Friday, October 28, 2011

The Eureka Screams & The Apple Hit…!!!

How to retrieve Articulate Templates, Color Schemes, Logos and Presenters

How many times have you wondered about where you can find the Articulate template that you had created for an e-learning project you did months ago? The client wants some modifications and when you open the file, you see that you don’t have the same template inside Articulate. You have to create the template once again by editing the standard ones provided by Articulate.

Another common instance is when you work in a network: you create the template in one system and later on, if the same file is opened from a different system in the network, you will have trouble with the templates. Of course, it says that the template is ‘In Project’ but try to edit the template ‘In Project’ and you will be surprised. And the surprise will not be a pleasant one for sure.

I always wanted to know if we can save the template as a file so that we can retrieve it later. Even after being the author of the blog post titled Beg, Borrow or Google it never occurred to me that I should Google it out. I dig into my system folders to find any reference to the template files.

Obviously, I went into the Articulate folder in the program files section. “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\templates” – that was my first eureka scream. (But thankfully, I was all dressed up unlike Archimedes. ;-)) All the templates I have created are saved here as xml files. Inside “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter”, I also saw a folder called Color Schemes. And yes, all the Standard and Custom made Color schemes were present in that folder. Eureka again!!!

Eager to find the Engage Color schemes, I looked into “C:\Program Files\Articulate\Articulate Engage\schemes”, but found only the standard ones. Right at that moment, the apple fell on my head. “Why the hell didn’t I Google for this? I was so dumb wasting time searching the system folders.” I did Google for it and found that the engage color schemes are saved here - C:\Users\sravind\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Engage\2.0\schemes. (sravind is my system username. So you have to change it accordingly.)

I also found out that the folder where the templates, color schemes etc are stored might actually depend on many things like the operating system you use, whether you are in a network or not, etc. Like I mentioned at the end of my Beg, Borrow or Google post, Google might give us something better. And this is what I got: http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=914 . This article here, lists the folder locations of Articulate templates, color schemes, logos and presenters in your hard drive; and it took me two eureka screams and an apple hit to reach this.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Does your e-Learning course have an identity?

I completely agree with Tom Kuhlman on what he wrote about Corporate Branding in e-Learning courses. You cannot simply tax upon the space you have, to include the company logo in every screen. Instructional Designers should be able to utilize the screen space fully. It is frustrating when you have a wonderful idea and you cannot use it just because there is no space in the screen.


My team called the Content Solutions is into developing e-Learning courses for employees of our own company (FCI, which is a connector manufacturing firm). We really don’t brand the courses that we make. In fact, very rarely do we keep our company logo in our courses. So we have full freedom to decide the layout, navigation and the templates. It doesn’t really matter because we use these courses to train the employees of our own firm. They would have already seen the company logo a zillion times in every other PowerPoint presentation and in the posters on the office walls. So ultimately, each of the courses we make is different from one another.

But on a second thought, isn’t it actually nice to have your company logo just in the beginning of the course at least? I think it gives an identity to the course and makes it look more professional. You need not repeat the logo in every other slide, but you can show some basic details just in the beginning like Company logo, Name of the Course, division or department for which the course is meant for, time duration of the course, and an icon to indicate whether the course is audio enabled or not. In fact it will be great if the company logo can be shown as an animation. The courses might look similar in the first screen, but after that, the instructional designers have full freedom to design the layout and contents.

Our team is a part of a unit called Global Business Services (GBS) which provides many cross functional support to FCI. So it is equally important to let the learners know that this course was made by GBS. Today’s learners might become tomorrow’s client. ;-) You never know. Keeping this in mind, I would add a slide at the end which gives credit to the people who made the course. Name of the SME, a Contact e-mail ID, Name of the Client, Month and Year in which this was made (or updated), copyrights mention of any web site, artist or other resources, etc are some of the things that could be added in the end slide.

Things like these are more relevant for us now since we are in the initial stages of moving into a third party support service. Next week, I am starting to work on a new e-Learning project. And I will definitely include some of the things mentioned here. Is there anything that I am missing out here? Let me know through the comments section...