Toolkit: Obsidian Black

Obsidian Black is a cloud-based authoring tool that firstcame to my attention in Obsidian’s booth at DevLearn 2015. At the time, I sawsome promise in the tool but wasn’t sure how it would evolve. Two years later,I think the time has come to perform a proper review.

Obsidian Black publishes to HTML5. While you can useObsidian’s servers to show stakeholders and reviewers a course while indevelopment, it’s expected that after finalizing a lesson and publishing it,you will download the zipped files and upload them to your learning managementsystem.

The interface and publishing controls

Let’s start with the publish interface and controls. ObsidianBlack takes a slide-based approach, much like PowerPoint and several otherauthoring tools. As you can see in Figure 1, the control bar includes Back andNext buttons, along with a slide counter.

Figure 1: The standard publish interface

In addition, you’ll see that there are two buttons that mayneed a bit more of an explanation:

Figure 2: The Menu button can show atable of contents

Figure 3: The Notes button can show aslide note

Buttons, one type of interactive object

As you can also see in Figure 1, you can place buttons on aslide. Most of the time, buttons are used to jump to other slides. However,other interactions are also possible, such as showing a popup. See Figure 4. Oneset of actions that Obsidian Black provides that is not always available inother tools is the ability to directly report a passed or failed result andscores for a specific learning check, a series of questions, or the fullcourse.

Figure 4: Obsidian Black actions

Other static and interactive options

• You can turn any text into a link. You can customize the links in various ways.You can link to a URL, to an anchor within the lesson, or to your email clientto send an email. You can have a link open in a frame, or in a popup, new,topmost, same, or parent window. (If you’ve ever coded HTML directly, you’ll befamiliar with those options.) In addition to all that, you can customize thelink even more with the options you see in Figure 5.
  
  Figure5: More link options
• You can insert Accordion interactions, wherein you divide information intocollapsible sections. The nice thing about this option is that you’re notlimited to just text and images. Any of the options normally available can beplaced in the accordion, including videos or interactive elements.
• In addition, you can insert:
  • Icons,small vector images from a library of selections.
  • Panels,which are callouts with titles and text areas.
  • Tables,a feature often missing in other authoring tools.
  • Wells,which are callout boxes.
  • Labeled graphics,which allow learners to roll over markers in an image to get text popups.
  • Tabs,similar to Accordion in function, where the information is divided underhorizontal tabs.
  • Tool tips,just like the ones you see when you roll over many application options.
  • Images,videos, and documents. Obsidian Black guides you by showing you the typesof each that are accepted. See Figure 6.

Figure 6: Supported file types in ObsidianBlack

Quiz options

Obsidian Black offers the following types of quiz questions:

• True/false
• Multiple choice (single answer and multipleanswer)
• Drag-and-drop matching
• Open response

It also offers a Quiz Results slide that you can customize.

Other Obsidian Black features

• Whenever you have audio on a slide, you cananimate different screen objects to points in the audio using Obsidian Black’s Animation Editor. There are 15different PowerPoint-type animations built into Obsidian Black. You can alsoset up animations without audio.
• You can publish to SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI,and cmi5, which ensures your lessons will work with most learning managementsystems and with learning record stores.
• There are currently 23 themes available, andmore are planned for the future. You can change the look and feel of yourentire lesson by switching themes.
• When learners navigate between slides, you canuse the attractive default transition or choose to have a fade, linear,concave, or no transition.
• Get stakeholder and SME comments by sharing alink to your lesson, and see those comments when you next log in. Note: Commenters (stakeholders andSMEs) do not need a license to preview and comment on individual slides.
• You can choose to lock navigation upon enteringa slide and unlock it when the end of the slide is reached.

Getting behind the scenes: Editing source

For the sake of simplicity, many options in Obsidian Blackare limited in some way. When I asked about this, Obsidian told me that thoselimitations were integrated by design, motivated by factors related to userfriendliness, focused choices, and reducing decision anxiety. It’s a balancingact that all tool vendors face: Provide fewer options and keep things simple,or provide more options and make it less simple. For instance, if you choose toinsert a button, you can choose from the options seen in Figure 7.

But for those of us who have programming experience, it ispossible to work around some of those limitations. There’s a tool bar option  called Edit Source. Take a look at Figure 8, in which I placed a treasuredphoto of Neil deGrasse Tyson and me as a labeled graphic, so that you can view popupinformation about Dr. Tyson and about me by hovering above the markers.

Clicking Edit Source lets me further edit the contents ofthe slide. Of course, to do this, you’ll want to be pretty comfortable editingHTML and CSS!

You can also edit the source to perform tasks such asremoving the control bar. See Figure 9.

Figure 7: Button style options

Figure 8: A labeled graphic

Figure 9: Editing the source

Limitations

I’ve already mentioned some of the limitations that arebuilt into Obsidian Black, limitations that you can circumvent only by editingthe source. Truth be told, most authoring tools don’t let you edit their sourcecode, but Obsidian Black is publishing standard HTML5 code, so props toObsidian for allowing this option. Obviously, you should back upyour files before you edit the source.

Another aspect of Obsidian Black that you may find a bitsurprising is that it doesn’t offer any responsive design options. It willscale to fit a window, but that may mean empty space above and below in somecases. Think of it as mainly useful for desktop and tablet landscape views.

Pricing and a trial version

Obsidian is simplifying its pricing so that a license toedit Obsidian Black projects now costs $240/year or $25/month, with volume discountsavailable. There is also a 30-day free trial you can use with no credit cardneeded. Go to Obsidian.black for moreinformation.

By the way, Obsidian will keep your source files for 90 dayspast the date your trial ends or after you cancel your subscription.

Is Obsidian Black for you?

Obsidian Black fits an interesting place in the “ease of usevs. power” debates.

If your needs are not complex, you can use Obsidian Black’sfeatures as they’re offered, and that makes it easy enough to use.

If your needs are more complex but you’re not comfortableediting HTML and CSS, you may be better off with another tool that offers moreoptions in its interface.

If your needs are very complex, you may find that the abilityto edit the source files trumps those tools that don’t let you do this easily.

I suggest you sign up for the trial and see for yourself whetherObsidian Black works for your design needs.

What’s next for Obsidian Black

Obsidian Black’s development team has informed me that theyare working on a private collaboration feature that will be launched soon.Currently, authors can set a project to be publicly viewed and/or commented on byanyone with a specific link, even users without an Obsidian Black account. Onlyproject owners are allowed to edit a project. The new feature will allowauthors to grant permissions for a project to individual authors to view, edit,comment, download, copy, and manage permissions.