animated the cars in his course to make them travel in a realistic circular motion:

View this screencast at Screenr

Really nice job, Joe! Thanks for sharing your course, and congrats on your Articulate Guru Honorable Mention! 

Eager to see more Honorable Mentions? Stay tuned — we’ve still got more courses to feature!