Summary: You can add multimedia content to the Guestbook pages in Articulate Online by adding HTML.
Difficulty: Medium

If you use Articulate Online, check this out.

You can give access to your courses via:

The user either goes straight into the course or onto a login page depending on your permissions settings.

You can add a step just before viewing the course: the Guestbook. The Guestbook allows you to get information about the user. You can get tracked scores and they don’t actually need to be registered on the system.

Standard Guestbook

Here is a typical Guestbook:

Enhanced Guestbook

Here is the same course with an “enhanced” Guestbook.

Can you see the Engage Process interaction embedded within the Articulate Online interface?

You can customize how your course will be introduced and brand it accordingly.

User know about the course before it begins. There is no tracking until the user clicks on Continue. They can see if the quiz or presentation is timed.

Online Video Guestbook

You can add more or less any HTML including links or even embedded videos from online video sites:

How do you do it?

So how do you do it? Easy. You use a web object feature within Articulate Online itself.

1. Publish your content to Articulate Online as usual.
2. Go to the Content tab and click on Guestbook.

 



 

3. Click on Change and then select which fields you wish to make required or optional before the user can move onto the course.
4. Copy and paste the HTML you want to include in the Guestbook in the customization box at the bottom of the form:

 



 

5. Save the changes.

Your Guestbook will now have whatever HTML features you added.

How do you add Engage to the Guestbook?

Adding Engage is the pretty much the same as adding HTML. Upload the Engage files to Internet. You can do this in two ways:

1. Using an external server
2. Using Articulate Online

Either way, paste the following HTML into the Customization box in the Guestbook:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0"
width="767" height="590">
<param name="movie" value="the URL of your engage.swf">
<param name="play" value="true">
<param name="loop" value="true">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<embed width="767" height="590" src="the URL of your engage.swf"
play="true" loop="true" quality="high"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">

where “the URL of your engage.swf” is URL of your Engage interaction. ie. http://myserver.com/engageintroduction/engage.swf
The width and height values are the width and height of your interaction.

Using An External Server

If you have access to an external server, place your Engage introduction interactions there and then use the URL of the engage.swf (not the engage.html) in the code above. This works fine.

Using Articulate Online

If you don’t have access to an external server or have to rely on your IT department for that, try this nice workaround.

Make one of your content items a Multimedia Resources item. Use an Articulate Presenter course as an archive for any resources, images, videos, quizzes or Engage interactions.

1. Create your Introduction Engage interaction and publish to the web on your local computer.
2. Navigate to the published files and change the file engage.html to index.html
3. Create a new PowerPoint file and call it Multimedia Resources.
4. Create a new slide and then a web object in that slide.
5. Don’t specify a URL address but rather point the web object to the index.html you’ve just created.
6. Get the web object to open in a new window.
7. Publish your PowerPoint course direct to Articulate Online using the title “Multimedia Resources”.
8. Now open your Multimedia Resources course in Articulate Online and view the web object open in a new window.
9. Copy the URL of the web object window.

 



 

10. Now paste that URL address into the Engage code above but change the last index.html to engage.swf.

For example: the URL you copy might be something like:

http://daveperso.articulate-online.com/p/9378888768/data/webobject_slide2/index.html

Just change it to:

http://daveperso.articulate-online.com/p/9378888768/data/webobject_slide2/engage.swf

You’ll now have an Engage introduction as an introduction of your other course.

NOTES

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