Creative Ways to Enrich Your E-Learning with Toolbar Tabs
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 by Jade Kelsall
This guest blog entry was written by Jade Kelsall, an Articulate user who designs e-learning for Skills@Library at the University of Leeds, UK.
Let’s talk about toolbar tabs. You might already know that by customizing the layout settings on your player template in Articulate Presenter, you can add some standard tabs to the upper edge of your player. But did you know you can also add tabs for your Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes on the same toolbar?
This opens up all sorts of options for what you can include in your course. It’s a really flexible way to enrich your e-learning. Learners can click on the tabs anytime during the course to view the content you provide there.
I’d like to give you a few creative ideas for how you can use Engage & Quizmaker content in your toolbar tabs. (If you’re not yet familiar with how to add an interaction or quiz as a tab on your player’s toolbar, this tutorial shows how.)
Include a how-to-navigate demo
Many developers like to give their users a bit of info on how to navigate the course. Toolbar tabs are a great way to do this. Learners who need the information can access it easily, and those who don’t can bypass it.
One approach I’ve used is to create an Engage Labeled Graphic, showing key features on the course’s player. Have a look at the example below. You can get a free copy of this interaction to use or modify for your own courses by visiting my blog.
Another idea for adding a how-to-navigate resource is to create a video walk-through of your course with Screenr. You can download the MP4 from the Screenr website and add it to an Engage Media Tour interaction or a blank Quizmaker slide. Then just insert the interaction or quiz as a tab on your player.
Add resources to help your audience find out more
Another good use of a toolbar tab is to provide additional information your learners might want to explore. Though Presenter’s attachments feature can be useful for this, in some courses I find that the list of attachments gets too long to manage, or too difficult to organize. An Engage FAQ interaction can be a neat alternative for providing supplemental info instead.
Within the FAQ interaction, you can organize the attachments however you like, and add hyperlinks for specific resources. Then just add the interaction as a toolbar tab on your player. It’s a nice way to make information available in an interactive, easy-to-navigate interface. In the example pictured below, the FAQ interaction contains attachments related to a series of workshops:
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use an FAQ interaction in this way, check out this tutorial. As Justin mentions in the tutorial, your attachments will need to be hosted online so that you can link to them from your Engage interaction. Or, you can use relative hyperlinks to make the attachments part of your interaction instead. Here‘s a way to do that.
Use a blank slide to provide company info, links to other courses, and pretty much anything else
Another way to get creative with the toolbar tabs is to include content that you build in Quizmaker. Quizmaker gives you PowerPoint-like design tools, plus the flexibility of incorporating multimedia elements. And you aren’t limited to just creating quizzes — you can use Quizmaker’s blank slide feature to build any content you want, and then incorporate it into a toolbar tab.
For example, in the course pictured below, I used a toolbar tab to provide information about resources related to my course. It contains a blank Quizmaker slide with several hyperlinked images. Users can click on the images to access other e-learning courses and related resources.
I’m sure you can think of all kinds of other uses for a blank Quizmaker slide inserted as a tab in your course. How about a supplemental video? Or how about a snazzy animated slide showing your organization’s contact details, which you could then re-use in other courses? There really are no limits to what your tab content can include when you leverage Quizmaker’s blank slide feature.
How will you use toolbar tabs?
So go on – get creating some tabs! I look forward to seeing what other ideas the Articulate Community has for using this flexible technique of adding content to e-learning courses.
Jade:
We use this feature to make any navigation helps or global glossary files accessible for the duration of the individual course.
For Example, “How to Navigate this Course”, “Glossary”, and “About the Author” interactions are added as tabs to the top of each of our courses, as they are not necessary to complete the learning objectives, but offer insight and help.
Sean Bengry | Posted at 12:30 pm on March 17th, 2010 | #