Learning Solutions 2013: Preconference

The pre-conference session I was lucky enough to attend was Yukon Learning's 'Building Assessments, Scenarios, and Simulations with Storyline".  What an AWESOME session!  Tons of good information, lots of good questions, and a great presenter:  Ron Price of Yukon Learning, with some help from Kathi & Charles.

The session covered each topic in depth using a tell, show, do process:  telling us what we'll do, showing us how to do it, then letting us 'do' it on our own.

Our morning was spent on Assessments, while the afternoon session covered Scenarios & Simulations.

Even though I knew some of the information, I still learned tons, making this session DEFINITELY worth it.

Here's a few quick examples of some of my favorite take-aways:

1.  Format Painter:  double click the format painter button to format more than one object--seriously?  How did I miss this one before?  There's even a hint when you hover over the  button telling you about it.  Geez.

2.  Naming your objects is VERY important (which I knew), but it's also helpful on assessment slides,  to indicate in the name which objects are 'correct' (or 'incorrect').  This indicator can be something as simple as '-C' after your object's name to indicate correct.  If you use varying points for different choices, you can also indicate the points in that name, making it easier to edit your slide.  Example:  Car-C-3 (Car, correct answer, 3 points).

3.  The best use of a Question Bank:  when you have 20 questions, but only want 10 of them to be used during the course for each learner.  You can use the question bank to randomly show 10 of the 20 questions.  Of course, there's lots more customization possible here!

4.  The Action Fine Tuning option within Storyline's screen recording feature (which is pretty awesome) is VERY easy to use--amazingly easy!  It helps you 'tweak' your View It, Try It, or Do It versions as need to, for example, get rid of a button hover affect you didn't realize was recorded--just use Action Fine Tuning to 'back' it up until the hover affect is gone.  Wow.

5.  You CAN export a screen recording to a movie!  And you can save a frame from the movie recording--very similar to a screen shot.

6.  When doing recordings, choose the 'Select a Window' option in the frame size menu--it automatically focuses on a specific window instead of you having to resize the window to fit the recorder.

If you ever get the chance to participate in any Yukon Learning training sessions on Articulate products, it's worth your time and money!