Urgent solution needed for Articulate layout!

Sep 14, 2012

Hi all! Some urgent advice needed.

Essentially I have one piece training, consisting of several parts in the same project, that is being published for LMS.

Employees taking the training will only need to complete their relevant section. For example, the training is made of five modules. Each employee would choose which section is relevant to them, and would only do that section.

So what I have done is created an introduction slide with five separate buttons, each one hyperlinked to their relevant section. This is all fine, but each module/section has it's own specific quizzes (about 7 quizzes per module), and the client has specified that employees must pass each quiz (i.e. keep retrying the quiz till they get it right) before they continue with their content, eventually getting to the end. To do this I have changed the quiz properties on all quizzes to make it compulsory for them to pass each quiz before being able to continue with the slides

However the side effect of this is that at the introduction slide, even if you hyperlink to Module 5, Articulate still wants you to go back and complete the first quiz in Module 1.

I hope this all makes sense. I want trainees to be able to choose which module they want to do, and then have compulsory quizzes in their chosen section, but not have the compulsory quizzes in the other modules interfering. If they hyperlink past a quiz then the quiz won't. Hopefully I'm missing something obvious.

Would appreciate any feedback

Alastair

4 Replies
Jeanette Brooks

Hey Alastair,

Unfortunately if you have several branched paths in your course, using the quiz properties to require a passing score will be a bit problematic. As you've noticed, this will require the user to pass every quiz before advancing to later topics - which of course is not what you want. 

Here's a different idea that might work for you: 

  1. On your quiz placeholder slide, click the Slide Properties area at the bottom.
  2. Go to the selector for "When user fails, 'Finish' button:" and choose either a slide prior to the quiz (which would allow the user to review the content), or choose the actual quiz placeholder slide itself (which would take the user immediately to the beginning of the quiz again if they fail). Also, go to the selector called "When user passes, 'Finish' button:" and choose "Goes to Next Slide."  This way, the learner will only be able to advance if they pass; if they fail, they'll be taken back to the quiz or to a slide prior to the quiz.

One down side of this approach is that if you've chosen to display a sidebar menu outline in your course, learners will still be able to click on slide titles in the sidebar to jump ahead. So, to prevent that, you'd need to choose a view mode that omits the sidebar (either No Sidebar or Slide Only View) and also remove the view mode toggle button from your player. Or, an alternative would be to lock your slides in Slide Properties (which disables the player controls & prevents learners from clicking on the sidebar) and then either auto-advance your slides or build your own prev/next buttons on the slides themselves so that learners are able to move forward or backward.

Perhaps an easier overall approach would be to build each of your 5 modules separately, rather than bundling them all into a single branched course. That way, if learners only need to complete one of the 5 modules, you could provide each learner with the link to the appropriate standalone course. Then you could set up the navigation for the compulsory quizzes as you described initially - where learners can't move on to subsequent slides till passing a given quiz.

Bob S

Hi Alastair,

Of course Jeanette has this right. But there is one more point you might want to think about...

I'm not sure what sort of reporting/tracking you need out of the course. Do you need to record quiz scores by attempt for example, or simply completion. That can drive your decision on which way to implement the course as per Jeanette's suggestions.

Without knowing more, my knee-jerk reaction would also be splitting the 5 modules up. It provides you with the most options. Depending on your LMS, you could probably still have a common front-end starting page/section, then send the learner to proper module for their needs.

Good luck,

Bob

Alastair  Moore

Thanks Jeanette and Bob for your replies. Very useful and very informative.

I did try to utilize a combination of both of your suggestions, which would have worked out very well, except that the main project experienced an error/corruption every time I tried to publish to LMS. I've logged a couple of cases with Articulate but none of the suggestions seemed to have any effect at all. I'll be interested to see what the support team say.

What had to do was go back to square one, and create separately published modules. With a project consisting of 650 slides this was not a fun task. The LMS server provider will then create a separate landing page that will direct users to their specific module. More money for the client to spend but this was we could keep the mandatory pass of each quiz as they had originally specified.

To be honest I've given up on Articulate Studio Pro handling anything other than very small projects. I could wax lyrical for pages and pages but in brief I am definitely of the opinion that all of the glitches and errors that people experience with the software is primarily because it is third-party in nature (i.e. its essentially a plug-in for Powerpoint, which let's face it has it's own share of bugs). 

We'll be testing with Storyline in the upcoming weeks. I love Studio Pro and think the concept is great, but there just seems to be no way for us to get around the buggy implementation. Project after project has just ended in blood, sweat and tears. I truly hope that Storyline is more stable.

Thanks again though for all your help guys!

Alastair

Jeanette Brooks

Hi again Alastair, I'm so sorry to hear of the publishing problems! I do see that you contacted support and that Joe and Sid both replied with some suggestions. Were you able to follow up with either of them to let them know that you're still having trouble? If you do, that will keep your case open so that the support team can continue troubleshooting with you. Regarding Storyline - yes, I think one of the strengths of the tool is that it's standalone and so isn't dependent on any PPT operations or functions. Looking forward to hearing how you like it.

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