This case study is about the training challenges faced and solved by one of our enterprise customers, Wyeth, which uses Articulate software to develop elearning courses for sales representatives, new hires, and others.

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Challenge

Less than a month before a sales conference, Steve Wells, Senior Director of the Learning and Compliance Group for Wyeth’s Sales Training and Management Development Department, was handed a major challenge: Develop and implement an e-learning course that covered essential background materials and company policies that sales representatives could take prior to attending a mid-year Plan of Action (POA) meeting. And to make the challenge even more daunting, the course had to be tracked by the company’s learning management system (WyethTRAINet Learning Center) so that Wyeth senior management could confirm completion by each sales employee.

Using the company’s traditional course development tools would have required two to four weeks of intensive work from Wells and a development team to create a CD-ROM course and ship it to 5,000 sales representatives and managers. The cost to design and implement the training program would be expensive and wouldn’t allow for automatic tracking of completions because of the time crunch and delivery method chosen.

“Besides the exorbitant costs and lack of tracking functionality, I knew the timeframe wouldn’t allow us to do the quality job expected by management on the course itself,” said Wells.

Solution

Wells believed this challenge required a new approach. He decided to try a new tool, Articulate Presenter, for this high-profile project.

“I knew most of the content was PowerPoint-based. If Articulate worked as promised, we’d reduce the development time and save thousands of dollars in development and distribution costs,” said Wells. “Even though we’d not used Articulate before, the tool seemed very straightforward and easy to use. I was sure our course developers could pick it up quickly and deliver a SCORM-compliant course.”

His hunch paid off. The course was completed ahead of schedule, which gave the management team time to further review and suggest changes. Articulate Presenter easily allowed for last-minute edits. Management was thrilled with the tracking and reporting capabilities that Articulate Presenter enabled.

“The total investment resulted in a benefit-cost ratio of 8:1 and an ROI analysis yielded a 500% result on the training investment/deployment over traditional delivery methods,” according to Wells. “Most importantly, the great success of the course rollout validated rapid e-learning development at Wyeth and dramatically increased its use.”

Since then, Wells and other Wyeth trainers, instructional designers, project managers, and technology specialists have used Articulate Presenter extensively, as the demand for rapid e-learning continues to grow. So far, the tool has been used to create many new e-learning modules, including six new hire orientation modules, and to repurpose many classroom-based courses to e-learning courses throughout Wyeth.

“We’ve seen a continually growing demand for faster turnaround and shorter courses,” said Wells. “And Articulate’s offerings are ideally suited for this trend.”

Today, Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker, a companion product that Wyeth uses to embed quizzes in courses and tutorials, are used throughout the global Wyeth enterprise to meet a wide variety of training needs.

“Typically courses we create today are between 30-40 minutes long and subject matter experts do most of the content building by leveraging existing PowerPoint presentations” said Wells.

The Wyeth Multimedia team finishes and completes the production work, which may involve adding professional narration, high quality graphics, and even animation — depending on the course requirements, the available budget and the overall schedule. Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker’s compliance with SCORM enables launching and tracking of all courses through WyethTRAINet Learning Center, which is built on SumTotal System’s Total LMS.

Best Practices

• The team created a design document that incorporates portions of Articulate’s user manual and instructional design basics. The document gives subject matter experts the information needed for content creation, standardizes results, and facilitates further production work — such as the addition of audio and graphics and LMS integration.
• Articulate has helped the sales training team respond to critical, often unbudgeted learning needs that arise throughout the year. The team has discovered that sales representatives actually prefer short instructional modules averaging 10 to 15 minutes for completion.
• By giving subject matter experts more responsibility for content building, Wells’ team has broadened its support. In addition to supporting U.S. sales, the team also indirectly provides customization and integration services to training teams outside of the United States.

“Much of our company’s learning is time critical,” said Wells. “Articulate helps us meet unpredicted needs with modules that are highly professional and well-received by our audiences.”

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About Wyeth

Wyeth is one of the world’s largest research-driven pharmaceutical and health care products companies. It is a leader in the discovery, development, manufacturing, and marketing of pharmaceuticals, vaccines, biotechnology products, and non-prescription medicines that improve the quality of life for people worldwide. The Company’s major divisions include Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Wyeth Consumer Healthcare, and Fort Dodge Animal Health.

Wyeth’s products are sold in more than 145 countries, and its product portfolio includes innovative treatments across a wide range of therapeutic areas. Wyeth’s worldwide resources include 52,000 employees, manufacturing facilities on four continents, and a unique research and technology base encompassing small molecules, biopharmaceuticals, genetic engineering that will give us the next wave of innovative therapies; and vaccines. The company’s headquarters are in Madison, New Jersey.

Well-known Wyeth products include: Advil, Alavert, Centrum, ChapStick, Dimetapp, Effexor, Enbrel, Prevnar, and Robitussin.

This guest blog entry was written by Articulate EVP of Sales & Marketing Mark Schwartz.

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Imagine putting in a full day’s work and then having to go to school for more than 5 hours of classroom lectures one day a week. That’s a long day. For part-time MBA students at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — and many other advanced degree students around the world — this type of schedule is required in order to complete the rigors of a part-time MBA course load.

Steve Crane, Associate Professor of Economics at Marquette, was asked by his associate dean and the director of the MBA program to seek alternatives to traditional classroom lectures as a way to reduce the burden of MBA students.

Enter Articulate.

“Essentially, I was tasked with providing a solution that would enable students to learn remotely, at their own schedule and pace — without compromising on quality content or rigor. My research led me to Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio Pro,” said Crane.

Crane converted his managerial economics class — a core curriculum course required for all MBA students — to a blended learning course consisting of a biweekly lecture supplemented with e-learning. Thirty-eight hours of class lecture material was transformed into 18 hours of engaging e-learning, thanks to Articulate.

“As a result of swapping direct classroom contact time for elearning, I expected more student requests for assistance,” said Crane. “I was surprised that this was not the case. I soon came to realize that in a traditional lecture, once you say it, it is gone, but with e-learning, the students can always access your commentary and examples, and can clear up many points of confusion on their own. In addition, the embedded Quizmaker self-test quizzes helped to both identify problem areas and offer clarification when the correct responses were revealed.”

Articulate software also provides flexibility to allow students to seek their own pace through a lesson. This ensures the best use of the students’ time. For example, the course requires a solid foundation of statistics and calculus. Since a third of the MBA candidates are engineers, they don’t require a refresher on these disciplines. But for those who need to learn or brush up on derivatives and basic statistics, the courses are designed so that lessons on these subjects are merely a click away.

“I’ve found the Articulate software very simple to use,” said Crane. “And the Rapid E-Learning Blog has really improved my e-learning course design and effectiveness.”

Overall, student feedback has been positive and Marquette’s College of Business is moving toward redesigning its entire MBA program to a blended approach. Crane’s experiences proved very useful in demonstrating how this can be done.

Add this success story to the recent University of Houston example of how they’re using Articulate, and it’s clear that Articulate can play a significant role in transforming education and the way people around the world learn.

I’d love to hear from other educators on how you are using Articulate software. Share your story by contacting me here.

You might recall the plug I gave back in February to submit your authoring tips for inclusion in a new ebook. Well, guess what?

Yup, The eLearning Guild has released the free ebook, 239 Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content, and in it you’ll find 6 pages of Articulate-focused authoring tips submitted by our customers on making the most of our tools.

A total of 147 members responded to the survey, contributing 239 usable tips on 28 products. The tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. Some are very basic in nature, and others are quite advanced.

A quick reference guide for jumping right to the Articulate tips:

• Pages 56-60: Articulate Presenter & Engage
• Page 61: Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio & Studio Pro

Here’s a sample tip from page 56 of The eLearning Guild’s 239 Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content:

USE ENGAGE TO SAVE TIME — In this day of rapid development and tight deadlines, efficiency is everything. Flash is a fantastic tool, but Articulate Engage can make nice-looking, functional animations in a fraction of the time. Use Engage where you can to save time, and use Flash for more customized and complicated animations. Tipster: Steve Johnson

Enjoy! And thanks to everyone who contributed to this resource.

I’m incredibly proud to say that for the second year in a row, our support site has been named by the Association of Support Professionals as one of this year’s Top Ten Best Web Support Sites in the 11th annual competition, which is “a prestigious award that showcases excellence in online service and support.”

Last year was our inaugural win in the small company division, and we’ve repeated that success again this year.

According to ASP executive director Jeffrey Tarter:

“As these ten sites demonstrate, Web support has come a long, long way in the past decade. The industry has learned how to deliver a huge amount of information and support services in a form that delights customers — and every year, the standard of excellence rises even higher.”

A big part of the scoring in the contest comes from “the biggest challenge” portion of the application. This year I chose to highlight implementation of our Google Mini-powered Articulate Universal Search as the biggest challenge of the past year, and how it’s helped us to scale our support department by empowering our customers to search across nearly 6,000 documents from four different content sources, powered by four different technologies.

Some highlights of our universal search project by the numbers, which I included in our 25-page application for this year’s contest:

• 22,770 total searches in 3-month sample period (10/1-12/31/2007)
• 7,590 average searches/month (same period)
• 100 hours of internal staff time (estimated)
• 17 months from conception to rollout (4/2006-9/15/2007 launch)
• 15 hours of consulting time from 1 Google-authorized consulting firm
• 10 customer beta testers
• 7 months of internal setup & QA testing
• 4 RFPs to data centers considered for hosting
• 3 rounds of design mockups
• 1 director of support
• 1 designer
• 1 major site relaunch

Along with highlighting our universal search, I also outlined all of the great new support offerings we’ve added in the past year alone:

• Articulate 101
• Custom in-person & Web-based training
• Case surveys
• Monthly live community chat
• Status site (heartbeat.articulate.com)

I’m obviously very proud of what we’ve built and we look forward to continue helping your elearning development efforts with the best elearning software support site and team in the world.

Congrats to the Articulate support team for helping us earn this honor two years in a row!

By the way, I happened to catch Captain Smiley — in recognition of this 2008 award — posing proudly with our 2007 Ten Best Web Support Sites trophy:

“I was able to use the chat support today to great effect. Thanks for your help!”
- Articulate Platinum Membership Plan Customer

As current Platinum Membership Plan customers already know, one of the many great values of the PMP is the ability to get technical support in real time directly from Articulate Tier 2 Customer Support Engineers. Our live Web chat offering, which is included with all levels of the PMP, is available for PMP customers Monday through Friday, 5am - 5pm U.S. Eastern Time (excluding U.S. holidays).

Along with live chat, PMP customers also benefit from exclusive offerings like these:

• Free software updates and full-version upgrades
• Unlimited priority e-mail support
• Reduced-cost Articulate Live Conference
• Invitations to beta releases

When you purchase your new Articulate software, you’ll see the option to add PMP coverage to your purchase for a duration of 1, 2, or 3 years. You’ll get access to live chat via a special URL, along with all of the above benefits, for the duration of your plan coverage.

Our technology partner for our live chat offering is Provide Support, which provides an incredibly reliable product that we extend to our PMP customers. ProvideSupport recently did a case study about us and our use of their product to offer live chat to our PMP customers — Provide Support’s Live Chat Software Adds Sellable Benefit to Company’s Premium Membership Offering:

Rather than offering live chat support for all of its customers and any visitor to its website, Articulate decided to make Provide Support’s Live Chat part of its Premium Membership Plan.

There’s also a related press release about the study.

You can learn more about the PMP in this FAQ: What are the details of the Platinum Membership Plan?

Articulate live chat support — yet another reason why our support site is one of the best around and our support doesn’t suck.

Among many other reasons — easy to use, highly customizable, quick delivery to your users — our customers love our elearning tools because it’s so easy to create a course that can be uploaded to your Learning Management System (LMS) and deployed to your users, giving you full tracking, reporting, and status details.

In most cases, this is a simple process that works smoothly just by publishing your file to LMS and uploading the output:

However, given the wide array of LMSes on the market and the varying degrees of adhering to or implementing the elearning communication standards that allow your content to talk to your LMS, there are any number of things that can lead to unexpected issues with getting your Articulate-powered content to launch and track as expected in your LMS.

The good news is that with some basic troubleshooting steps, you can usually get to the bottom of the issue. In this post we’ll review 9 things you’ll want to look for to get your course or quiz tracking with the best of ‘em.

1. Go Back to the Basics

Articulate desktop products (Articulate Presenter 5 and Articulate Quizmaker 2) support the following e-learning industry standards:

• SCORM 2004
• SCORM 1.2
• AICC

You can learn more about SCORM in this blog entry. You can also download sample certification logs for Presenter and Quizmaker below:

• Is Articulate Presenter SCORM conformant?
• Is Articulate Quizmaker SCORM conformant?

If your LMS also supports one of the above standards, then you should have no difficulty using Articulate content with your LMS. If you’re running into any issues with getting your content to launch or track properly via your LMS, start by reviewing the below presentation, which outlines how to correctly pubilsh to LMS:

View LMS Basics Prsentation

At the end of the presentation, you’ll see a link to the relevant LMS help documentation.

By default, publishing to LMS will create a zip file for you to upload to your LMS. The LMS should process the zip package and create a new course for you.

You’ll want to ensure you’re doing the following when creating a course to upload to your LMS:

1. Select Articulate -> Publish (in Quizmaker, click Publish).
2. Select LMS.
3. Select the Output Option corresponding to that supported by your LMS:
   • SCORM 1.2
   • SCORM 2004
   • AICC
4. Set desired Reporting and Tracking options (more on this below).
5. Upload the course to your LMS:
   • SCORM: Upload the generated zip file to your LMS.
   • AICC: Upload the published course & specify the correct launch URL in the course.au file (point to index_lms.html).
6. Ensure your LMS is pointing to index_lms.html to launch the course (not to player.html or any other HTML file).

If you are following this process correctly, then any error you’re seeing is likely due to an issue with your LMS or the method within the LMS you’re using to upload the zip package.

It’s also a good idea to check with your LMS provider to see what they have to say about any issues or error messages you may be encountering.

2. Check LMS Reporting Status

When you publish your course or quiz from Articulate Presenter or Quizmaker, you’ll see 4 different value pairs under the Reporting and Tracking button in the LMS publish dialog:

The reason for this is twofold:

1. We support all 4 value pairs, but not all LMSes do.
2. If your LMS does support all 4, you can choose what pass/fail values you want to display to your users.

If you’re finding that your course or quiz status is not being properly recorded in your LMS, please test the other LMS Reporting options in Articulate -> Publish -> LMS -> Reporting and Tracking. The available options are the following:

• Passed/Incomplete (Default)
• Passed/Failed
• Completed/Incomplete
• Completed/Failed

3. Confirm in SCORM Test Track & ADL Test Suite

If you’re having difficulty with your content in your LMS, it’s usually a good idea to test it out using one of the below tools. If the content checks out OK in one of these tools, odds are there’s something amiss about how you’re uploading to your LMS or how the LMS is handling the Articulate-created content

For SCORM:

First, test your content via the SCORM TestTrack, which is a really simple way to upload and launch your content, then review the debug logs and be informed of any issues with the content.

You can also verify your course using the ADL Test Suite. To verify your course with SCORM 1.2 or 2004, please do the following:

1. Download the SCORM 1.2 test suite or the SCORM 2004 test suite.
2. Publish for SCORM 1.2 or 2004.
3. Launch the appropriate test suite and select Content Package Conformance Test.
4. Select Package (PIF).
5. Select Content Aggregation Package.
6. Browse for the zip file.
7. Select Begin Test.

If you’ve published correctly from Articulate, the content should pass the test suite.

For AICC:

There’s also an AICC/CMI Test Suite available to test your content (be sure to read Dave’s detailed instructions for getting it to work on Windows XP SP2).

4. Generate a Debug Log

A debug log is useful for determining what’s happening in the communication between your Articulate-powered course and your LMS.

Generating a debug log either for us or for your LMS provider to review can often help isolate the cause of any issues you may be experiencing (and sometimes you can even review on your own and figure out what’s happening).

You can generate a debug log if you’re using SCORM by doing the following:

1. Launch your Articulate course from your LMS.
2. In Presenter, pause the first slide (the debug will only work on the first slide). If it is a standalone Quizmaker quiz, click on the quiz to make sure it’s the active window, and type the following: debuglms!!!
3. You’ll see a debug window pop up (ensure pop-up blockers are disabled, if necessary).
4. With the debug window open, view and exit the course as it was intended to be viewed. If it is a quiz, take the quiz and exit the quiz as you would normally do.
5. Copy and paste the information in the debug log into a text file.
6. Sometimes you can identify issues in the debug log yourself. If not, email it to us and/or to your LMS provider to review.

Once we review your debug log, we’ll have a better idea of where the communication failure is occurring.

You can generate a debug log if you’re using AICC by doing the following:

1. Add ShowDebug=true to your launch URL.
2. Your launch URL should look something like this:
   http://host/PRESENTATION_DIR/index_lms.html?ShowDebug=true&AICC_SID=123&
   AICC_URL=http://host/lms/lms/aicc.asp

3. Alternatively, there’s a 1-pixel frame along the bottom of the course window. If you expand that and press ? 5 times, the debug log should pop up.
4. Refer to steps 4-6 above.

5. View Your Course Before You Upload It

This one is more about checking out your content locally and not so much about LMS troubleshooting, but thought I’d throw it in here anyway since it’s a common question: If you have published your course for LMS and wish to view it before uploading to your LMS, you should uncheck the Output Option to zip the presentation. This will allow you to launch your presentation locally via player.html.

When you’re ready to prepare your course for upload to your LMS, you can either zip the contents of the output directory yourself, or republish from Articulate Presenter with the zip Output Option selected.

index_lms.html will not launch a presentation on your local drive, but is the launch file you should use once you’ve uploaded your course to your LMS.

6. Check the “Prompt to Resume” Feature

If you are publishing your presentation for LMS, we recommend that you turn off the option Prompt to resume on presentation restart in Articulate -> Player Template Builder -> Navigation (learn more in the help documentation).

This will allow the presentation to only use the LMS bookmarking to restart a presentation from where an end-user left off. You can learn more about this topic in this blog entry.

7. Unhide Hidden Slides

If you’re finding that your Articulate Presenter course is not tracking slides or status as expected in your LMS, you’ll want to double-check, as noted in this previous blog entry of LMS pointers, that you don’t have any hidden slides in your PowerPoint file.

If you do, unhide the slides or delete them, then re-publish and re-upload your course to your LMS to see if that resolved the tracking issue.

8. Analyze HTTP Traffic

If you still can’t determine what’s wrong with the communication between your Articulate content and your LMS, it’s often very helpful to install an HTTP traffic analyzer, which shows you what’s going on behind the scenes as you launch and click through a course.

Two such products include the following:

• HTTP Analyzer
• HTTP Watch

Many of our customers use one of these products to observe all browser activity, which helps narrow down if the issue you’re experiencing is related to the content or to the LMS. We use HTTP Analyzer here at Articulate to help troubleshoot and test issues, too.

9. Get More Help

Your LMS provider should also be able to assist you in troubleshooting any issues you may run into. Though we can assist troubleshooting LMS issues to some extent, if your content passes the ADL test suite and checks out OK there, then odds are the issue resides with the LMS.

As always, you can submit a case or email support@articulate.com if you need specific help — and remember, the more detail you give us, the better.

I’m pleased to announce that over the weekend our planned migration of Articulate Online to a new, world-class data center (Rackspace) went off without a hitch. We also upgraded AO to version 1.7.

This move is significant because it represents our commitment to providing you with the best possible system. With the move to Rackspace comes a sixfold increase in our Articulate Online hosting investment, providing excess capacity above and beyond the long-term projected system load.

In addition to counting on us for reliable hosted products like Articulate Online, you depend on us to keep a number of Web-based systems running smoothly — this Web site and blog for the latest news, our forums for lively discussion, our support site for helping you find just the right answers, our product activation servers for new customers to begin using our software, Tom’s Rapid eLearning Blog for creative ways to design your elearning projects, and more.

But how do you know if something’s not quite right with any of our systems?

If you haven’t already seen it, the Articulate status site (heartbeat.articulate.com) allows you to monitor the health of your Articulate Online service, along with all other customer-facing systems:

Bookmark the URL or subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll always get the latest status of all Articulate systems.

We’ve also added a link to this new site right on the support home page:

…and in the footer of all support pages:

So now checking our system status is just a click away.

Last week I posted a blog entry about how using a blended learning approach in academia can earn students better grades. This week I bring you a case study on a blended learning approach in the corporate world — as employed by the Target Corporation.

Michael Sunnarborg, Sr. Training Specialist with Target Corporation Training & Development, was kind enough to create this case study about his organization’s use of Articulate Presenter in powering blended learning solutions for its employees. In it, you’ll hear Michael talk about how “Articulate Presenter has given us the ability to quickly and easily reengineer instructor-led classes into dynamic and creative blended solutions.”

Other highlights from the case study, which you’ll hear Michael discuss:

The (classroom-based) class consisted of 4 hours of instruction and over 120 PowerPoint slides — our learners were on content overload. We wanted to create just-in-time reference materials that could be accessible outside of class.

In addition, packaging the presentation into compressed Flash files made deployment and uploading to our LMS quick and easy. With the blended solution, learners first complete the e-Learning module on our LMS. Upon completion, they can register for the tools workshop. This facilitated coaching session provides hands-on practice of the tools and processes covered in the module. The workshop gives the learner an opportunity to “try and apply” the new tools as well as ask questions.

View the Target Corporation Case Study

So how have Target employees responded to the blended approach?

The response to this blended solution has been very favorable, and learners have found the experience to be less complicated and easier to apply to their job.

Target also appreciates the ease of updating training content for employees:

Another big win of using Articulate Presenter is that the content can be easily updated and refreshed as processes and procedures change. This is especially valuable in the global training field where content may need to be customized to reflect cultural or contextual differences. Our learners like Articulate because it allows them to access content at multiple levels whether it be by individual module chapter, through links, or via our company LMS.

Thanks to Articulate Presenter for giving us at Target Corporation the ability to quickly and easily reengineer instructor-led classes into dynamic and creative blended solutions.

And thanks to you, Michael, for sharing your experience with us!

Have a case study you’d like to share with us about your Articulate-powered training program? Let me know.

You’ve probably heard the term blended learning before. You may even use it in your own organization or school. Simply, it’s the act of combining two or more forms of learning — for example, classroom training and elearning — to create a comprehensive learning experience for students. And now it’s official: Using Articulate-powered elearning courses, combined with traditional classroom learning, increases student grades a full letter, according to a new study from the University of Houston:

A technical report from a University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance researcher finds that students in a hybrid class that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format.

Dr. Brian McFarlin is the University of Houston professor who taught the comparative classes and conducted the study in which he taught one Kinesiology 3306 class via the traditional, classroom-only method (meeting twice per week) and pitted student results in it against student results in the same Kinesiology 3306 class that incorporated both classroom (meeting once per week) and Articulate-powered elearning.

We asked Dr. McFarlin some questions about the study:

1. Besides the obvious gratification of improved grades, what other feedback did you receive from students, in particular related to the Articulate-authored courses?

Formally (in surveys) and informally the students really liked the flexibility that the Articulate-authored lectures allow. In particular, they like that they could stop in the middle and pick up where they left off later on. They also really liked how I embedded self-test quiz questions throughout the lectures. Finally they like having the ability to search the presentation for a particular topic. In addition to the presentation, I always offer the students a downloadable story board that they can take with them.

2. Have other professors / classes followed your model? Have they received similar results?

To my knowledge I am the only faculty member using Articulate in my college. I have been singing its praises for some time now (well over a year) and it appears that two of my colleagues have followed my lead and have begun using it. In addition to the course that this report was based on (KIN3306), I have gradually begun to incorporate this technology into my other online courses (KIN1304). The results have been very favorable. We will be targeting additional undergraduate classes in the future.

3. Do you have any student feedback you can share with us about the use of Articulate software and its role in the class?

Here are just a few quotes that pertain to the online lectures:

“Great teacher, smart. I really enjoyed all the online work. Made learning fun and easier.”

“I loved the organized structure of the class as well as the slides/ WebCT website.”

“The hybrid format was an asset and helped me learn in various ways. It allowed for a more in-depth form of studying and helped my grade.”

“The course was presented in a very interesting format with the in class and online fusion. I believe that the material presented did a very good job of giving one the grade they earned. Overall, a great and informative class.”

“Prof McFarlin is an exceptional teacher. He made the material understandable. His WebCT work was flawless and he always responded. Overall, this was my best class this semester.”

“The availability of class materials to review on WebCT contributed to my success in this course. Lecture audio was extremely helpful to review before exams.”

“The professor gave all the resources and tools to help students succeed in this class. Instructor was extremely knowledgeable and informative.”

“It was very useful to have the lectures online from class (the recording) and the different ways to access all the information needed.”

“I liked the fact that the class was a hybrid. He gave you all the tools you could possibly imagine to be successful in this class given that we only meet once a week. He was extremely knowledgeable about the subject and I feel I was able to learn a great deal in here.”

4. How easy was our software to use? How was the integration with WebCT? Had you tried other authoring tools prior to Articulate? How did they compare?

The main reason I chose Articulate was the ease of use. When I first started producing lectures, I used the voice narration function in PowerPoint and then Impatica that UH purchases to publish it for WebCT. While this worked, it was very difficult to use because you have to really record the whole presentation at the same time. In my case I am not a professional when it comes to elearning so I often need to record slides multiple times. Articulate is much better because you are able to record the slides one at a time. In addition to Impatica I also used Camtasia for a time, but it fell to the same problems as Impatica. I found Articulate on the web, downloaded the demo and was hooked. The integration with WebCT is great. I use the SCORM-compliant format, which allows me to track student responses to the “self-test” questions that I embed in the online lectures. From my experience, if you can use PowerPoint then the learning curve to using Articulate is minimal (I did not even read the manual — just tried it out).

5. You indicated that creating online course material is time consuming? Has that time decreased? Has our software assisted in that?

Yes and no. Creating materials is still time consuming initially and I am not sure much can be done to change that. Where Articulate plays a big part is with updating. Now I can update a single slide and keep the rest of the recorded presentation. For instance, this past fall I updated all eight of my online lectures in about 12 hours to make a single lecture the first time. So this is a huge time savings.

6. Are there some courses that are not well suited to a hybrid approach?

I personally think that the hybrid format is the wave of the future. It allows the professor to leverage the flexibility of the web, while maintaining the structure of a traditional face-to-face class. I think that eventually most traditional lecture classes will move to a hybrid format. I think that professors tend to prefer this approach for upper division classes, while reserving fully online courses for lower division offerings. I have really enjoyed using the hybrid approach and am gradually infusing it into all of the classes that I teach. Of course, the initial undertaking for such a transition can be overwhelming, but this burden can be eased if you work with an instructional designer. Students like the hybrid format because it is more flexible for their busy schedules and allows them more access to the content in a course.

7. Were there any other unexpected benefits that were realized?

I was surprised that the increase in student grades was so dramatic. I thought the students may do a little better, but I would not have anticipated the outcome that I saw. I thought that it might be the same or slightly improved. I am all about helping students succeed and reach their goals, thus I am completely sold on hybrid instruction. My next objective is to make sure that every professor knows how powerful this approach can be. I am really addicted to developing quality elearning experiences for my students, which is a good thing for them.

Thanks, Dr. McFarlin, for taking the time to share your story with us. Something tells me that students who register for your classes in the future are going to insist on the version that incorporates the Articulate-powered courses.

You may have seen the technology around the Web: You click on a link or a thumbnail of an image and instead of going to another page or getting a popup window, you get a slick looking inline window that grays out the primary page and displays new content on top of the page. Known as Lightbox JS, it’s actually just some JavaScript you can implement in your site to bring your users a smooth experience:

Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

A variation of Lightbox is ThickBox, which I’ve had better luck with since it allows more types of content beyond just images to be embedded in the modal window: images, HTML, and yes, even an Articulate Presenter course, when coupled with an iframe. (You can learn more in ThickBox - One box to rule them all.)

Here’s the description of ThickBox, which sounds a lot scarier and more technical than it really is:

ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.

The technology is actually simpler than you might expect to implement. You can see examples of our use of ThickBox on our free trials download page when you click the Select Download link next to the Articulate Presenter trial:

Note that a modal window “is a child window which requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application,” so you’ll want to make sure your ThickBox window has a close button (you’ll see the code for this in my sample code below).

You can also click on any of the images in the New in Version 5 Presenter page to see more examples of the concept at work on our site (Lightbox in that case since they’re just images).

And that brings us to Presenter.

How to Launch an Articulate Presenter Course in the Same Window

Today stevebutton asked an interesting question in our forums:

any one had any success calling a Presenter project up in Lightbox or any of it’s variations?
Looking to call the Flash file as opposed to the web page.

You’re in luck, Steve. Your question intrigued me, so I gave it a shot and am happy to report that using a combination of ThickBox and a simple iframe, I was able to get this to work just fine.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download ThickBox (you’ll see JS files, a CSS file, and a loading GIF) and follow the implementation instructions on the ThickBox site.
2. Upload the files to your Web server.
3. Create or edit the HTML page where you want the link to your ThickBox presentation to live.
4. Go to Articulate -> Player Template Builder -> Other -> Browser Window Settings and ensure your Presentation size is set to Scale presentation to fill browser window (this will also ensure it shrinks, as necessary).
5. Publish your presentation using your modified player template.
6. On your parent HTML page, insert an iframe that points to the player.html file in your Presenter published output folder.
7. Make the iframe height less than that of the ThickBox code that calls in your presentation — this is the only way to ensure you won’t end up with an unsightly scrollbar in your ThickBox window (you’ll see in my example that I call in the ThickBox with a height of 400, but that the iframe has a height of only 340, which was how I got it to work sans scrollbar in Firefox 2, IE6, and IE7).

And here’s an example of this concept in action:

View Articulate Presenter Presentation as a Modal Window

The obvious drawback of this method is that the content will likely need to be smaller to ensure it will be a reasonable size for your users with smaller resolutions (for the above demo, I set the ThickBox dimensions to 640×400), but if that’s not a problem for you or your users, then this is a great alternative to the usual pop-up window method of launching a course.

Download sample project files (560k zip file).

Enjoy, and thanks for the suggestion, Steve!

By the way, I’m sure some of you may ask how I embedded the demo right in this blog entry: After creating my parent HTML per the above instructions, I simply embedded it here via the EmbedIt WordPress plugin.