In a recent project I created a custom skin for Articulate Presenter that included menu buttons and a "puzzle" picture that appeared as parts of the interaction were completed. One of the challenges in creating this piece was to correctly size and position the custom skin elements to fit over my slides and some Articulate controls that I left active in the final player.

After completing the project, I realized that a grid template in my Flash file would be useful for f ...

Custom Skin for Articulate Presenter

This is my first attempt at a custom skin for Articulate Presenter. I followed the instructions given by Dave Mozealous in his blog posting. In addition to the excellent instructions he gave, I would like to add the following steps that should preceed his process.

Creating Interactive Buttons

Regardless of the computer application in order to create buttons that have a three-dimensional feel, you need to create images to represent three different "states": the appearance of the button in the up position, the appearance with the mouse hovering over the button, and the appearance of the depressed position when you click on the mouse. These states are typically referred to as the up, over, and down states.

The ...

Relevant graphics are essential to effective elearning courses. Remember the saying, "One picture is worth a thousand words." It turns out that educational psychology studies have provided scientific support of this statement.

According to the "multimedia principle" stated by Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark (eLearning and the Science of Instruction, Pfeiffer, San Francisco: 2005), eLearning courses should include both words and graphics rath ...

A few years ago when I was completing a Masters degree in Information Technology, I learned about the spiral model of software development (first described in detail by Barry Boehm). According to this model, an effective software development process follows these iterative steps:

1. The new system requirements are defined in as much detail as possible.
2. A preliminary design is created for the new system.
3. A first pr ...

In a recent course, I wanted to use the SWF files from another Articulate Presenter publication as the content in a mini-slide series within my course. The problem is that AP SWF have a size of 720 x 540 px, which fill up the entire slide when published. I wanted the effect of a little movie playing within my slide. In addition, I wanted to be able to load a series of SWFs in sequence and allo ...

Here is a quick tip on working with the reviewers of the first draft of your elearning course. If you want the reviewers to take a good look at the first working online version of your course, do NOT give them access to a printed or printable copy of the storyboard or written script.

During the course of a recent project, I gave the reviewers access to a PDF file of the images and script for the first online draft of the course. Perhaps the issue was the choice of the reviewers ...

From Classroom to Elearning in 5 Steps

A common challenge for elearning developers is to take the materials from an in-person, instructor-led course and develop them into a self-paced online course. Here are two suggestions that you might have heard from your management or clients:

"Let's videotape the class and convert the videos into a format we can put online"

How to Export Grouped Records from a Single Access Report into Multiple Files

A client recently asked me to create one button that would allow them to save groups of records in a report in separate files. They could accomplish this task “manually” by opening the report (which contains more than 900 pages), selecting several pages, and exporting these to a file; however, this process was time consuming and tedious.

I searched the Microsoft developers’ ...

eLearning Decision Tree

Creating online courses doesn't mean that you have to spend a bundle on course development and hosting.

Many people seem to think that developing eLearning or online learning means that you need to create a fully programmed, self-contained course that is delivered on the Internet. This concept implies lots of instructional design, subject matter consultation, writing, and programming.

Welcome to Webucate Us Views and Reviews

This discussion is for you if you want to present educational programs online, whether you are new to the field or an experienced online educator. My primary experience has been working with non-profit professional associati ...

Starting Your eLearning Program with Instructor-Led Courses

Why is it faster and less expensive to start y ...

Load and Play Multiple External SWFs Sequentially in a Flash File

Introduction

In this post I discuss how to create a master SWF file that will sequentially load several short, external SWFs that were created previously, play each one, and then unload each before loading and playing the next SWF.

My constraints in creating my master SWF were that I had to make it compatible with the Flash Player 6 and use Actionscript 2. In thi ...

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