This tutorial will show you how to incorporate Articulate Engage interactions into Lectora. We had to write these procedures out for someone on our team anyway so we thought we would pass them on to you.

Here at Pinched Head, we like Articulate Engage for some things because it’s fairly easy to use. They have focused their efforts on creating a select number of high-quality flash-based interactions that can add a lot to an otherwise static elearning project. We’ll write a more detailed review of Engage at some point down the road.  For now,  here is a Camtasia screen movie of the process followed by a summary review of the steps.

My narration is no James Earl Jones but I hope it is helpful.

Summary of Steps

1. Create your Engage interaction.
2. Export your Engage interaction to web output.
3. In the folder where Engage exports your interaction, rename the “engage.swf” to <whatever>.swf
4. Also rename the “engage_contents” folder to <whatever>_contents (the same name  you chose for the .swf. We do the above two steps in order to differentiate between multiple Engage interactions that we include in our Lectora title. It would simplify things if Articulate named these other files uniquely (it always names them “engage.swf ” and”engage_content”) but that is a subject for our future product review.
5. On the Lectora page where the Engage Interaction will go, add an Animation to the page either by selecting the Animation icon at the top or by going to Add>Object>Animation.
6. Place the Engage Interaction <whatever>.swf on the page.
7. When embedding a .swf file to a Lectora page,  put the following parameter in the flash animation properties: wmode=opaque. This ensures that any menu that you create on the page will appear on top of this flash movie (see earlier post on adding a slide-out menu to Lectora). This applies to engage movies, flash movies and any Camtasia or Captivate flash videos that are embedded directly on the page.
8. Important: Place the folder named <whatever>_content in the /images folder so that you can preview the interaction while working in Lectora.
9. Important: After publishing the Lectora title, place the interaction folders also in html/images (or in scorm/html/images for SCORM titles.) for each Engage interaction.