Layers upon layers
This idea started with an ordinary feature. Plenty of authoring tools let you put different objects on different layers of a single slide. You stack the layers, show one, hide another, and build a slide that changes as the learner works through it.
What if every slide were a layer?
Layers usually live inside one slide. But turn the idea sideways. What if each slide in the course were a layer, and the course were the stack?
Lay every page on top of the next, and you can see straight through the whole course at once. Animators have worked this way for a long time, laying drawings over one another to check that each frame lines up with the one before. A course has the same problem, just with titles and headings instead of characters.
Why alignment drifts
Nobody sets out to build a course where the title jumps around. It happens a little at a time. A slide gets duplicated and nudged. A heading gets a longer line of text and someone drags the box to fit. A new author joins halfway through and eyeballs the margins. Each change is small, and each slide looks fine on its own.
The trouble only shows when a learner clicks from one slide to the next and the title shifts a few pixels, or the content area gets a little narrower. It looks careless, even when it was not. Clicking through forty slides one at a time is a poor way to catch it, because the eye forgets where things were on the last slide by the time the next one loads.
Look through the stack
Stack the slides and the problem becomes obvious. Here is how it works:
Stack the slides
Every slide in the course becomes a layer, and the layers sit on top of one another, so you are looking through the whole course at once.
Look for what does not line up
Titles that sit where they should overlap into one clean line. A heading that is a few pixels low, or a content area that is a little too wide, stands out immediately.
Select the ones that are off
Pick the misaligned objects, even though they live on different slides.
Change the properties once
Set the position, size, or style one time, and every selected object changes together.
The fix is the part that saves the most time. You do not open forty slides and move forty boxes. You fix the misaligned objects together, in one change.
From idea to feature
It started as a cool idea. Now it is built in. IRLO Studio Slides treats every slide as a layer in the course, so you can stack your pages, see what is out of line, and bring it back in one step.
It is the same thinking behind macros: the repetitive part of building a course should not be yours to do by hand. Your time belongs on what the course teaches, not on where the title sits.
Try it
IRLO Studio has not launched yet. Join the early access waitlist, and when it opens, bring a course that has been through a few authors, stack its slides, and see what lines up.