Encouraging Engagement in eLearning Courses - Articulate Storyline

Mar 28, 2014

To enhance the learning experience for our eLearning courses, we're trying to come up with a way for learners to engage with other learners as they navigate through their course at their own pace.

We are envisioning a discussion board type of forum that would allow the learners to post questions they have and the opportunity for other learners and/or subject matter experts to respond to the quesitons posted in the forum.  The board would be monitored by us.

The thinking is that the option to "Ask a Question" would be available as a button/link on every page throughout the course.

Has anyone ever done this?  Any suggestions?

14 Replies
Daniel Brigham

Hi, Alexandra: Should be easy enough to do: you could insert a web object (say a wiki page) or have a button that when clicked leads to wiki page.

You might also explore putting this on the course player itself: that way it wouldn't take up valuable screen real estate. In the mockup attached, I created a "Have a question?" tab on the course player. When the learner clicks on it, it brings them to a lightboxed slide which has a web object on it. In this case, it's just amazon.com, but you could put in a URL that leads to a wiki or whatever.

Hope that helps you think through what you might do. Let us know how it goes. --Daniel

Rachel Barnum

It is potentially something you could integrate into the LMS itself. I'm not sure what you're using currently. An LMS like Moodle would basically allow you to have maybe discussions or something in between lessons.

Honestly, it would be kind of neat. Maybe you would add in links to a specific Moodle forum post (or whatever LMS you're using) that have to do with certain lessons/ slides and it would pop up and allow them to contribute. You could also make it into a web object and link to the page where they can submit a post.

There are also options like http://www.learndash.com/

Quick edit - this is kind of what I'm thinking of: http://www.ohthatrachel.com/forum/TestDiscussionBoard/story.html

Unfortunately I ended up having to use a layered web object because whenever I'd lightbox it, the "X" button would disappear. I think that had to do with the forum I tested it out on. While I think that having a button in the player is neat, it'd be a lot more engaging to have these buttons throughout the course that actually linked to discussion pages about whatever the topic was on, rather than just a general forum. You could have another button in the player that may just be a general questions forum post or something like that as well.

You could also make it look as neat or integrated as you want. I'm pulling my inspiration from Medium where each paragraph has an option to put a little comment next to it and you can see other comments: https://medium.com/surveillance-state/a3f8a99880d6

Soundcloud is similar, people comment within the music itself at certain times.

Kate Salvan

I think that Rachel is right. There is such option in Learning management systems.For example, in JoomlaLMS there is a forum tool called SMF Forum for easy communication between the course participants on different course issues. The forum Administrator manages this board. Here the course Students can share their ideas with the Teacher and other Students and comment the course. It's possible to organize group forum too. I am sure there are similar options in other Learning Management Systems and you will find what you are looking for.

Another option to integrate any kind of social platform with users' profiles where they can share their learning results, track progress and communicate with each other.

Joshua Roberts

I think as well it's important to make the association that there may be a different process involved in the engagement of learners with a page like this not just implementing it.

We implemented a forum/question style discussion board in our courses but it was a different process entirely in actually getting learners to use the board.

tin C

Phil Mayor said:

If this helps here is a file with javascript to generate a twitter message

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8u9tpjbe0hy172n/Twwet.story

Should be easy to repurpose, if you have a problem let me know, I could probably build you a quick example


Phil, this is great but how do I use it?

We also want something like this where users can leave comments and also discuss.

I have no idea about JavaScript, so if you could point me in the right direction about how to implement something like this in our courses it would be great.

john faulkes

if you wanted to build something to do this it can be done within your Storyline project itself, without using web objects and without needing an LMS.

Here is a small demo of Storyline managing input/comments from various learners. it's in the form of a group brainstorm session but could be adapted to any purpose.

https://www.agio-interactive.com/brainstorm/

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