Instructional Design/Writing

Storyline vs. Flash

• The key point to remember is that Storyline is not a Flash replacement, it operates significantly differently than Flash, which manifests itself in positive and negative ways:
• Flash has more advanced animation tools such as keyframes, easing, effects transitions (blurring, shadows, etc.), and drawing tools, which Storyline does not have, meaning we cannot do the complex animations we are used to with Flash
• Storyline has HTML5 publishing support, which Flash does not
• Flash has an internal programming language called ActionScript, which allows us to program pretty much anything we want to do, whereas Storyline does not have an internal programming language, we are limited to using specific functions that are built into the program when creating interaction
• Flash cannot display external website content such as YouTube, Storyline can
• Flash can export content in video format, Storyline can only export as a web package
• Flash courses can be broken down into multiple source files, which allows us have multiple developers work on a single project with minimal diminishing returns, and also allows us to update course packages more easily and with fewer risks

Content Quality Tiers

When designing or writing Storyline content, we suggest not taking the tier system too much to heart. Features are flexible and will depend on the client’s requests and needs. You can implement things from the gold tier on a low $/finishing minute rate if there are other compromises made, and there are different factors sure as client relationship, previous work to leverage, and our development team’s skill set. There’s lots of opportunity to use creativity to get around budget limitations. Just do your normal thing, check in with your PM and AM on specific requirements, check your finished minute rate and total minutes sold, and consider your audience and learner. When in doubt, we recommend grabbing a development lead and asking questions, we are more than happy to assist.

• Bronze ($400-700/finished minute)
  • No audio, limited sound effects
  • Very basic animations and transitions, little to no movement
  • Linear content
  • Multiple choice or drag and drop questions
  • Stock assets or well-organized client assets with no adjustments
  • Basic translations when sold with an English version (French, Spanish)
• Silver ($700-1000/finished minute)
  • ICOM approved vendor audio
  • Basic music and sound effects
  • Complex non-audio content (software simulation, etc.)
  • More complex animations, movement, more variety in animation types
  • Basic branching or split content
  • More question variety, hotspots, sliders, fill in the blank
  • Stock assets or well-organized client assets with adjustments
  • Client-provided video with minor adjustments
  • Complex translations when sold with an English version (any languages but French and Spanish)
• Gold ($1000+/finished minute)
  • Sky is pretty much the limit, depends on the finished minute rate
  • Multiple VAs, full music and sound effects
  • Complex content with audio
  • Highly complex animation
  • Extremely complex branching, branches in branches, dialogue trees
  • Custom interactives within the limits of Storyline
  • Custom assets, photo shoots, video sessions
  • Client-provided video with heavy edits
  • Complex translations when sold without an English version

• Chunk content out into smaller pieces, due to a number of technical reasons in Storyline, it is ideal to avoid large paragraphs and long lessons. It helps keep our files cleaner and individual sections easier to manage when developing. Ideally lessons will be less than one minute in length, compared to our maximum length of six minutes with Flash
• Ideally, individual courses do not stretch beyond approximately 45 minutes in length, as we start to run into technical issues with the LMS being able to “remember” all the states, completions, and questions answered in the course. We have solutions around being able to commit more data, but as a general rule, don’t pack your course completely full of questions, click activities, and other things that the course will need to remember the state of, as it manifests itself in completion and bookmarking errors when revisiting a completed course
• We do not have the animation capabilities we have with Flash - we are not able to do traditional character animation for example, as that is well outside of the abilities of the program, think Powerpoint with a bit more options in terms of features
• Branching and split content is much easier to develop in Storyline than in our Flash content, we have the capabilities to do some very complex branching and pathing if you want to work that in
• Interactive elements are a bit more limited in Storyline, we do not have the ability to program anything we want as we could with Flash, it has to be something that is built into the program. Generally your choices will be:
  • Multiple choice and multiple select
  • Drag and drop
  • Reordering questions (“Reorganize these steps into the correct order”)
  • Sliders (“Move the slider to the correct step on the timeline”)
  • Click activities (“Click each section to learn more”)
  • Fill in the blank
  • Hotspots
  • Surveys (“Did you like or dislike these aspects of the course”)
• When creating interactive elements outside of questions, we are limited to this set of actions when selecting what happens when you trigger an event:

• These are the events you are able to trigger those actions off of: