I produced this video lecture for a Landscape Architecture in Articulate Storyline.
The team I lead developed a total of 12 SCORM modules for the Landscape Architecture class. My team designed the interface, developed the interactive elements, and added the closed captions. Our SME provided the initial PowerPoint slides, quiz questions, and narration.
My favorite part of this project was sourcing Creative Commons imagery to replace the copyrighted images from the professor’s PowerPoint. I spent several enjoyable days in Flickr looking at beautiful garden photos. It almost made me forget our offices were in a windowless basement.
Our biggest challenge proved to be closed captions. The SME recorded without a script, and we didn’t have a budget for transcription. We also didn’t have a talented typist. Our best solution was to train one of our student assistants in Dragon NaturallySpeaking, then have the student listen to slowed-down recordings through headphones. He repeated the professor’s words into a microphone so Dragon could turn it into text. We now make sure every project we touch has a captioning budget!
To make matters even more interesting, this was one of our first Storyline projects, and at that time Storyline’s ADA support was close to non-existent. Closed captioning, for example, doesn’t exist at all! This meant we had to manually create our captions using triggers, which is a labor-intensive process. Each video has about 45 minutes of audio, so we had thousands of lines of text to manage. I developed a Byzantine two–part automated process that made the process mostly hands-off, but I’m still looking for a better solution. I’m starting to think Lectora may be the answer . . .