This guest blog entry was written by Articulate VP of Community Tom Kuhlmann.

Let’s quickly review how to create links in Engage ’09 and then I’ll show you a few ways to use the linking feature in your elearning courses.

Adding Links in Engage ’09

Look at the image above. The first step is to select the text that you want to use for linking. Once you’ve selected your text, click on the hyperlink button.

This opens a menu where you can choose between linking to a URL or to one of the steps inside the Engage interaction. If you look at the image below, you can see that I am creating a link to Deliver Greeting.

That’s it. Pretty easy, huh? (Here’s the help documentation on the topic.)

So now that you can easily hyperlink, how can you use this feature in your courses? Here are a few quick ideas.

Sort Your Learners

A lot of organizations have some sort of annual refresher training. Newly hired employees need to take the whole course, while a tenured employee only needs to do a quick review.

In the example above, I sort learners by date of hire. New hires go through the entire course, while older employees go to the summary section for a review. This is a good way to save time and money on refresher training.

Create a Main Menu

In the image above, I created a main menu on the introduction tab. This allows the user to quickly scan the steps and click on a link.

Create Custom Navigation

In this example, I created my own navigation. HOME links to the introduction step and HELP links to a URL (which could be an intranet site). BACK and NEXT represent a linear progression through the steps.

The linking in Engage ’09 opens the doors to all sorts of creative uses. Now that Engage is also SCORM and AICC compliant, you can use it to quickly build what I like to call “coursels” (as in course morsels). It is rapid elearning at its finest — relevant content, built quickly, and delivered just-in-time. In this economic season, that’s the recipe for success.

You can learn more by viewing the very helpful Engage ’09 tutorials.