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Are you looking for a way to make e-learning courses more dynamic and engaging? Look no further than drag-and-drop interactions. Drag-and-drop interactions give your learners the opportunity to make decisions and engage with course content, and can be an excellent learning tool when used appropriately. That begs the question, when should drag-and-drops be used?
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In my experience, they can really come in handy when you want your learners to:
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Storyline 360 offers a variety of ways to create drag-and-drop interactions. Let’s have a closer look at three easy techniques.
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Graded Quiz Slides
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Storyline 360 offers 11 graded question types, two of which are prebuilt drag-and-drop interactions. The nice thing about Storyline’s graded question slides is that they’re superquick and easy to set up since you don’t have to create a single trigger. All you have to do is select the type of drag-and-drop question you want—matching or sequence?—and insert your content.
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View a Storyline 360 Matching Drag-and-Drop Quiz Slide
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View a Storyline 360 Sequence Drag-and-Drop Quiz Slide
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Matching activities are great when you want learners to make a connection between several items, for example an event and the date it occurred. Sequence is great for having learners identify the order of a process or task.
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Freeform
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Freeform slides let you convert any regular slide into a graded drag-and-drop quiz slide in a few clicks. Freeform slides are a really powerful tool because they allow you to completely customize every single aspect of your slide and drag-and-drop interaction. Freeform is perfect when you want to create a drag-and-drop that is not a matching or sequence activity, for example, to sort incorrect and correct items or to match non-text items such as shapes or images. Here are some examples of customized drag-and-drop interactions created using Freeform slides:
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View a Freeform Gamified Drag-and-Drop
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View a Freeform Placing Drag-and-Drop Activity
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To create a freeform drag-and-drop interaction, insert a new slide and click the “Convert to Freeform” button on the “Insert” tab of the Storyline 360 ribbon. Select the drag-and-drop option, then click Insert. Storyline will automatically create a graded drag-and-drop quiz slide, and will even add the “Submit” button and the feedback layers. You will be presented with “Form View,” where you can assign your drag items and your drop targets.
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Storyline 360’s Drag-and-Drop Freeform Form View
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When you’re in Form View, you’ll notice that there are options available to you in the ribbon.
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Options available in Drag-and-Drop Freeform Form View
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A few things you can do here: shuffle the answers, assign a results slide, and assign the number of attempts learners have. Above all, the one key feature you need to know about is the “Drag & Drop Options” button.
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Drag & Drop Options
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Knowing about these options can save you a ton of time and headaches. These options give you flexibility when you’re tweaking your drag-and-drop interaction to work just the way you want it. Need your drag items revealed one at a time? No problem! Do you want to allow multiple items onto one drop target? Just check the box. These options will let you customize your drag-and-drop interaction to behave just the way you want.
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Triggers
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There’s one more, little-known, way to create a very simple, ungraded drag-and-drop interaction by using a single trigger. You’ll need at least two objects on your slide to make this work. The “When” drop-down menu in the Trigger Wizard offers two options:
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These Drag Drop Events are available in the Trigger Wizard
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By using either of these options in a trigger with two objects from your slide, you can create a very simple drag-and-drop interaction. However, you can’t customize that interaction in any way and it can’t be graded. For that reason, it’s typically recommended to use the freeform drag-and-drop interaction, which is superpowerful, graded, and offers many options for customization.
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In Sum
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Creating drag-and-drop interactions with Storyline 360 is intuitive and easy, no matter which method you choose. Go ahead, build your own drag-and-drop interaction so you can see for yourself how quick and easy it is. Let me know how it turns out in the comments below!
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Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.
Well THAT was fast - thanks for getting back right away! This is helpful. I hadn't gotten to the Canadian geography example when I wrote - the sales example sparked me because it illustrated a frustration I've had with designing DnD interactions so I just started typing!
I'm off to go play with Freeform. Thanks for guiding me!
(correcting a URL above - it got an extra \")\" at the end that leads us astray)
https://community.articulate.com/articles/3-cool-ways-to-use-storyline-states Well THAT was fast - thanks for getting back right away! This is helpful. I hadn't gotten to the Canadian geography example when I wrote - the sales example sparked me because it illustrated a frustration I've had with designing DnD interactions so I just started typing!
I'm off to go play with Freeform. Thanks for guiding me!
(correcting a URL above - it got an extra \")\" at the end that leads us astray)
https://community.articulate.com/articles/3-cool-ways-to-use-storyline-states Hi Greg! Thanks for posting your question. A few features that could help you achieve exactly the customization you're looking for would be 1) variables and 2) drag-and-drop states. Are you familiar with these handy features?
For example, take a look at this example (included in the above article)
http://articulate-heroes-authoring.s3.amazonaws.com/Nicole/Demos/Drag-Drop-CanadianGeo/DD-CanadianGeo-output/story_html5.htmlThis Freeform drag-and-drop makes use of the drag-and-drop states that are built into Storyline. You can read more about them here:
https://community.articulate.com/articles/3-cool-ways-to-use-storyline-statesNotice how when you click the submit button for that interaction, the ones that are incorrect turn red? That's a way you can provide partial feedback to your learners. I can do this so that when learners click submit they know which steps are correct, and which are wrong.
It's really all about how you want your interaction to work. You can customize the drag-and-drop interaction as much as you want by adding more triggers to the submit button that display more/less custom captions & hints and information to your learners depending on how they answered the question. The possibilities really are endless with Storyline! But diving deeper into variables and drag-and-drop states is probably your answer here.
Hope this helps!
Hi Greg! Thanks for posting your question. A few features that could help you achieve exactly the customization you're looking for would be 1) variables and 2) drag-and-drop states. Are you familiar with these handy features?
For example, take a look at this example (included in the above article)
http://articulate-heroes-authoring.s3.amazonaws.com/Nicole/Demos/Drag-Drop-CanadianGeo/DD-CanadianGeo-output/story_html5.htmlThis Freeform drag-and-drop makes use of the drag-and-drop states that are built into Storyline. You can read more about them here:
https://community.articulate.com/articles/3-cool-ways-to-use-storyline-statesNotice how when you click the submit button for that interaction, the ones that are incorrect turn red? That's a way you can provide partial feedback to your learners. I can do this so that when learners click submit they know which steps are correct, and which are wrong.
It's really all about how you want your interaction to work. You can customize the drag-and-drop interaction as much as you want by adding more triggers to the submit button that display more/less custom captions & hints and information to your learners depending on how they answered the question. The possibilities really are endless with Storyline! But diving deeper into variables and drag-and-drop states is probably your answer here.
Hope this helps!
You're very welcome Greg, thanks for leaving a thoughtful and detailed comment. I'm sure others in the community share the same very thought that you did and also didn't know about the drag-and-drop states. They are a little known feature. You might want to stay tuned because this article was actually just 1 in a series of 4 articles I'm writing all about Storyline drag-and-drops. I'm also going to dive deeper into Freeform slides and how to use & customize them (including mentioning the drag-and-drop states) and I will also have a few other articles that explore other drag-and-drop features and also general design tips for creating d-and-ds. And thanks for letting me know about the typo in the URL ! Fixed it :)
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