I'm hoping someone can help me out. I have created an online module that requires people at certain points to watch a video, select via multi-choice what is happening and then reflect via a short-answer survey question the impact of what they have viewed.
This sequence is repeated several times throughout my module. The issue I am having is that the reflections people type into survey 1 carry over and populate into the second survey and so on. Each group (multi-choice question and survey question) have been created as separate articulate files.
Has anyone else come across this? Any suggestions on how to fix?
Firstly as you say, you need to retrieve the reflections that people type into the first survey, in order to use them to populate the second. Whether you can do this easily depends which type of questions you are using. If you use a text entry or numeric entry survey question, Storyline will create a visible variable to hold the answer. Then in a second, similar question slide, you can display the first answer using a manual text-entry box, set to hold that same variable. Or, you could set the variable to be filled by the second question to be the same as the first one. In this case SL will fill the text box with the first answer and let you re-edit it for the second. This is quite a crude mechanism but it does work.
Unfortunately, if you using different types of survey questions, such as pick one, pick many or likert, although SL will use variables to hold the values that users put in, it will not display them in the editor, nor allow you to retrieve them easily, so you couldn't do what I've said above. There is one way around this, and that's to create the questions manually instead of using SL quizzing slides, but of course you will lose other elements of SL functionality, such as result slides.
Secondly, if you want to populate a survey from an earlier one, which is in a different SL file, this adds further complications, but it can be resolved. Once again, as long as you can get hold of the variable values, those from one file can be stored in a database and retrieved into another file. This may not be the only way to do it; there have been a variety of discussions in the forum about this...you might use a spreadsheet instead of a database, or perhaps you could use an LMS, but most everything about this second issue generally requires a few things that are beyond the average SL designer.
I hope this has helped. I would be happy to explain further about the 'crude' solution (!), send me a PM. We offer a service to people who want to make a more elegant solution work, and allow you to design just using fairly simple routines. let me know if you want to talk more.
Thanks for taking the time to respond! Unfortunately, my issue is that the survey responses are carrying over and populating the second survey, which I do not want to happen. It seems like a publishing error is occurring, because this shouldn't happen.
Each sequence is independent of the other and I want to see that when a person gets to the second survey they see the default words 'Type your thoughts here...' rather than whatever response they typed in survey 1.
Hope this makes sense, and if you do have a potential fix for this issue I'd love to hear back from you.
5 Replies
Tanya,
There are two issues here.
Firstly as you say, you need to retrieve the reflections that people type into the first survey, in order to use them to populate the second. Whether you can do this easily depends which type of questions you are using. If you use a text entry or numeric entry survey question, Storyline will create a visible variable to hold the answer. Then in a second, similar question slide, you can display the first answer using a manual text-entry box, set to hold that same variable. Or, you could set the variable to be filled by the second question to be the same as the first one. In this case SL will fill the text box with the first answer and let you re-edit it for the second. This is quite a crude mechanism but it does work.
Unfortunately, if you using different types of survey questions, such as pick one, pick many or likert, although SL will use variables to hold the values that users put in, it will not display them in the editor, nor allow you to retrieve them easily, so you couldn't do what I've said above. There is one way around this, and that's to create the questions manually instead of using SL quizzing slides, but of course you will lose other elements of SL functionality, such as result slides.
Secondly, if you want to populate a survey from an earlier one, which is in a different SL file, this adds further complications, but it can be resolved. Once again, as long as you can get hold of the variable values, those from one file can be stored in a database and retrieved into another file. This may not be the only way to do it; there have been a variety of discussions in the forum about this...you might use a spreadsheet instead of a database, or perhaps you could use an LMS, but most everything about this second issue generally requires a few things that are beyond the average SL designer.
I hope this has helped. I would be happy to explain further about the 'crude' solution (!), send me a PM. We offer a service to people who want to make a more elegant solution work, and allow you to design just using fairly simple routines. let me know if you want to talk more.
JaF
Hi John,
Thanks for taking the time to respond! Unfortunately, my issue is that the survey responses are carrying over and populating the second survey, which I do not want to happen. It seems like a publishing error is occurring, because this shouldn't happen.
Each sequence is independent of the other and I want to see that when a person gets to the second survey they see the default words 'Type your thoughts here...' rather than whatever response they typed in survey 1.
Hope this makes sense, and if you do have a potential fix for this issue I'd love to hear back from you.
Cheers,
Tanya
Hi Tanya!
This was a known issue that was resolved in Studio '13 Update 2.
Are you running the current update?
Hi Leslie!
Thanks for your feedback; I'm now in the process of downloading update 2.
Cheers,
Tanya
Sounds great Tanya! Thanks for the update
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