Linking from Engage to Presenter

A while ago there was a great post on Daveperso’s Articulate eLearning Blog about how you can use a hyperlink within Engage to link to a particular slide within your Articulate Presenter course. You can add the code asfunction:_level44.playSlide,5 through the “insert hyperlink” function in Engage, change the number at the end to correspond to the slide which you want to link to, publish and that’s it! (Read his full post here).

This method works great, and also works when inserting Engage interactions in the manner which I described in my last post. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t quite work when the slide to which you are linking contains another Engage interaction – the Engage becomes mis-aligned and appears way over to the left of the screen. You can see in this presentation: the first two links, which are linking just to standard slides, work fine; if you try the third link, which links to a slide containing an Engage interaction, it doesn’t look right.

While I’ve found no way to fix this, I have found a handy little workaround, which is to insert a blank slide immediately before the Engage interaction to which you are linking and set the slide to automatically advance. You can then insert a “please wait” type image onto the blank slide which will appear for the second before the slide advances. You can see that method in action here.

Articulate presentations with resizable Engage interactions

A while ago, I was working on creating this presentation, which was designed to be an interactive tour around 15 Blenheim Terrace (which is the home of Skills@Library at the University of Leeds), as well as an introduction to what support we can offer to students.

The idea was to create the illusion of being in the building, and we wanted the user to be able to navigate around from within the slides, without having to rely on using the Articulate controls, or the sidebar menu (though we ended up including the sidebar aswell).

As we were using numerous Engage interactions within the slides, we had to come up with a way of linking from the Engage slides back to other slides. We also wanted to maintain the illusion of being “in” the building, so that when the user still appeared to be in the room when they accessed the Engage interactions. This Screenr will show you what we came up with:

If you’re embedding multiple Engage interactions into a presentation in this way, you should rename your engage.swf files to something meaningful, otherwise once you’ve published that Articulate presentation you won’t be able to keep track of which is which.

Also, if you then republish your Articulate presentation, the engage_content folder will have to be copied over again.

** Updated**

See a PDF version of these instructions here, by request of @TriciaRansom

Navigation tab

I hate reading instructions. I much prefer to plough on in and get my hands dirty straight away.

Not everyone is like that though, and it’s easy to forget that not everyone will automatically know how to navigate through a presentation. So I’ve created an Engage interaction, to use as a “how to navigate this tutorial” tab in our Skills@Library student tutorials.

It’s not the most mind-blowingly original idea, I know, but based on my own experience of having been meaning to do it for ages but never getting around to it, I thought it might be useful to the community for me to share. You can see it in action here.

You can download the template interaction from here. All you’ll need to do is swap the image for one of your own presentation, change the colour scheme as appropriate then add it as an Engage tab to your presentation. Don’t forget to remove any of the features that you’ve disabled from your player template.