E-Learning remediation techniques

Remediation is a basic concept in most educational environments. If a learner fails at a particular task, such as an assignment, a quiz, or a behavioral skill, then the learner is provided with an opportunity to gain the necessary knowledge or skills before attempting the task again.

In an e-learning environment, the same remediation goal holds. If learners do not successfully complete a quiz, an interaction, or some other task, you want to help them gain the necessary knowledge and skills so they can pass on another try. In this blog post, I’ll show you three easy quiz remediation techniques you can create quickly in Articulate Storyline.

The first two approaches I’d like to share fall under the umbrella of immediate remediation, which means that you provide learners with immediate feedback for incorrect answers. And in Articulate Storyline, you have a couple of different ways to provide on-the-spot feedback.

Use Feedback Layers

In Storyline, the Correct and Incorrect feedback layers in quiz questions are highly customizable. Your feedback layers can have text, images, videos, interactions, and more—just like regular slide layers. For example, you might show the correct answer as a simple text statement, or opt for a video clip that demonstrates a process or sequence.

E-Learning-feedback-layouts

Add a Lightbox

Another easy way to provide instant remediation is to use a lightbox trigger. This way, when learners answer a question incorrectly, they can pop up a lightbox with the relevant content right away, exactly as they saw it originally.

To set up a lightbox, simply add a second button on the feedback layer. Add a trigger to lightbox the slide that contains the correct information and—voila!—quick remediation.

Articulate-Storyline-Lightboxes

Review the Material

Sometimes, rather than providing immediate remediation, you want learners to experience the material again and then retake the quiz. Or maybe you want them to only take the part of the quiz they got wrong; is this even possible without becoming overly complex? Absolutely. While you could use a bunch of tracking variables, you can also use this much simpler way.

Let’s say your course is divided into four content areas and each content area has four associated quiz questions, for a total of 16 questions. Instead of creating a 16-question quiz to end the course, divide the course into four distinct sections and create a four-question quiz at the end of each section. Then, at the end of each quiz, create a results slide so that if learners fail the quiz, you can route them back to the beginning of the section to review the material before attempting the quiz again.

Now, you may want to track their overall score, which collates all four quiz results. To create a master results slide, simply:

  1. Create a new results slide.
  2. Select “Selected results slides” from the “Calculate results for:” dropdown.
  3. Click each of the quizzes you’d like to include in your overall calculation.
  4. If you’d like to calculate an overall score, simply select “Combine points from each quiz.”

Storyline-Results-Selection

And there you have it—a quick and easy way to break down your quiz into smaller chunks that you can route learners through as they need to review specific information, while still keeping track of their overall quiz performance. Pretty slick, eh?

Hopefully these three simple ways to provide remediation for your learners in Storyline will be helpful to you in your next quiz or assessment. Have experience with learner remediation in Storyline? Please share yours in the comments below.

Want to try something you learned here, but don't have Articulate software? Download a free trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.

 

4 Comments
Angie Creighton
Mike Enders

Angie, At that point, you'd likely be utilizing some variables to set up the infrastructure (and leaving the land of simple techniques). ;) The easiest method would likely be the lightbox technique combined with the standard quiz review process. So as the learner is going through the quiz review, he or she is offered the opportunity on each slide to review the appropriate content. I'd have to test it out, but my initial thoughts are to have a hidden button on each quiz slide that is set to trigger a light box with the appropriate remediation content. So... 1. I'd create a T/F variable that will serve as the indicator of whether they've completed the quiz. We'll set it's default state to False. 2. On the Results slide, I'd create a trigger to adjust the variable to True once ... Expand