June 2018 update: issues with drag and drop

Jun 22, 2018

Hello everybody. I have another issue resulting from the latest update to add to the list. 

It relates to drag and drop interactions. Formerly, when a slide's properties was set to 'When revisiting: Resume saved state', anything on the slide that had been dragged remained in the place to which had been dragged when the slide was revisited. However, since the update, these dragged items appear back in their initial positions when the slide is revisited. 

This is an issue for us as our standard quiz template allows users to revisit questions before submitting their attempts and so gives the impression that they have not answered the question or, perhaps, have got it wrong.

Any suggestions on how to work round this in the short-term, gratefully accepted

Barney

25 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Barney,

Are they revisiting this drag and drop slide from a Results/Retry option or navigating back to it using your in-course navigation options (next/previous, menu, etc.).

That's not an issue I've heard folks running into from Update 17, but I'd like to take a look at your course to confirm. Can you share a copy of that .story file here with us? 

Thanks! 

Barney Barrett

Hello Ashley

They are revisiting using in-course navigation. We also use our own system of triggers to check whether the question has been answered correctly or not. We don't use Storyline's built-in review feature; we have a custom answer summary slide (not included in the attached .story file). 

The  .story file is a section from a 10 question quiz with most of text and images stripped out. Question 7 is the sole drag and drop interaction. The other 9 questions are all multiple choice. This should be enough to demonstrate the issue: once question 7 has been answered, if you navigate forward to question 8 or backward to question 6 then return to question 7, you'll find that the dragged items have returned to their origin positions at the bottom of the slide, i.e. the slide has not resumed the saved state.

We have been using this quiz template for several months and have only experienced this issue since last week's Storyline update. 

Many thanks for any help or suggestions.

Barney

Alyssa Gomez

Hi there Barney,

Thanks so much for sharing your file with us. This is indeed an issue in Update 17, and our team is looking into a fix as we speak. 

When you revisit a drag and drop slide, the objects should remain where they were dropped--they should not return back to their original positions.

As soon as this is fixed, we'll let you know. I'm sorry for the headaches this has caused you!

Kelley Conrad

I'm also having an issue with drag and drop questions. In my case, I want them to reset to initial state. I have the slide setting to "reset to initial state" and the questions are not tied to a results screen. There is a results screen at the end of the course that only includes results for 1 T/F question and not the drag and drop questions. If I use the Menu to return to the drag and drop question after I pass the results screen, the drag items are in their original location, but the Submit button is not there and I can only click Next or Prev. 

Scott Wiley

Hi all. I didn't see where the actual product was mentioned, but with Storyline 2, we would sometimes run into issues if a course extensively used "return to saved" state on slides, as well as many quiz questions.

It ended up we were publishing to SCORM 1.2, which only allowed minimal data to be saved to the suspend_data field of SCORM.

Perhaps if you try SCORM 2004 4th Edition, you'll see your problems go away. Just a thought.

Scott Wiley

Hi Kelley,

Just thought it might be another avenue for troubleshooting.

It appears that AICC has, or at least had, similar limitations to how much data can be stored in the suspend data field. And using "saved state" is only one factor that can blow up the amount of data.

Here's a posting about it: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/is-there-a-limit-to-aicc-course-length

The part I saw there is that at that time AICC still limited suspend data to 4096 characters. That was the same as SCORM 1.2, but later SCORM versions allowed up to 64000. I haven't looked for the latest data on AICC as we've never published to that.

Good luck.

Scott Wiley

Hi Kelly - I just meant that even if all your slides are reset to initial state, there may be other things possibly causing the issues you are experiencing, yet still related to suspend data limitations in AICC. For instance, a lot of slides, variables, layers, quiz questions, multi-branching, etc.?

For us, when the available limits were exceeded, things like buttons appearing when they shouldn't, disappearing when they shouldn't, variable values populated with seemingly random numbers, etc., were all happening.

For other reasons more related to how things can be problematic in HTML5, we generally avoid drag and drops unless absolutely necessary and with more robust testing.

If you have a course that exceeds suspend data limits, and are required to use AICC, here are some suggestions for correcting it:
- Disable the resume feature in Storyline.
- Reduce the number of slides in a course.
- Reduce the # of layers in a course
- Consider using lightbox slides for layers that repeat over many slides or come from masters.
- Set as many slides as you can to "reset to initial state" (as you're doing).
- Reduce the number of questions in a quiz or cut any freeform interactions that you can.
- Use freeform questions instead of text based questions as less data may be sent.
- Reduce the use of longform variable strings.

To quote Justin from the article referred to earlier:

The suspend data is based on how much information the course needs to "remember" when it resumes. So, 2 slides with 100 variables, 50 objects with multiple states, and a quiz question on each slide could cause our suspend data to exceed AICC limits. On the flip side, 400 very simple slides could also cause you to exceed AICC limits.

Kelley Conrad

Hi Scott - Unfortunately none of that applies in this case. We are having the same issue in more than one course and each course is 10-30 slides. None use variables or branching per client requirements. The drag and drop questions are freeform questions and each course has only 3-5 questions. 

Alyssa commented that it is a known glitch that they are working on, so hopefully it will be resolved in the future. For now, we're leaving the questions as-is ans learners will just not be able to answer them again if they return to that screen.

The client hasn't uploaded to their LMS yet - the testing and issue are all in Articulate Review so far.

Alyssa Gomez

Hi Janice! Happy to help you here. I'm sure you're feeling pressure from that deadline, so let's get right to it!

A drag and drop question does not give partial credit. The learner must drop all answers to the correct spot for that slide to be counted as correct. 

It sounds like you want to give partial credit on this exercise. For example, if the learner drops 3/5 answers correctly, they should receive a 60%. Is that what you had in mind? 

If so, could you break this up into 5 separate slides? That way, you could score each drag object individually. 

Janice Dyke

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Thanks for replying.. I came to that conclusion as well!  So I've completely altered the slide.  I removed the drag and drop panels and created my own drag'n drop triggers.  That finally worked once I gave up on the built-in system.  I have 2 drop zones and 22 words.  The next issue I had was creating a randomization sequence that would prevent duplicate or empty words.  This took HOURS as storyline has several glitches.  I did finally solve it at midnight last night - and I still have all my hair!  So thanks for the clarification on the drag 'n drop.   It's too bad there is no way to keep score - this would be extremely useful to educators...

Crystal Horn

Hey everybody. I'm excited to let you know that we just released update 18 for Storyline 360! It includes new features and fixes - check them all out here.

One of the fixes addresses an issue where drag-and-drop items were returning to their original position during a review of your quiz.

Here’s how you can update Storyline 360 to take advantage of everything the latest release has to offer. Let me know how you make out!

Janet Place

I am still having problem with the drag and drop interactions. This is happening the first time someone gets to the drag and drop activity. The drop items are not aligned and one is even underneath the drop spot. This is an important interaction. What is going on.  I have just updated to the newest update.

Katie Riggio

Hi, Janet. Really sorry to hear you're still hitting a roadblock with the drag-and-drop interaction after updating Storyline 360–we're here to help!

If you're able to share your .story file here, we would love to dig in and test it. If you need to share the project privately, use this upload link to share it directly with our Support Engineers. We'll be standing by!

Leslie McKerchie

Hey James,

Thanks for reaching out and letting us know that you're still experiencing an issue.

The conversation here seems to is centered around Storyline 360, and we show this as corrected in Update 18.

The current version of Storyline 360 is Update 20.

If you see this in the latest update, we certainly would like to take a look. Please feel free to share your .story file so that we can check that out for you.

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.