Intro

One of the reasons I started using eLearning assets as professor in a university college, was that I wanted to offer students a more personalized learning experience. In this blog I will not expand on that goal, but show how you can use an ignored feature of advanced actions in combination with multistate objects to offer the choice or a personal avatar.

Do you know that several simple actions (dropdown list in the Actions tab for a slide or an interactive object) also appear as possible commands in advanced action, but that they are ‘enhanced’? Typical examples are:

•  Show/Hide: as simple action they can only address objects (or groups) on the same slide as where you trigger the action. However when used in an advanced action, you can address all project objects.
• Change State/Go to Next State/Go to Previous State: as simple actions you can only point to multistate objects on the slide of the action, but used in an advanced action you point to all multistate objects in the project.

Example project

Have a look at this example. You can use the Table of Content (custom button) to navigate freely. This project has:

• Title slide
• Slide ‘Flashlight’ with timeline staggering, where you see bottom left an avatar
• Slide ‘AvatarChoice’ where you can change the avatar. It is not the first slide to prove that the avatar change will also be functional on the previous slide (Flashlight)
• Slide ‘CareerSteps’ which has an avatar outside of the slide, but it will appear in steps if you click the play button (motion path animation triggered partially with each Play button click)
• Slide KnowledgeCheck where the avatar is used to give a feedback message

How?

I will explain the setup in a blog post.  There was no need for variables, nor for conditional actions. It is really very simple to create that type of avatar choice propagation. Adding more slides with avatars is not a problem neither. In this example I used only SVGs as avatars but it works perfectly with bitmap images as well.

This was one of the workflows I showed in the AEW 2021 workshop about Advanced and Shared actions. You can still watch the recording if you cannot wait for the blog post.