Updating and Upgrading Existing Courses with Articulate Storyline 360

Digital learning programs have been around for a long time. Right from the initial Word documents and PowerPoint presentations to the advanced Flash and Java based courses, e-learning courses have been ever evolving. In recent times, one technological boom has acted as a catalyst in the evolution of e-learning courses: smart-devices. A rapid influx of devices with touch functionality and high-powered processors called for the complete upheaval of how e-learning courses were developed.

A HTML5 based Responsive Course Design can be currently termed the most advanced technology used to develop e-learning courses. Courses developed using RCD dynamically adapt their parameters to suit the device in use. This eliminates the need to individual courses for different devices or device classes, thereby greatly reducing development and maintenance efforts. Needless to say, older course formats are incompatible with this new e-learning technology. This doesn’t mean that your old courses should gather dust. With a little bit of effort, you can upgrade the existing course content into the dynamic, newer format.

As rapid authoring tools are the primary software applications using which HTML5 based courses are developed, these play a prominent role in upgrading older courses. Articulate Storyline 360 is one such tool that can update your older courses and add a great amount of learning value along the way. Let’s explore some of the ways in which Storyline 360 adds a great amount of value to your upgrading process:

Updating to Match New Visual Branding

With Articulate Storyline 360’s intuitive and familiar interface, your developers can start upgrading old courses with almost no training. Since this tool is integrated with a content library, developers can speedily access a wide variety of templates, characters, and stock media right. Using the 2 million plus photographs, illustrations, icons, and videos your developers can mold the upgraded course according to the new brand values of your organization. The many features of this tool allow your text to flow consistently across all devices and make pixel-perfect placements of object. This way your course holistically looks and feels like the intellectual property of your organization.

Improving Interactive Elements

Storyline 360 is filled with useful features that help you convey your old content with new instructional design methods. You can easily create dial, slider, button, light-box based interactions to depict your content in a more engaging form. To further engage learners, you can build interactions by assigning one or more triggers to an object, choosing when and what kind of action you want to occur based on the input from the learners. Storyline 360 also gives you the power to create software simulations and demos faster than ever as it segments any activity into step-by-step tutorials that you can edit without re-recording.

Including Multimedia

Storyline 360 gives you the necessary features to easily create, import, and edit video, audio, and images, without any complex conversions or encoding techniques. When using this tool for upgrading old courses, you don’t have to restrict yourself to just plain written text. Convert your text to speech quickly and narrate your course as per the required language. You can even bring the power of the web to your courses by easily embedding web-based applications, games, videos, reference materials, and much more.

Creating High Quality Assessments

One of the major things that were restricted in older e-learning development methods was the quality of assessments. You can change this important aspect of your course while upgrading it using Storyline 360. Easily assess your learners’ progress by choosing from 20 predefined, form-based questions and build quizzes in seconds. With the Freeform Question feature, you can create an engaging, decision-making activity around any objects on your slide without the need of programming.

Delivering Powerful Publishing

All these features mean nothing if your upgraded course is not published the right way. Storyline 360’s new responsive player takes care of just that. It dynamically adapts to all imaginable tablets, smartphones, laptops, operating systems and browser applications. It also fine-tunes the output for touch-enabled devices. Even different languages don’t hamper the output quality as the tool fully supports right-to-left languages as well as scripts with double-byte character set. Storyline 360 makes your courses universally accessible by adhering to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

The market is full of authoring tools, with each having its own set of pros and cons. But, when it comes to upgrading your older courses, few come close to the comprehensiveness of Storyline 360.