Producing interactive courses that engage learners, foster knowledge, and teach skills is only possible with the proper tools. One such tool is Articulate Storyline, a powerful asset for creating custom educational experiences.
Articulate Storyline is widely used by both professional and amateur course designers. There are more than 120,000 organizations around the globe relying on it, and 128.7 million learners receive knowledge from courses developed via this software.
Articulate Storyline is one of the best choices for those looking to create online courses.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show how to use Articulate Storyline, cover its main features, and offer the essential steps for online course production using this tool 🤓
Summary
- Introduction to Articulate Storyline
- What can you do with Articulate Storyline
- Setting up Articulate Storyline
- Creating first project with Articulate Storyline
- Best practices for using Articulate Storyline 360
- How Blue Carrot can help your business
- Summing up
Introduction to Articulate Storyline
So, what is the Articulate Storyline? It’s an e-learning authoring platform that enables instructional designers, educators, and course producers (with or without programming skills) to develop multimedia-rich content.
Articulate offers tools that allow users to build slide-based courses with various forms of media: images, audio, video, and interactive elements. The platform also supports responsive design, ensuring the e-learning course runs seamlessly across different screen sizes.
Think of Articulate Storyline as the go-to solution for transforming educational concepts into dynamic, interactive courses that are professionally designed and appealing to the target audience.
Is Articulate Storyline easy to learn?
For those wondering how to learn Articulate Storyline and whether it is easy to do, you must always consider two main aspects. First, how complex do you need your online course to be? Second, do you have experience creating online courses or working with similar tools?
Articulate Storyline has an intuitive interface that allows even a non-technical person to easily navigate it and create a simple online course using standard drag-and-drop functionality, media importing, text, etc. Storyline also comes with pre-built e-learning templates, characters, and interactions, which significantly speed up the production process. So mastering the basics of Storyline would be fine.
On the other hand, if you’re looking to create a more dynamic product, it will require knowledge of advanced Storyline techniques and a deeper understanding of how authoring tools work. For example, learning to use JavaScript triggers (for in-course action control) and variables (for dynamic content) will require time and additional practice.
What can you do with Articulate Storyline
With Articulate Storyline, you can create everything you need for a professionally made online course. Its functionality ranges from basic features to more advanced ones that allow you to create custom learning experiences for users.
This platform offers a wide range of content customization capabilities for templates, quizzes, and interactive simulations. Storyline also supports branching scenarios, meaning you can guide learners through different paths based on their in-course choices. It has a robust media library with more than 100,000 combinations of characters, expressions, and poses, allowing you to create a product that resonates with audiences of different age groups.
Setting up Articulate Storyline
When getting started with Articulate Storyline, you need to download the Articulate 360
desktop app, which provides access to all the tools within the Articulate ecosystem (Storyline 360, Studio 360, Replay 360, and Peek 360). You can also create storylines in Articulate Rise 360 without needing to install a desktop app: it just depends on how complex the courses planned are to create. Check this video out to see how to use Rise 360:
For other instances, the standard setup process will go as follows:
- Go to the Articulate website and sign up (Matheson Alex. The World’s Best Creator Platform for Online Workplace Learning. Articulate. 2024 ). There are two options: you can choose a free trial to test the tool out or choose a subscription plan that works for you right away.
- Once you’ve set up your Articulate account, go to the main page and click Download Desktop Apps in the bottom right corner of the page. Note: Articulate works only on Windows, so we recommend using Parallels Desktop if you have a Mac.
- Once the file is downloaded, run the installation procedure.
- The Articulate 360 desktop app will automatically open when the installation is complete.
- In the app, choose Storyline 360 and click Install.
- Wait for the installation to complete, then click Open.
The procedure itself is pretty straightforward. Now, let’s see how to use Articulate Storyline in practice.
Creating first project with Articulate Storyline
📌 Set up new project
To begin creating your first project with Articulate Storyline, launch Storyline 360 and click on “New Project.” It will bring you to Story View, where all the slides will be gathered and organized into scenes, allowing you to visualize your course’s overall structure and flow. Now, click on the blank “Untitled Slide,” which will take you to Slide View.
Here, you’ll notice the interface is very reminiscent of PowerPoint. From this view, you can configure slide settings like the timeline, triggers, slide layers, and more.
📌 Start building the course
Now, the main part begins. You can equip slides with various layouts, adding text, images, shapes, storyline animations, transitions, etc. Interactive features like buttons, hotspots, and clickable areas will allow you to create more engaging content and use triggers for user actions.
Articulate Storyline also supports layers, enabling you to show additional information or feedback on the same slide, and states to change the appearance of objects based on user actions. You can design quizzes with different question types and configure feedback and scoring for assessments. Additionally, you can add voiceover, sound effects, and background music to enhance the course experience.
When dealing with large amounts of content, you can also try out the Articulate AI-Assistant, which can help speed up the production process by generating text, images, etc., within the platform. It can, for example, rephrase text for clarity, and create images tailored to specific topics, reducing dependency on other tools.
📌 Publish the course
Once your course is complete, it’s time to publish it. Click the “Publish” button and choose the needed format, such as SCORM, Web, or Video, based on your LMS requirements. If you’re using SCORM, set up tracking and reporting options, like completion criteria or quiz scores.
It’s also important to choose the SCORM version compatible with your LMS (e.g., SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004) and adjust output settings, including player options, resolution, etc. Once settings are configured, publish the course. Articulate Storyline will generate a ZIP file containing the necessary files for LMS upload.
📌 Upload to LMS
Log in to the LMS and go to the course creation or content upload section. Select the option to upload a new course, then choose the ZIP file generated during the publishing process. Configure details like title, description, and learner access rules. Remember to select tracking options, such as completion criteria or quiz tracking, to align with your reporting needs.
Once uploaded, test the course within the LMS to make sure that it functions as intended, including tracking and reporting learner interactions. After that, your course will be accessible and ready for learners.
Best practices for using Articulate Storyline 360
Now let’s look at the best practices of online course production using Articulate Storyline. With so much this platform has to offer, it’s important to strategically plan the course design with Storyline and avoid the most common mistakes along the way.
✔️ Define your learning objectives
Defining your learning goals before developing an e-learning course with Articulate is crucial as it provides clear direction and understanding of your desired result. Set objectives help you stay focused on essential aspects of production, ensuring that all content, interactions, etc., align with the course’s main goal.
It makes the content more targeted and relevant to learners. By understanding your learning objectives, you can establish clear KPIs for the course and know exactly what and how to measure and assess its performance.
✔️ Storyboard in advance
While learning objectives establish the overall vision and direction for the e-learning project, the storyboard provides a narrative design structure, allowing you to verify the feasibility of all project ideas before they are implemented.
Storyboarding helps you organize and sequence all Articulate Storyline interactive elements, ensuring a logical flow for media, text, and other components. It also facilitates collaboration with SMEs, enabling them to provide feedback before the product reaches the later stages of development. Storyboarding reduces the risk of costly revisions, saving time and resources for the entire production team.
✔️ Think about content
A unified approach to fonts, shades, transitions, slide layouts, and other design elements ensures a consistent visual experience for learners. This is especially important for branded courses or tutorials that need to convey a strong visual identity for a business or company to deliver knowledge.
These seemingly small yet significant elements directly impact the user experience. They influence how learners engage with the content, allowing you to reinforce particular messages or sections of the course visually. This, in turn, supports the main learning objectives and improves the course’s overall effectiveness.
✔️ Keep it simple
While Articulate Storyline offers a wealth of features and functionalities, it’s important to keep things simple to avoid overwhelming learners with excessive interactivity, visuals, transitions, and actions.
On the one hand, you want your online education product to look professional and provide learners with the tools and functionality necessary for an effective learning experience. On the other hand, overloading the course can take the focus away from important content.
The main rule of thumb is that all content should support and complement the learning objectives of your course, not the other way around.
✔️ Don’t forget to save and back up
Even though this is a general recommendation, it often gets overlooked. Backing up data becomes especially vital when producing large e-learning courses that involve the creation of hundreds of slides with custom interactions, characters, illustrations, video footage, etc.
Losing even a portion of this data can be a major setback for the entire team, but it’s not just about the extra man-hours required for reproduction — sometimes it’s simply impossible due to time constraints. At Blue Carrot, we’ve managed dozens of projects that demanded large amounts of content to be produced in short periods, meaning we couldn’t afford mistakes during production as they could stall the entire project.
This is why we have a streamlined process where all progress is backed up and saved, even when multiple team members are working on a single project.
How Blue Carrot can help your business
👉 Innovative energy courses
Our team developed and localized over 70 hours of engaging e-learning content on innovative energy sources in just two months, featuring 1,680 minutes of video and 1,920 interactive slides. We delivered this project in five languages — German, French, Spanish, and Romanian — by leveraging Articulate Storyline and AI tools.
This approach enabled us to provide a high-quality, interactive learning experience significantly faster and more budget-friendly for the client than traditional studio recordings. The production process set up by our team ensured consistency across languages, maximizing the final product’s quality and relevance for the target audiences.
👉 Data-driven decision making
This lesson demonstrates how Large Language Models, like OpenAI, can be utilized in Learning Design, particularly for blueprint creation, and how the generative AI tool Synthesia can enhance media production. By leveraging AI, we’ve achieved a fivefold increase in media production speed for this project while reducing SME time involvement by 50%.
🔗 Check data-driven decision making course demo
Summing up
Articulate Storyline is a robust tool used to produce effective online courses. However, as with any other digital tool, there are pros and cons. The main advantage is that you don’t need specialized knowledge for learning Articulate Storyline and working with it. At the basic level — for classroom use, for example — it allows for the rapid development of basic interactive courses without the steep learning curve often associated with other e-learning tools.
However, creating interactive e-learning content for wider audiences or commercial use will require deeper technical expertise. At the same time, you can turn to professionals who can develop such a course for you. With the available experience and knowledge of Articulate Storyline such a way would not only save you time but also help to avoid many mistakes, eventually saving budgets on the project production.
If you want to know more about how to use Articulate Storyline 360 or need help with your e-learning project, don’t hesitate to contact the Blue Carrot team in any way convenient to you! 🥕
