Corporate eLearning Development

I served as the Articulate Storyline eLearning developer to help Tencza Designs and DVI Group support their large corporate clients.

• Responsibilities: eLearning Development
• Clients: Tencza Designs, DVI Group, IHG, Holiday Inn, Doosan
• Tools Used: Storyline 360, Illustrator, Camtasia
• Budget: High
• Year: 2018-Ongoing

I was chosen for these projects due to my technical proficiency and speed. I turned around files in hours or days as opposed to weeks, and the budget for these projects reflected this need.

Process

Having worked with Tencza Designs in the past, they reached out to me upon learning about a new pipeline of eLearning development projects. We partnered with DVI Group, an extremely talented video agency based in Atlanta, to support DVI Group's large corporate clients.

I handled eLearning development, Tencza Designs handled instructional design, and DVI Group handled project management and video production.

Storyboard Review

For each project, my involvement began when Tencza Designs completed a development-ready storyboard. I spent time reviewing the storyboard and considering all of the proposed interactions.

For interactions that would require additional time and / or budget, I let the client know and explained possible alternatives. Once the proposed interactions were in a good place and the storyboard was ready to move forward, DVI Group began supplying the media assets that I would need.

I also helped the client consider other technical items, such as aspect ratio, LMS reporting options, file compression, and more.

eLearning Development

With the storyboard and assets in hand, I developed the projects in Articulate Storyline 360. Since the layout and visuals were decided in the storyboard and handed off to me, my responsibilities were mostly technical and programming-related.

I made use of slide masters, the format painter, and Storyline keyboard shortcuts to move development forward as quickly as possible. I added animation where it made sense to do so in line with the end-clients' brands.

Also, for complex interactions, I made use of JavaScript and my advanced variables and conditions knowledge to ensure that the interactions were functional and technically sound.

I developed large deliverables in a fraction of the time that it would take an average eLearning developer, and this allowed us to adhere to strict client timelines.

Review Cycles

For some of the end clients, the eLearning projects had to go through many rounds of review across teams on multiple continents. After each round of review, it was up to me to make swift revisions to the projects so that they could move forward in the review process. Sometimes, the timeline demanded that I make revisions in a matter of hours upon receiving revised assets.

I leveraged my customer service skills and technical proficiency to ensure that I never caused a hiccup in the timeline.

Projects

I used the process above to support many eLearning development projects for clients such as IHG, Holiday Inn, and Doosan. This section includes sanitized samples from each project, as well as details about my contributions and challenges that I faced.

IHG

The IHG projects included gigabytes of video files. I worked with DVI Group to optimize these videos as needed.

That being said, my high-powered workstation and fiber internet made it possible for us to turn files back and forth with ease, and my computer had no problem handling Storyline development with these large files included.

On the programming front, I developed several complex interactions within the IHG courses that I worked on.

The most complex was a likert-scale interaction that allowed the user to rate how well certain statements applied to them. We included these scales with different statements throughout the courses, and the user's responses to these surveys influenced the content that they saw later in the course.

I used JavaScript triggers to get the likert scales to function as desired, and I used variables and conditions to influence the content that the user would see based on their choices.

I also used Storyline states, hotspots, and shapes to create the "Can You Spot The Difference?" interaction that Tencza Designs envisioned.

For this project, it was crucial that everything was pixel perfect. Since Storyline has trouble producing pixel-perfect output, I had to use manual workarounds to make up for Storyline's deficiencies.

For example, Storyline output includes a few pixels outside of the working canvas that you have access to when developing. To remove any gaps on the sides of the player in the final product, I had to add thin rectangles that matched the background color of the player; I made sure that these rectangles extended several pixels off the working canvas in any direction, and this solved the issue.

There are other Storyline constraints that make it impossible to publish 100% pixel perfect output, but I pushed the tool to its limits on this project and learned things that I've used on many projects since.

Holiday Inn

Since Holiday Inn is an IHG hotel, we worked with a similar layout and set of constraints.

Once again, I worked with tight timelines, extensive review cycles, and demanding development tasks.

This project in particular made more use of drag-and-drop interactions and click-to-reveals. I was able to use Storyline's built-in interactivity to speed up development on some slides, but others required that I build the interactivity from scratch.

Doosan

I've worked to support many Doosan projects, all of which deal with complex machinery and maintenance.

As with the other projects, I worked with the visuals and layouts provided to me to ensure that the end product was functional and delivered on time.

For one of the courses, I used "invisible" markers to bring the icons on a maintenance diagram to life. When the user hovers over one of the icons on the diagram, the icon's description appears. This interaction was part of a series of "Test Your Memory" interactions that Tencza Designs imagined.

Takeaways

My biggest takeaway from this partnership is that my eLearning skillset can be extremely valuable for some clients, especially those with tough technical demands or tight timelines. Since I can develop highly technical eLearning very quickly, this partnership has been perfect for me.

Furthermore, the clients pushed me to my limits and helped me learn new ways to extend the functionality of the authoring tools. In addition to using JavaScript to manipulate Storyline variables to make interactions possible (and speed up development time), I also learned how to ensure that Storyline output is as pixel-perfect as possible.

This partnership continues to this day, and I am always eager to support clients that have similar eLearning development needs.