Quick start guide: Build and preview your first Elucidat Project

If you‘re just getting started in Elucidat Author, this guide can help you through the first steps of building and editing your first course. 

1. Building your first Project

A Project is the workspace where you design, build, and edit your elearning course. You’ll add pages, text, images, questions, and more—just like building a presentation or website. Everything you do in a Project will shape the final course that your learners will take.

You can create your first Elucidat Project in five steps.

1. Open the Start page. This is the first page you will see when you log in to Elucidat. You can always get back to this page from wherever you are in the platform by selecting Start in the top toolbar.
   
   
2. Choose Create a new blank project.
   
   

3. Select a Style for your Project by hovering over the Style you‘d like and choose Select Style.
   
   

   Information
   A Style acts like a blueprint for your course‘s appearance. It sets the default colouring and styling of the elements of your Project so you don‘t have to manually set these in your Project. You can change a Project‘s Style at any time so don‘t worry too much if you‘re not sure what to choose.
4. Type a name in the Name your project field. You can also optionally choose which folder you’d like your Project to be created in. Click the Select folder field and scroll through the list of folders to find the one you‘d like to use.
   
   
5. Click Get started to build your Project.
   
   

Once your Project has been built you‘ll be taken to the Pages overview screen where you can see a top-down view of your Project’s structure.

2. Adding pages to your Project

Projects are made up of pages. You might think of pages in Elucidat like slides in a presentation. Learners will work through each page of your elearning, absorbing information or completing interactions along the way.

In this section, you’ll add a new empty page to your Project that we can add interactive parts to later.

1. Click Add new Page to add a new page to your course.
   
   
2. To begin editing, select the ellipsis menu on the page tile and choose Set Page Type.
   
   
3. Choose Start from scratch.
   
   
4. Open the page’s ellipsis menu and click Edit page to go to the editing interface (you can also double-click the page tile).
   
   

You‘ll be taken to the authoring interface where you can begin adding content to your pages.

3. Editing your Project

Editing a Project is carried out through the authoring interface. It is comprised of four sections or ‘modes‘: 

• Author
  This mode allows you to edit the content of your pages. Adding text, editing styling, adding media can all be done from here.
• Layout
  This mode allows you to add parts to your page to build out its structure. 
• Preview
  This mode allows you to view and interact with the course as a learner. This is great for testing.
• Review
  This mode allows you to comment on parts of the course for collaboration purposes.

You‘ll only need to focus on the first three sections for now.

Adding parts using Layout

A page needs to have parts before your learning content can be added. Parts are the informational or interactive elements that make your elearning engaging.

You can use Layout to add parts to the page. In this part of the tutorial, you’ll add a new blank section to the page and then add a Question to that new section.

1. Click Layout to switch modes
2. Click the grey Add section button to add a new section to your page. A section is used to contain parts.
   
   
3. Choose Empty section to create a blank section.
   
   
4. Click the orange Add here button inside the section element to open the parts menu.
   
   
5. Click Questions and Results on the first page of the part menu.
   
   
6. Open the Select one answer category.
7. Choose Text Answer Single Choice to add it to your page.

Don’t forget to save your work using the Save button in the top-right corner.

Editing parts using Author

When you have added the parts you need to the page, you can start adding content to them in Author.

1. Switch editing modes by selecting Author.
   
   
2. Each part has several edit menus that allow you to control and change different aspects of it.
   
   
3. Select an edit menu to open it and view its controls. Expand each section to see its full list of controls.
   
   
   Different parts have different options available in their edit menus. Have a look around and see what you can change on the parts you‘ve added!
4. You can edit text by selecting the text field and typing.
   
   
5. Remember to save any changes using the Save button. You can also undo any changes made since the last save by selecting Undo.
   
   

4. Checking your Project using Preview

You can take a look at what your Project will look like to your learners by switching to the Preview mode. Here you can navigate through your course and check that everything is how you‘d like it to be. 

1. Switch to Preview mode.
   
   
2. In Preview, you can navigate through your course and interact with the parts that you‘ve added to your pages as a learner would. This can give you a good idea of what kind of experience your course will offer your learners.
   
   

The next steps

As you become more familiar with the platform, we encourage you to experiment and explore what Elucidat can do to help you create high-quality, engaging elearning. 

If you have questions, the Elucidat Help Center can be a valuable resource to help you gain a deeper understanding of the platform. It is filled with a wide variety of useful guides and we‘d recommend it as your first port of call if you need help.

If you get stuck and need someone to talk to, the Elucidat Support team is always happy to work with you through any questions you may have. You can contact the Support team at support@elucidat.com.