A Customer's Challenge

Jun 15, 2013

A customer had an unusual request based on the reporting limitations of their new LMS.

The problem is that they have single modules published in multiple languages, but that the LMS does not allow them to aggregate the results from those modules into a single report. Each language iteration of a module is a separate sharable content object (SCO). They'd have to manually merge the data.

The challenge is to find a way to present a module in multiple languages that reports to the LMS as a single SCO so that a report contains the Pass/Incomplete information for all users, regardless of the language for which the module was taken.

While I have a potential solution to this challenge in hand, I wanted to pick "the collective brain of the forum" to see if anyone can think of a workable solution that may be better.

So, for all the folks who have nothing more important to think about this weekend... let me know your ideas!

Thanks!

7 Replies
Patti Bryant

Ooh, what a conundrum! The first thing that comes to my mind (depending on the length of the modules) would be to merge all languages into one .story file and have the learner select their language in the beginning. When the learner selects their language, it would advance to the appropriate scene.

Then, you could set the "Pass/Complete" info by slide progress where they must complete x number of slides. So, if the overall course (including all languages) is 100 slides and each language is 20 slides, 20 is the number they must complete to be marked as Pass/Complete. 

It's not a super advanced solution, but it's something. I'm interested to see what others have to say about this.

Keepin' the joy,

Patti

Dave Neuweiler

Thanks, Patti.

Yes, combining all of the language-specific slides in a single file was the customer's suggestion as a starting point. After thinking about it, we decided it would not be a workable solution for three reasons:

1. The size of the file would be huge (at least 200 screens), and publishing times would be painful (BTW, it's going to be in Presenter, not Storyline).

2. As you pointed out, completion would have to be determined by the number of screens viewed, so having a mastery quiz would have to be ditched.

3. I realized that you can only apply one player template to the entire piece, and this would prevent being able to use language-specific lables in the player.

Keep that joy comin' in!

Dave

Minh-Triet Nguyen

I tried this and it worked in local testing:

  1. Publish each module with LMS tracking and with a player template that launches a new window
  2. Create a new parent module and insert each child module as a web object
  3. Publish the parent module with LMS tracking that launches in a new window
  4. modify the parent module's launcher.html file: 
  5. -- Comment out the auto-open
  6. -- Add a javascript variable (e.g. UserLanguage) to capture the language URL the user selects.
  7. -- Add a SELECT element with options for each child module's index.html file.  Note that the child modules are published as data/webobject_slideXX/index_lms.html so you need to do a little sleuthing to match the webobject_slide number to the corresponding language.
  8. -- Add an onchange event to the SELECT element that assigns the SELECT value to the UserLanguage variable.
  9. -- Replace where the launcher.html file references index_lms.html with UserLanguage.
  10. Save and then test the heck out of it.

In RELOAD, the launcher has a dropdown with my options.  The option I select dictates which index_lms.html file gets launched.  The local LMS picked up the score from the child module, regardless of which one I picked.

Minh-Triet Nguyen

Hi Julie,

What a difference a year makes. Our group just upgraded to Studio '13, and we're also on a new LMS this year. So I'm not sure if my old solution still works with that configuration.

I wish I had time to redo and test this out for you soon, but I'm afraid I might not be able to get to it quickly. Steps 4-8 are a bit of javascript but you're right; it's intimidating if you're not used to working in code.

Ana Victória

Hi, I had this issue a while back and what I dis was the following:

I had a storyline file for each language and published it individually.

The default language was English and I created a launch page that had the little flags for each language of the course. in the English published folder I pasted the published folders of all other languages. So when the user selected a flag in the launch page it opened the specified published course. 

If learner close and opened again the bookmark worked just fine even if he pick another language :)

so the only thing I had to do was the launch page. I published the EN version with a launch page and edited it in dreamweaver to add the flags and course tilte, organization, etc...

 

Hope this helps

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