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Tag: Articulate

Multiple Mini Interviewer Training Module

I made a thing. And it feels like a long time since I made a thing, and I like showing off the things I make, so I hereby present to you a thing.

This specific thing is an online Multiple Mini Interviewer training module. The University’s new Medical School is in partnership with Keele University who have supplied us with the initial range of teaching materials, including their MMI training module for staff who will be interviewing applicants.

Last year we used their training as provided due to very short timescales, but for this year I was asked to re-create it with Sunderland branding, style and contextualising. It was a fun one, as I had to work out how to create reveal style effects when people click on buttons in Storyline. Still patiently waiting on Storyline 3 here… this will likely be the first thing I convert to the new version.

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Silly Season Survived

stadium_of_light

Having set a record for the implementation and deployment of a new VLE, it seems as though we have gotten through the start of the new academic year pretty unscathed. I still fear that there are parts of the integration of Canvas not working as they should, and the integration we do have with SITS is far from complete – doesn’t do updates or removals yet – but we are coping, and our academic community for the most part seem to be very pleased with the new system.

My team has expanded to the tune of two new interns who are here for six months to help us get over the implementation phase and the managed discontinuation of SunSpace; I finally got to do a shift with our live streaming service during graduations at the Stadium of Light in July; and I finished off another Storyline presentation for Pharmacy students – an online induction to a specific ePortfolio template they have to use.

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PDF Certificate from Storyline

For the Bribery Act training module that I have been developing for our Legal, Governance and Business Assurance department, I was asked to find a solution whereby persons identified as being at high risk could prove that they had taken and passed the module. The module, which includes a presentation followed by a quiz, has been built in Storyline as they wanted something that could standalone and would look very slick.

We discussed the possibility of hosting the module in SunSpace and rewriting the quiz using SunSpace’s native Exam tool, but ruled this out as it adds unnecessary complexity and would result in an inferior experience for people taking the module.

We finally agreed that simply instructing the high risk individuals to save the results slide produced at the end of the quiz and emailing it back to Business Assurance would suffice. That’s fine as far as it goes, but actually introduces a lot of complexity and possibility for human error. People would have to either take a screenshot of the slide, different on every operating system, or save / print the slide as a PDF, different in every browser. I wanted a simple solution, a single button that all you had to do was click.

I found that solution through Articulate’s awesome E-Leaning Heroes community, in a post by Ryan Lowry which explained how to use pdfmake, a JavaScript library, to generate PDF documents on the fly, on the client side. After successfully integrating Ryan’s template into the Bribery Act module I then modified the code in pdfmake to produce a certificate that’s University of Sunderland branded and matches as closely as possible the certificates issued by HR upon completion of CPD courses. The only real issue I had with this was integrating an image for use in the footer. To get this working I had to convert the image to Base64 text and add it into the certificate.html document. To do that I found one of those fabulous little online niche tools: https://www.base64-image.de.

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Introduction to SunSpace Storyline

intro_to_sunspace

Created a video-based presentation for new students which runs through all of the key features of SunSpace and includes a short surprise MCQ at the end to try and help reinforce their learning. Initially this was at the request of an academic who wanted something like this for some non-standard modules he has starting now, but it has wider potential so I made it generic to all SunSpace modules and then integrated it into the new module template we’ve been building for academic year 2015/16. It’s probably not complete yet, a voiceover on each slide would be nice for example, but it’s now in a state that’s good to go!

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/29f3d246-59aa-4f60-9543-6c8577171de1/1/story.html

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Storyline Demonstration

storyline_demo

I’ve delivered a couple of training sessions lately where I’ve been plugging Storyline to people and how we can use it to enhance their learning materials. To help with this I have created a very comprehensive presentation showing all of the major features including all of the quiz and survey question types, interactions and screen and video capture options.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/f2dc20ce-f273-440d-b5ea-024e0cb9e0fa/1/story.html

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Careers Induction

careers_induction

Further to the video walkthrough, I have now been able to integrate Careers’ PowerPoint presentation into this Storyline item to create a more seamless experience for students. It has been well received and the customer has been impressed by what Storyline can do, so there is almost certainly going to lead onto more work in the future which will enhance the online material which our Careers and Employment service provides.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/b4f2b022-1c23-4ae5-bb80-c9f71f13ac93/1/story.html

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Opportunities Online Demonstration

opps_online_demo

Another quick Storyline presentation, this time a video walkthrough of how to access and use a vacancy search tool provided by our Careers and Employment Service. This will be used in the next couple of weeks as part of their induction for new students and is, presently, just a link on their PowerPoint, though I have suggested to them that their PowerPoint could be imported into Storyline and integrated with this video to make it all seamless.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/b9713cd7-2038-461e-99ab-3c6c4f5d1819/1/story.html

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Sunderland Storyline Template

storyline-template-3

This is the third, and hopefully final version of the Sunderland branded Storyline template I have been working on. All colours and styles used are now in-line with the official branding guidelines from our Marketing department, and indeed this template has been approved by them. The only thing I am really unhappy with is the logo. You are restricted to a bitmap image with a maximum width of 200 pixels, anything larger is scaled down. I’d love to be able to pop a nice clear SVG in there instead.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/505bcff3-44ac-41f2-a2d2-b406c5dccd18/1/story.html

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How to Mark an Assignment – Storyline Presentation

mark_assignment

The presentation I put together for student submission was well received and it has led to others. This one is for markers where there is only a single marker. The tool that the team is developing has the ability to accommodate multiple independent markers. The player is looking a little better now and I added the video in a different way with better results, more like an actual video than a series of screenshots.

Making these has been a little difficult as Storyline kept crashing on me when I was using the precision timing editor. Upon investigation I found that this was because I was running Storyline on a Windows 7 virtual machine in Parallels and had all my files on the desktop of my computer. Parallels has a nice little feature whereby it links the desktop on the host Mac with that on the Windows client, but it does so by making the drives on the Mac a pseudo-network drive in Windows. I discovered on Articulate’s forums that working on, and saving files to a network drive can cause various performance problems, and when I moved my files to the actual C drive it solved all of my problems.

http://solar.sunderland.ac.uk/solar/file/eee5d915-96c4-41bd-95d1-e6e6695969a2/1/story.html

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