Encountering The (E)Learning Curve All Over Again

I’ve spent the past week or so on the brink of poking my eyes out with a hot fireplace poker thingie. At least that amount of searing hot pain would cancel out the throbbing headache that has made my eyes bulge out of  my head — Diego Rivera style.

All of this has been brought on from learning a new skill-set under a very, very tight deadline.  For the past month or so, RedEye has been developing an online training course for one of our longtime clients.  For the most part, creating this online course has been smooth-sailing … graphic change here, title change there .. no big deal.  But like Murphy’s Law says, just when you’re nearing the end of a very long trip, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

So in two days, I had to sync up audio with a powerpoint presentation — and make it play seamlessly and without need for any human interaction (except for pausing, for necessary bathroom breaks when doing an online class).  Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy!

I had two options before me to make this happen: Adobe Presenter and Articulate Studio.  Both programs gave me the same roadblock — apparently, leading e-learning software is not made for a Mac system, and the last time that I regularly used a PC for anything was when I still used dial-up.  (NOTE: I find it mind-boggling frankly, how applications created for online course creation, don’t exist in a platform known for being the choice among creative professionals.)

Thankfully, because we encounter Windows-only stuff on a pretty regular basis, we run Parallels on our system in order to work with PC applications.  Adobe Presenter wouldn’t install correctly, on our system, so Articulate was the program that I ended up using (and just judging from the first few articles that I found via Google — in order to accomplish what I could do with just Articulate Studio, I would need multiple Adobe programs).

Articulate actually works in pretty seamlessly with Microsoft Powerpoint — once you install it the Presenter application works as a Powerpoint plug-in, and you can easily access the rest of the Articulate suite (Quizmaker, Video Encoder, Engage) from the plug-in tab.

But, as with (almost) all PC applications — I found that Articulate acted very buggy.  And unfortunately, I didn’t figure out what all the bugs were, until I was already neck-deep in the Hillbilly Handfishing brown river water, with my fist jammed up a catfish’s mouth.  But instead of my hand being a fist, it was actually my entire lower torse, and instead of a catfish’s mouth, I was stuck inside the really Scary Great White Shark that will prevent me from ever swimming in Australia.

Whenever I returned to the application to make the requested client changes, Articulate would crash on me.  Not just once or twice … but consistently for a good 3 hours or so.  I tried to troubleshoot my way throughout — resorting to the most manipulative of tricks in my worn-out copy of “Macs are from Mars, PCs are from Venus: How to Make A PC Love You.”

That book lied to me! Nothing would work! (PS — that book does not really exist, I tried looking it up).  So after countless emails with customer support, and 6 drafts of half-completed works — I decided to start anew, and here’s what I learned about Articulate Presenter

1. The program says that MP3 and WAV files are preferred for audio — Use MP3s instead.  Just because it says it can use WAV, doesn’t mean it wants to. It’s like, just because I can eat potato chips, I don’t want to because clearly french fries are the worthier of the deep-fried potato variety.
2. Articulate also gives you the ability to extend a single audio file over various slides.  In PC language, this means that Articulate will let you use the same single audio file over no more than 2 (maybe 3 if you pray really hard and perform a random act of kindness) slides.  This is very important! After struggling to sync animations and slide transitions for 58 slides over one long 40 minute audio file (in a WAV form no less!), I had to bite the bullet, and cut the audio file into 58 different smaller files!  Only then did it work (kinda) — which leads me to #3.
3.  Do not use the Audio Editor feature to sync your animation.  In fact, don’t even go there — if you absolutely have to open the Audio Editor feature — be sure to bring an ax, a flashlight, and a little prayer to the Articulate/Powerpoint/PC Gods, because the “Your Computer Will Crash” boogeyman will hunt you down, and you’ll need weapons to kill him. In my treacherous initial experiment with Articulate, I have found that the Audio Editor feature works really nicely to make small edits to your file, like deleting an extra word, adding in some silence, and syncing the transition to another slide.  But, I urge you, to only make these changes one at a time — because there’s an 80% chance that Audio Editor will crap out on you.  So make one change, and save save save!!!
4. The “Sync Animation” feature on Articulate doesn’t lie to you when it says that it only works to sync your “On-Click Animations.” It’s actually being honest!  But here’s where it gets confusing, especially if you have a combination of “On-Click” and “After Previous” and “With Previous” animations on your slide.  What you see in your Sync Animations preview, isn’t actually what your presentation will look like!  For example, if at the top of your slide, you have an “After Previous” animation, followed by an on-click animation — you may end up making your on-click animation appear too soon — throwing off absolutely everything.  For this I suggest, marking down the cues on your script as to when an animation is supposed to appear, and don’t count the animations that are numbered as 0.
5. Also, Powerpoint will hate your guts and won’t let you group your text with an image, until it does! And then when you try to do it again in another slide, it won’t let you do it again!  It’s like a fickly boyfriend.

I’m onto my second online course now — It’s going a lot better than the first time around, I don’t feel like killing any interns.  I’m sure that as RedEye continues to create more online courses, I’ll be making them faster than it takes you to reach the end of this blog post.  I’m also certain that our Intern Mortality Rate will also go down.

What has been your experience working via different platforms on a single project?  Are there better options out there for software to create E-Learning courses? For now, I think we’ll be sticking with Articulate — I’ve put the Imperius curse on it.