Need some suggestions on managing course variations

Hi all,

I've built a course for a client who now needs course variations for multiple industries. The course remains 90% identical, with perhaps differences in images or voiceover on a few screens. This is a burdensome situation as any general course changes now have to be made to multiple project files, multiplying the time required, thus additional cost to the client.

I would like to maintain a single master project file that would allow me to choose the course version I want before publishing, which would simplify changes. I first considered adding duplicates of the screens that vary between courses, renaming them to indicate which course version they pertain to, then deleting the non-applicable screens and renaming the applicable screens before publishing. But this seems like a very clunky approach, in addition to introducing the possibility of inadvertently saving over the master file with a modified-for-publishing-only version.

Has anyone faced the same issue and come up with an elegant solution?

4 Replies

Wendy Farmer
Hero

5 years ago06/14/17 at 6:44 am (UTC)

Hi Chris

I'm following along as I have the same requirement...here's hoping.

Matthew Bibby

5 years ago06/14/17 at 11:41 am (UTC)

I've had to do this in the past. I built alternate slides for the areas of the course that differed and used variables to guide the navigation to the correct slide. Then it was just a matter of changing one variable before publishing to determine which version would be published.

5 years ago06/14/17 at 9:22 pm (UTC)

This is a great idea and something I considered, but I don't know how this would work in the menu pane. I assume both slides (the correct slide and the alternative slide) would have to remain hidden in the menu so they wouldn't appear as duplicates, correct?

5 years ago06/15/17 at 3:01 am (UTC)

I hadn't considered that Chris (as I build custom menus, rather than use SL's inbuilt one).

You could create a slide that's included in the menu and jumps to the right slide depending on which variable has been entered.

The downside is that this slide may flash up for a second before it jumps to the correct slide... so just give it the same background or make it into a loading screen or something so it isn't so obvious.