Best Practices for Learner Ruggedized Courses

May 19, 2021

What are your best practices for ensuring that learners can't "accidentally" break the flow of your Storyline360 course? Perhaps by clicking/tapping in an unexpected area or at an unexpected time?

I'll start with a relatively common issue - a learner is asked to click/tap on a trigger location to start something interactive. If they do this earlier than designed, a media playback may be interrupted, which could lead to BAD THINGS. I will often cover the trigger location with a transparent box which I use as the trigger item and only enable the transparent box on the timeline after the media is complete. All the clicking/tapping in the world won't interrupt the media.

What are your ideas? Are there 508 issues to consider as well?

-Job-

1 Reply

Judy Nollet
Hero

almost 3 years ago05/19/21 at 1:21 pm (UTC)

Best practice? Try to break it yourself.

Go through your course as a user might—which means go through it at least once and click everything as quickly as possible.
Check what happens when you return to each slide using the Prev button and/or the built-in Menu. Does revisiting work the way you want it to?
Pay special attention to how the quiz works. Can the user review and/or retake it? Can they access other slides when taking the quiz? If so, does that impact how the quiz functions?

BTW, I agree that it's best to prevent clicking something that will interrupt media that needs to be played to its end. Instead of covering it with a transparent box, I'd recommend hiding the clickable object or giving it a Disabled state that makes it obvious it's not yet clickable. Otherwise, it'll seem like it isn't working, which is frustrating and distracting for the learner.