How to link several presentations

In this article, you will learn how to create a compound course that will connect several presentations (lessons) created with iSpring. This course can be distributed on a flash drive or via email as a single folder and provide an uninterrupted learning experience.

Technically speaking, an iSpring course is a web page, so you you will need to link the resultant web pages rather than the initial .pptx files. The main “Table of contents” presentation will represent links to other presentations. After clicking on any link, the respective presentation will be opened in another browser tab.

Note: If you use an LMS, use the learning path feature to connect lessons into a single compound course.

Create a folder structure

1. 1

   First level. This will be the root folder for the linked course.
   

2. 2

   Second level. All presentation projects will go here, e.g., video-lecture-01, etc. Also, this level will contain the main presentation Table of contents, which will feature links to all presentations.
   

3. 3

   Third level. This folder has the output presentation folder, Table of contents (Web) and the original files, such as Table of contents.pptx and the project resources folder (named Table of contents without suffixes, not shown in the picture below).
   

4. 4

   Fourth level. All published presentation structures are alike and feature the same set of files with the same names (data folder, index file). To open a published presentation, run the index.html file.
   

The index files of different presentations will be linked between each other to create a compound course. As you might have noticed, the index.html file names are not unique, so the folder name (third level) is what differentiates presentations.

Later, you’ll want to deploy the published course only, and get rid of the source files on the third level except those with the (Web) suffix. To do that, make a copy of the entire project structure for production and get rid of these files in the copied version.

Create the main presentation

1. 1

   Open the Table of contents.pptx presentation and add some links.
   

2. 2

   When adding a link in the Edit Hyperlink window, specify a relative path to the index.html file of another presentation. Add the prefix ..\ before the link to the file, as in the picture below.
   

Two dots .. in the relative path means go one level up, so ..\. .\ moves you two levels up in the foder structure (from level 4 to 2).

Note: the published presentation is located one level below the original .ppt, therefore you need to add this prefix to make it work after publishing. However, in the original PowerPoint this link will not work.

Catalog tree

Here you can see a tree of the project’s root catalog and links to index.html from different presentations.

How to link back

Every linked presentation is opened in a new browser window by default, and doesn’t interrupt the original Table of contents presentation.

If you want to open presentations in the same window, you will need to create links back and change some settings before publishing.

1. 1

   Click the Resources button on the iSpring toolbar.
   

2. 2

   Switch to the Settings tab and sel ect Open external links in: The same window (“_self”).
   

Now, linked presentations will open in the same browser tab. In order to make links back, you would need to modify the linked presentations and include links to the parent presentation:

..\. .\Table of contents\Table of contents (Web)\index.html

Also, you can link presentations together. For example, link the last slide of the first presentation with the second one:

..\. .\video-lecture-02\video-lecture-02 (Web)\index.html

Limitations

This approach requires an open folder structure that you have on your computer, CD, or a simple HTML website. Links between folders (local paths) will not function in most systems and websites that require an authorization. It will not work if you:

• Publish for an LMS (e.g. Moodle or Blackboard). Use learning path features or Aggregators to combine several iSpring SCOs (lessons) into a single course entity. Read more about iSpring SCO.

• Publish right to iSpring Learn.

Recommendations

We suggest that you publish your projects to HTML5 only, not using Flash output because it has known problems with local links.

Keep folders organized. If you don't copy some of the linked presentation — or if you rename, move, or delete it — the linked presentation will not be available when you click the hyperlink to it fr om the main presentation.