randomizing course branches and saving assessment data

Sep 24, 2018

Viktor Raskin
By Viktor Raskin

Hi,

I am a newbie to Storyline and eLearning design. I am a programmer by my previous training.

As a final project in my Instructional Design degree, I am planning to build an online course with an integrated controlled experiment on learning styles and built-in assessments.

During the experiment, learners will be randomly assigned different learning styles for the same material.

Question:
Does any tool provide flexibility to choose randomly study material, may be based on user ID?

Moreover, I want to store data after learners pass several assessments. Saved data will help to measure retention of the material studied and to evaluate the efficacy of the learning styles.

Question:
Does Storyline provide the flexibility to record data for every learner? I will probably need to capture user IDs, type of the material studied, assessment results, and maybe the time it took them to answer questions in the assessment.

I am wondering where I can read how to do the above.

Thanks.
Viktor.

 

 

 

1 Reply
Allison Goldthorpe
over 5 years ago09/24/18 at 3:42 pm (UTC)

Hi Viktor,

This is a really interesting concept! Although I can't give you the technical specifics of how to do this, I hope I can give you enough to get you started.

Step 1- Determine the Learning Style

You'll first need to pull the user ID or other identifier from your LMS to use as a basis from the randomization. You'll be able to do this with JavaScript, then store that info in a variable. Next, you'll need to build a trigger in Storyline that sets another variable using whatever logic you'd like. The trigger you'll use might be "Execute JavaScript when the timeline starts" and the code would say the equivalent of "set variable LearningStyle to Visual if the user ID ends in 1, 2, or 3".

Step 2- Send the Learner Down the Right Path

Once you have the learning style stored in a variable, you can use that to redirect the learner. If I was building the course, I'd create an intro slide in scene one which does everything described in Step 1. Then, I'd create different scenes for each of your learning styles. Finally, you can create triggers to send the learner down the chosen path. For instance, "When user click the Next button, jump to scene 2- visual IF variable LearningStyle equals Visual".

Step 3- Report All of that Information

With the amount of information you want to track, I think this would be a perfect application of xAPI. This is a more robust way to send learner data to a learning record store. If you google "Storyline xAPI reporting", I'm sure you'll find some tutorials to get you started.

One thing you may need to watch out for with all of this is your Storyline file size. It may become too big if there's 3 versions of the same content.

You may find this article on A/B testing interesting. I did a quick search to see if there were any LMSs that offer A/B testing as an option, but sadly it doesn't look like that exists.

Hope that helps. If you find some significant differences between learning styles I hope you write a blog post with the results!

Cheers,

Allison

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.