Characters
I absolutely love using characters in my e-learning courses. They are great for gaining attention throughout the course, acting as training facilitators, or for playing a role in a storyline or simulation. Over the past five years I have created many characters in my courses. And since my current role is coming to an end due to the bank acquisition, I feel it would be good to pay a quick tribute to my fictional colleagues who have made training easier and funner over the years. FYI: The first 2 characters were made early on and are a combination of edited clip-art images. The rest are made from scratch within Adobe Flash. Please do not copy or use these images as they are copyrighted materials.
Captain Outlook
IRA - retiree who knows an awful lot about retirement accounts
Sam Price - known to poke around branches and learn a little too much
James Cyclops - Expert in One View software, but has also been seen playing the role of a persistent customer with many pertinent questions
And of course there's the bank's middle management
Well, those are some of my favorite characters I have developed over the years. I will be continuing as the e-Learning Designer with the newly merged bank and hopefully will develop many new and exciting courses and graphics.
Ben Franklin m-Learning Course
Tracing Bitmaps in Flash
With Flash you easily convert your imported graphics into vector graphics. Once converted, you can manipulate the vector graphic from within Flash. For example, remove colors, add colors, distort shapes, etc. This has been extremely helpful while working on a Ben Franklin course I am currently developing. I have been importing graphics of historical illustrations and artifacts (none with copyrights). In order to keep the same “cartoon” feel of the Minutebio courses, I used this method. Giving the graphics a more uniform, cartoon look, plus vector graphics scale up better.
Here’s how it works:
Highlight the imported graphic. In the menu, use Modify>Bitmap>Trace Bitmap.
The Trace Bitmap dialog box will appear. Color threshold and other parameters can be adjusted and previewed. Click OK and it becomes a vector graphic.
- Tracing Bitmap
It can now be easily manipulated. In the example below, background colors have been removed, the shape of the arm has been changed and numerous colors have been added.
