Keep It or Trash It: Drag-and-Drop Sorting Activities #439

Drag-and-Drop Sorting Activities #439: Challenge | Recap

Drag-and-drop sorting activities are a great way to evaluate learners' ability to identify items by dragging them to different drop targets. One of the most common versions of this activity is designed around whether items should be kept or discarded.

Some popular versions of this popular interaction include:

• file it or trash it
• keep it or discard it
• healthy choice or unhealthy choice
• required or optional
• report it or ignore it

A variation might include three options, where the third choice is for "optional information." Another variation could be a single drop target choice where users identify only the "keep it" or the "toss it" items.

In either case, this common interaction should be in every course designer's toolkit. And that's what this week's challenge is all about. Let's look at a few examples.

Comstar New Hire Orientation

Here’s a drag-and-drop version that asks learners to identify permissible items for the workplace.

Click here to view the example

Creating Effective Meetings

This is another version of the keep-it-or-toss-it interaction. In this example, learners are asked to identify required and optional items.

Click here to view the example

Giving Effective Reviews

It’s not always necessary to include two drop targets. In this example, learners choose the necessary items by placing them into a folder graphic. The unnecessary items are left on the slide.

Click here to view the example

Animate Drag-and-Drop Items Storyline360

Learn how to apply exit animation effects to drag items after they're dropped on correct or incorrect targets.

View on YouTube

🏆 Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an example of a keep-it-or-toss-it interaction. The examples above all focus on office and workplace topics. Feel free to apply this model to any industry or topic for your example.

If you have extra time this week, consider sharing a few versions of your original interaction. For example, if your original demo uses drag-and-drop, try reworking your file to show how it could function as a text entry or click-and-reveal interaction.

✨ Share Your E-Learning Work

• Comments: Use the comments section below to link your published example and blog post.
• Forums: Start a new thread and share a link to your published example.
• Personal blog: If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We'll link to your posts so your great work gets even more exposure.
• Social media: If you share your demos on Twitter or LinkedIn, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can follow your e-learning coolness.

📆 Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you file (or trash) this week’s challenge, check out the creative ways course designers showcase their e-learning portfolios:

E-Learning Portfolio Examples RECAP #438: Challenge | Recap

👋 New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challengesanytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

Learn more about the challenges in this Q&A post and why and how to participate in this helpful article. 

📅 Next Week’s Challenge

• Next week's challenge #440 (11/10): Retail fashion and clothing industry. I still need to find a proper title, but the general focus is choosing, pairing, and dressing for different occasions. Feel free to offer some title ideas.

Got an idea for a challenge? Are you interested in doing a webinar showcasing how you made one or more challenge demos? Or do you have some comments for your humble challenge host? Use this anonymous form to share your feedback:  https://bit.ly/ElearningChallengeForm.