"Previous" Button Works Inconsistently

Apr 27, 2016

I'm creating a course that works well, however when testing it, the "Previous" button will sometimes advance the slide, instead of going back one. Sometimes it seems to think it should go to the last viewed slide, regardless of which slide is programmed to come before it. I can somewhat pre-empt this by making it actually link to a specific slide when the "Previous" button is clicked, but this is not at all a good solution. I may add, delete or move slides around, and I don't want to have to constantly change connections. Also, while this works for the specific slide that is acting up, all it does is move the problem to the slide before it. For example, if I make Slide 1.28 connect to Slide 1.27 when the "Previous" button is clicked, Slide 1.28 will consistently go to Slide 1.27, but now Slide 1.27 will not consistently go to Slide 1.26 when the "Previous" button is clicked, even though the instructions are to go to the previous slide when "Previous" is clicked. Any thoughts?

1 Reply
Walt Hamilton

By design, PREVIOUS works like the back button on your browser; return to the most recently viewed slide. It is actually a pretty pedagogically sound tool for those modules that give the learner sequencing options.

You are right, you can change that activity by hard-coding the trigger on a specific slide for it to jump to a static location, but I will warn you that there are pitfalls to that approach. First, it only works if the learner will have no options in sequencing the slides. Second, as you have discovered, if you hard-code some slides, and allow others to use the built-in function of determining the jump, the results may be strange, but seldom wonderful. The two methods will conflict with unpredictable results. So my advice for writing your own triggers for the PREVIOUS button is do it for all of them, or none.

As for your example, if the user is on slide 28, and clicks PREVIOUS, which is hard-wired to jump to slide 27, they have traveled from 28 to 27, and 28 has become the most recently viewed (previous) slide. It is not actually going forward, it is going to the most recently viewed slide. We may not like it, but people who are accustomed to browsing the internet expect that activity, and show a pretty callous disregard of how we think they should navigate our course.  :)

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