Exiting a course while opening a hyperlink

Feb 13, 2023

I created a course that needs end with opening a website and exiting the course. I set the trigger to exit the course when the user clicks on a picture. I have a separate trigger on the same picture to open a website in a new browser window. When the user clicks, it does open the new window but it does not exit the course. When the user returns to the course window, it is still on the last page and the LMS is not showing the course as complete. Is there a way to do this? The last step for the learner is to go to the external website and complete training and testing which will take about an hour. That will cause the course to time out. I want the course to be marked complete when the user opens the external website. Thanks.

8 Replies

Wendy Farmer
Hero

1 year ago02/14/23 at 11:07 am (UTC)

Hi Melissa

what is the order of your triggers?

Melissa Lodhi
Author

1 year ago02/14/23 at 5:07 pm (UTC)

I have it set to Open the link then Exit the course.

Melissa Lodhi
Author

1 year ago02/14/23 at 5:27 pm (UTC)

I tried rearranging the order of the triggers and that did not solve the problem. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

1 year ago02/15/23 at 1:25 pm (UTC)

Hello Melissa,

Thanks for reaching out!

The behavior you're experiencing is normal since both 'Exiting' a course and 'opening a link' involve an action that changes the active window on the screen from your Storyline 360 course to something else. For triggers to work, the active window and the focus of the learner should still be on your Storyline 360 course. Unfortunately, there's no way to get triggers to execute when the active window has shifted to a different browser tab or window.

There might be a way to accomplish this task using Javascript, but I'll leave this to members of the community to share how they accomplished this design requirement.

1 year ago02/15/23 at 2:11 pm (UTC)

Thanks for that clarification.

7 months ago10/03/23 at 2:51 pm (UTC)

Hi there, just wondering if there was a response to this query ... like Melissa, I'm building a course with a link to an external site so it would be great if there was a way that the course would close/mark as complete once the link was accessed.

Thanks

Nedim Ramic

7 months ago10/03/23 at 4:57 pm (UTC)

I'm not sure if I follow. Could be a trick to keep the course window active for a second or two after the learner click on the image to go to an external link. I created some sort of delay before the course window is closed. The tricky part is to have an external link window open in a new window, not a new tab. To do that, I used the custom window size instead of the Storyline default window when a link is open. I attached a little demonstration in the ScormCloud.

complete-and-exit.mp4

7 months ago10/03/23 at 5:15 pm (UTC)

I wanted to do basically the same thing as you. I was not able to get this to work because when you open a new tab the current tab loses focus so it wouldn’t mark complete. I had to direct the learners to return to the module tab and click exit to complete. I did not try opening a window instead of a tab. Let me know if you find a workaround. Perhaps the response from Nedim will work.