Well…interesting news! My boss announced this week that he is quitting! What does that mean for my training projects? Well, for the training that I am designing for other teams in the company, it means nothing. Nothing will change and I will keep working with those teams to produce the training that they need. For the training that I am personally leading, though, here will be a change. Train the Trainer Training, my baby, will continue because I own it. But the Manager training I was designing for my boss will be put on hiatus. He was leading that project…and not in a very timely manner, I have to say. But he was leading it and I was designing it to his specifications. Now I will postpone the design of the training until the new VP of Talent begins and I work with him to find out what he wants. So now my project is changing focus from Manager training to Train the Trainer Training. Fortunately that project has been running and still has two weeks to go until it is over, so the timeline of it should work for this class.

For Train the Training Training (TTT), I have been learning new software to host it. I hosted the first module in the LMS which was ugly and had rough transitions between the different elements of the training. I next designed the following two modules in Articulate Rise, and absolutely beautiful platform. It is intuitive, very easy to use, allows cool user interactions, and produces a gorgeous final product.

This past week, however, I decided to delve into another product in the Articulate suite, Storyline 360. I plan to build at least on module using this software. Honestly, this product is killing me. It is difficult to use, like Powerpoint but with animations you can add. Being similar to Powerpoint, it uses a Microsoft Office interface. After using Google and Google-like interfaces, I have found Microsoft interfaces to be clunky and tedious with too many buttons to click through. It’s the same with Storyline. Compared to Articulate, there are just too many steps you have to take to make one little thing happen. Say I want to have a button on the slide that opens to a video. First I create a base layer, then a second layer, then I have to add the URL to that layer, then I have to set conditions for that layer to become active, and there are like 5 conditions that need to be set, and then I I have to go through the whole process again to set an exit button that will make the video disappear. SUPER tedious. I’m learning this software, but only because I feel I have to like a kid feels she needs to eat her vegetables. It's a healthy activity -- but very unpleasant.

At the moment, Articulate Rise works but Storyline 360 does not. It took me two days to create three slides. Ugh!!! So, thumbs up to Articulate Rise for the two beautiful modules I created on it, and thumbs down to Storyline 360 which has become a massive time sink as I spend days learning the program to create just one module.