Running an Articulate Storyline module on a non-iOS mobile device

A lot of blood, sweat and swearing has gone into the back story behind today's post.

 

I am preparing to run a short internal workshop about the use of technology in learning. As part of that, I thought I might start with a brief, fun quiz, designed to demonstrate to my largely tech-shy colleagues that they are not as digitally illiterate as they think. Of course, it makes sense to deliver that quiz using technology in an intuitive enough form that it supports my message, right?

 

Devising the quiz
So I opted to use Articulate Storyline. I am fairly adept with Articulate Studio, having used it to build solutions for several of my clients when I had my own business, but I have only recently been coming to grips with Storyline. It's very handy for this sort of thing. So here we had learning experience 1. I made a few mistakes, and oversights, which revealed themselves in the test stages, but I managed to sort them out (I think).

 

The challenges
Creating the quiz proved to be the easy bit. The difficult bit comes when we start looking at the tech for the workshop. Here are the challenges I faced:

• There isn't enough cabling in any of our meeting rooms for everyone to bring along their laptops and access the quiz on our shared drive.
• There is only one, rather feeble, wifi network in our offices, which doesn't reach the meeting rooms.
• We have no supported tablets in our offices. We do, however, have some unsupported ones. These are generic non-iOS devices.
• The unsupported devices don't have access to our network drives.
• I don't have a space suitable for hosting the quiz module in a workable format.
• Normally speaking, in order to run an Articulate module on a tablet, you have to publish an html5 version and download the Articulate Mobile Player app from iTunes. That means it's only available to iOS devices.

With the help of my remarkably supportive husband for some bits, this is what I will be doing:

Creating a wifi hotspot

I will create a wifi hotspot in the meeting room by bridging the networks on my laptop as follows (I hope - this bit has yet to be tested!):

Hosting space

The tablets can then use that wifi to access the quiz. However, as I mentioned, there isn't a suitable space for me to host the quiz. So I'm hoping that I will be able to impose on the good graces of the people at Articulate to host the quiz on their tempshare space for the occasion. It is a little frustrating that I need to do this at all, but let's not go there for now.

Accessing the quiz

Of course, the resultant link from the tempshare space will be a long-ass string of letters and numbers and I don't have a way of storing that link on the tablets, so I will use Bitly to shorten it and then, rather clunkily, ask my attendees to enter it manually into the address bar of the browser.

Browser

This brings me to the matter of the browser. As I mentioned, these are non-iOS devices. In order to run an Articulate module on a mobile device, said device needs to have the appropriate app. This app is only available from iTunes, so applies only to iOS mobile devices. However, thanks to this post by Robert George on the Articulate forum, I discovered that the way forward on my cheap and cheerful tablets was a browser called Dolphin.

Having done that, I no longer needed the mobile player app. The tablet could run the quiz without it.

So, at about midnight last night, my husband and I high fived each other and dragged our exhausted butts to bed.

Now to see if I can replicate this in the office! It all hangs on that wifi connection!

Wish me luck.

A tip for Articulate users

I came across this today, courtesy of a link from one of my Twitter friends. I forget which.

For those who use Articulate and like to try to find ways to push the boundaries of what it can and can't do.

I have tried umpteen times to embed the video in this post, but, while I can see it perfectly in preview, it simply refuses to play ball when I publish. Sorry.

Articulating a response

On Wednesday, I posted about my struggles with Articulate Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes. And, in the interests of fair play, I would like make the following known.

The folks at Articulate Towers obviously have their finger on the pulse of social media, because there was a swift response from them in the form of an email from a team member, one Dave Moxon, with an invitation to get in touch by email, outlining the problem.

There was a prompt response to my email, and an invitation to teleconference. Yesterday at 5pm my time, I was in conference with Dave, who gave me presenter rights and got me to show him my set up and to demonstrate what went wrong.

Of course, as is always the case when you visit the doctor or get through to the helpdesk, everything worked perfectly!

What Dave did identify as a potential problem was that I was storing my Engage interaction files (.intr) and Quizmaker quizzes (.quiz) in the same folder as my published projects. This, apparently is a Bad Idea, so we created a new folder called Published Projects and did a little housekeeping.

Dave also considered the possibility that two other factors might be at play:

1. The computer that I have been working on has four log-ins. One for each member of the family. All four of us have a space on the C: drive, but, for example, my space is known as the K: drive. The partitioning may have had a role to play in the problem, but...
2. ... the more likely culprit appears to be the fact that we have an external hard drive onto which our computer automatically backs up every day.
   

The call ended with an invitation to get back in touch right away should this ever happen again.

We didn't find a definitive solution, but the point of this post is to acknowledge Articulate's alertness and engagement with their users, and their level of customer service. Wouldn't I just be a Mother Grundy if I only ever reported what went wrong?

So, going forward, I will:

• work on my laptop instead of the shared computer
• back up to a stick to make up for the loss of the external hard drive and auto backup facility
• create folder hierarchies for each project before I start, and keep my Articulate files separate from my published projects.
  

Articulating my woes

I have been using Articulate to put together an e-induction for a client with a global staff complement. It was the client's express wish to use this product, as they are hoping to be able to do their own maintenance going forward. I was well-impressed with Studio '09 and its extra features, and I don't take that back.

However, there is one aspect of Articulate that has not improved. Not even slightly. It's sticky and stubborn!

Let me explain. Using Articulate Engage, you can create interactive screens for the user to explore aspects of the learning material in different ways. Of course, the first time the client sees these, there is bound to be something that needs to be changed. X happened in 2008, not 2006. Y's name is mis-spelled. The URL attached to Z piece of text is wrong. That kind of thing. So you duly make the changes and republish the resource. No problem.

Except, for some reason best known to itself, Articulate re-publishes the old version of the interaction screens. So you go to your browser cache and empty it. You delete old versions of the resource from your system. You hunt down all the 'temp' folders in your file structure and purge them.

You republish. Again. And yet again, Articulate republishes the old versions of the interaction screens. You are unable to find a trace of these old files anywhere on your system. But hoo boy! Articulate not only finds them, but uses them.

The same problem applies to Quizmaker quizzes.

So... if you're me, and your client is champing at the bit, you delete and re-insert every single interaction and quiz in the resource. Then redo the Slide properties on each and every one to make sure the menu structure is correct. This takes you the better part of a day. And this day is after your IT expert husband has burnt the midnight oil for two nights running trying to find where the system is getting its data from.

When you have paid over £1000 for the licence, this feels a bit off-side. So, if anyone out there has a solution, please... I'm all ears!

LPOD - Articulate, temp folders and caches

Something I have learnt the hard way about Articulate is its stubborn adherence to older versions of Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes when you amend and republish a module. I learnt long ago to empty my browser cache before republishing an amended module.

What I have had to learn to do today is to track down all the temp folders on my computer, and empty those, too. For some reason, one single temp folder has not been enough for my computer. It has created several of the blighters at various levels of the folder structure.

I have also had to empty the caches in all my web browsers, not just Firefox, because I use other browsers for testing, and, blow me down if Articulate doesn't hang on to all that stuff, too.

I never knew an application with such stickiness!

Articulate 09 - PC Pro review

My IT support man and sleeping partner forwarded me the link to this review. It's a far better job than the haphazard mentions I have been making lately, but then again, it's a review of the product as a computer application.

If you want a review of the product as a learning development tool, you're better off trawling the blogosphere to see what the learning professionals have to say!

Articulate community to the rescue

Tuesday was a horrible day for me. I was trying to transfer an Articulate project from my deskptop computer to my laptop. Those who have worked with Articulate will know what a pain that can be. Fortunately, the good people in Articulate Towers must have heard the distressed cries of their user base and decided to do something about it. In response to my frantic cry for help on the user forum, someone called beeneeb sent me a link to this information:

If you want to back up all of your Presenter ’09 project files for safe keeping or send them to your collaborators working on the same project - or just send your project to another computer, Presenter ’09 provides a simple and effective tool to package all the necessary files into one zip file. This Send to Articulate Presenter Package feature creates a package of the contents of Presenter ’09, along with any embedded Engage, Quizmaker and other inserted media files (such as Flash movies) so they can be edited on another computer.

1. In PowerPoint 2007, click on the Microsoft Office button. Select Send -> Articulate Package.
   In PowerPoint 2000, 2002, 2003, go to File -> Send to -> Select Articulate Presenter Package.
2. The Articulate Presenter Package dialog box opens.
3. Select the location where you want the package to be created. You can also specify optional Package Notes, including the project name, the version number, the author of the project with email and other special instructions.
4. Click on Create Package.
5. A dialog box tells you if the package was successfully created, giving you the option to view the folder with the package files.

Hallelujah for user community forums. Hallelujah for beeneeb! Hallelujah for Presenter 09! (I have to say that I am thus far very much more impressed with it than I was with earlier versions - it provides far more flexibility to the author)

An email from a customer support engineer gave me this advice:

If you want to move your project files from one computer to another, be sure that you move not only the PowerPoint file but also the Articulate project files. If the project was created in Presenter '09, all project files will be stored in a .PPTA file with the same name as the PowerPoint file (and located in the same folder as the PowerPoint file). If it was created in Presenter 5, all project files will be stored in folder with the same name as the PowerPoint file (and located in the same folder as the PowerPoint file). You will also want to move any quiz and interaction files that you may have created for the presentation as well.

No disrespect to him, but I found the first option easier to understand, so I'm going to give that a go.

pic of the day - computer hell

Today is a horrible day! I'm trying to migrate all my work to my laptop from the family computer, and it is not going well. "Why?" I hear you ask. Well I don't really, but I'm going to tell you anyway. One word. Articulate. Articulate projects are a pig to try to migrate to a different computer midway. I have tried to get some help and none of the responses have been on target. Oh, for a techie to come and look over my shoulder and say, "Ah yes. I see what the problem is." And then FIX it.

Aargh!!!!

Articulate '09

If you're not familiar with Articulate, this post will mean little to you. If you haven't yet encountered it, Articulate is a suite of apps that can be used to transform a PowerPoint presentation into an elearning module, complete with interactions and quizzes. It allows non-techies to develop learning resources. It is a very useful tool, although (as I have said before) some organisations are wielding it like the all-purpose hammer that makes every identified learning need suddenly look remarkably like a nail!

One of the greatest frustrations for me when using Articulate in the past was that, unless you had access to the SDK (and the skills to use it!) your Engage interactions stood out like a sore thumb against your Presenter screens. This was because, while the user could format the PowerPoint slides as they wished, the interactions were autoformatted. There were three options:

1. Create the entire module as a series of Engage screens, with no flat PowerPoint screens in between
   
2. Try to fudge your PowerPoint slides to look roughly like the interactions (rather limiting and only partially successful)
3. Shell out £1200 to a company with the SDK for a customised template
   

However, this issue has been rather well addressed in the '09 release, in which you now have far greater control over the look and feel of the interaction screens.

I am busy with my first project using '09 and am very pleased with the seamlessness of the transition from slide to interaction and back again.

A definite thumbs up on that point.