Try These Ideas for Adding Web Content to Your E-Learning
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 by brian
This guest blog entry was written by Articulate Customer Support Engineer Brian Batt.
One of the great things about Articulate Presenter ’09 is that you can easily bring any kind of web content right into your e-learning courses by using Web Objects.
In this article, I’m going to show you three examples of web content you can leverage in your courses, and how to insert them with Presenter.
Add a Google Map
Let’s say your client is a trucking company that’s going to start a new route from Texas to Wisconsin. You want to embed a dynamic Google Map into an e-learning course to show the new route. A Web Object is a nice tool for something like this.
Just go to the Google Maps page, enter your route, and click the Link button. Google will give you both a link and an embed code. The tutorial below shows how to use either of these as a Web Object in your course. As I explain in the tutorial, you can use the link to display the whole page, or you can use the embed code to create an HTML file of just the map itself. Though the second option involves a few more steps, you get the added benefit of being able to fully customize the way the map looks within your slide.
View this screencast at Screenr
Feature a YouTube Video
Another way you can leverage web-based content is by incorporating a YouTube video into your course. Check out the following tutorial, which includes instructions for making a YouTube video appear full-screen on your presentation slide. It just takes a simple tweak to the video’s URL.
View this screencast at Screenr
Add an Interactive PDF with Youblisher
Here’s another useful & free tool that works well for Web Objects. Youblisher will convert an uploaded PDF into a dynamic and interactive document that users can print, zoom, and leaf through. It’s a great solution if you need to include some documentation in your course but you want to make it look and feel a little more interactive. Here’s how to do it:
View this screencast at Screenr
Questions?
If you have questions about Web Objects, or you’d like to talk more about the ideas I’ve shared here, feel free to post a thread in the Articulate Community Forums. I’m there every day and would be happy to help you out. You can also feel free to connect with me on Twitter.


Hi Brian,
Comments and questions.
Web objects in Articulate is pretty cool, but here’s a caveat. If the web content contains hyperlinks that open in the same window, and learner clicks on them, they leave the eLearning course. And if on an LMS, get recorded as an incomplete. Is there any way to block those hyperlinks from openning? Is there any way to force those hyperlinks to open in a new window? If not, then we may want to have the web object in Articulate open in the same window.
Does Youblisher result in some massive flash files?
One problem I’ve had embedding videos in this way is that, if you plop the web object in the slide as something less than full slide, it creates unsightly lines around the video. If you switch to full slide to eliminate those lines, the video simply plays in the upper left (as I believe your Goggle Map example did). If you enlarge the video’s display to fix that, a low resolution video ends up horribly pixelated. I found a workaround to display the web object at full slide and still have it centered in the slide. Code you index.html like this, pasting the embed code in the obvious place:
html, body {
margin:0;
padding:0;
border:0;
height:100%;
}
#main {
width:100%;
height:100%;
}
#maintd {
vertical-align:middle;
}
Jim Dickeson | Posted at 03:55 pm on March 10th, 2010 | #