Everything we know about Cornerstone on Demand and Storyline!

Hi Karoline.

We are going through the process of creating a lot of content for mobile users and I have to say the best way it to treat them as seperate modules (from the original content). For our desktop users we have higher quality audio, video and images. For our mobile users I recreate the same modules but with the graphics, video and audio resized and compressed to suit the typical screen size.

To give you an idea of how this impacts the final size:

30 second clip shot at 720 p can easily hit 10mb. If you resize the output video (before you insert the clip into storyline) to something like 360p (still the most popular size for YouTube videos) it will look fine on any tablet or mobile phone and be less than 1/4 of the original file size. Do the same with all your images (no point having a 2-3mb image designed to fill a PC screen if it is being viewed on a device 1/20th of the size and also the same for your audio. Most mobiles will give a very acceptable sound at 128kbs but you can go half of that and a lot of people with the standard headphones would not notice any difference.

They key is to do all of this before you import and then play around with the quality settings in Articulate when you publish. If you are using a 3 or 4 slide powerpoint as a source and the files size is already 10mb then you know the pictures are the issue Also I have noticed a lot of larger files due to people importing a poorly made source PowerPoint (not using the master slides correctly etc and made by pasting the background into every slide). This can multiply the final filesize by 10 or even a 100 times!

If you dont have any image editing software you can either use paint (standard in all Windows PC's) or copy the image into a blank powerpoint, format it to the size you think it will need to be for a mobile or tablet then right click, save picture and it will reduce the resolution and compress the file size in the version it saves. You can use Audacity (free) to edit your audio - just open up the file then "save as" to reduce to an accepatable level. You can also reduce background noise, hiss etc very easily. Finally for video WinFF is a free convertor and has presets for the sizes suitable for mobile phone.

Ok so it is a bit of extra work but will drastically reduce the page loading time for your mobile users and provide a far more engaging experience. Remember that the higher the file size the more storage needed to host and the more eenergy and bandwidth needed to push it around the internet. Both cost money, whether for your organisation or your end user so I am sure you will find the time spent brings suitable efficiences to justify the hassle.

As a final example for you to use as a guide, if you coppied a 2 hour Hollywood film from a DVD you will find the filesize to be anywhere between 1.5GB and 4GB. Once you reduce the audio, reduce the output resolution to fit a mobile phone screen and then compress to a format like .flv or .mpeg4 you can get it down to 250mb and the quality looks almost like the original. So even if your whole module was one long video you should be able to get it to around 30mb or lower just by doing a bit of reformatting.