How can I capture and store how many times various users visit a certain slide?

Dec 03, 2015

Hi, I’m a Storyline 2 newbie. I’m trying to track and store the number of times a user visits a certain slide within my project. I’ve created a variable called “visit” whereby each time they visit that slide the variable “visit” goes up by 1. Is there a way I can capture this value in a database (e.g. send this value to my LMS (elan))? The end use is to create a “leaderboard” to rank how many time various users visited the page. Any help would be appreciated.

5 Replies
Brian Allen

Hi Greg,

You can definitely send the values of custom variables to your LMS, and the nice thing is that you can cause this to happen behind the scenes automatically.  

Afterwards it's up to you to find your data in your LMS and report on it, which can be tricky in some LMS's because of the way some of them store the SCORM interaction data.

Here's a couple of knowledge base articles.  They both describe the same process but I found it helpful to reference both articles the first couple of times I did this.

How to send the value of a variable to an LMS - http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/how-to-send-the-value-of-a-variable-to-an-lms

Reporting Articulate Storyline variables to an LMS - http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/reporting-storyline-variables-to-an-lms

Brian Allen
Matthew Bibby

The downside is that this only works for text variables

Snap!  I've never tested it, but for numeric variables this same process *should* work by selecting the "How Many" survey question rather than the Short Answer question.  This provides a default numeric variable that you can then use to assign your (in this case) slide visits value to.

Hope this helps!

Greg Kirsch

Thanks for responding Brian. I must be doing something wrong b/c I can't even get the text variable to be reported (let alone a numeric value). Can you look at this simple example and let me know where I'm going wrong? (The text variable does appear on the results slide but is not reported as a score to either my LMS or to storm cloud). BTW my LMS can report a percentage score but that's not what I want. Appreciate your help!

Brian Allen

Greg,

 Try testing with the attached file.

 I've updated the submit trigger in your numeric question slide to submit when the timeline begins, as described in step 3 on this page - http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline/how-to-send-the-value-of-a-variable-to-an-lms

 What I like about doing that is it makes this placeholder slide invisible to your learner, no need for them to click submit. 

 Additionally, make sure you go into your variables view and edit the generic name for the numeric question variable to something that you'll be able to easily spot in your LMS database, and something that will easily identify what the variable represents (eg, "slide1visits_coursename"). 

 One last note on this, is that while you need to use a results slide, you have the liberty to do a couple of things with that results slide: 

  1. If there is no need to report a score, adjust the passing score down to "0" for the results slide, AND
  2. Strip everything off of the results slide that you don't need.  I normally use this as a slide to convey an ending message or something to my learners, thank you for completing this course, etc. 

Make sure when you publish you're setting your results slide in the tracking options. 

Finally, work with your LMS vendor to find out where and how you can find and report on SCORM interaction data from your LMS database.  It's different in different LMSs, and sometimes it's easier to find than in others. 

Send me a private message in the forums if you'd like to see this working in our LMS. 

Hope this helps, 

B

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