Saving Progress of Video when Exiting Course
Feb 03, 2020
Hello,
I am having a difficulty in saving video progress within a course in Articulate Storyline 360. I have inserted a video that is 12 minutes in length, so would like to present an option to users to exit out of the course and be able to resume the video from wherever they stopped. For example, the user exits out of the course at 6 minutes, comes back and can pick up at the 6 minute mark to complete the 12 minute video. Currently the course will resume at the proper slide, but the video starts back at the beginning.
A few things to consider:
- We have to have the seek bar set to "Allow drag after completion" as it is a required course and users must view the full video prior to going to the next slide.
- The video is currently set up to automatically play when the slide appears as to sync with the timeline.
- The show video controls are set to none so the user cannot skip around the video.
I'm just stumped. Essentially - is there a way to save a progress of an mp4 file so that when the user comes back to resume the course the video would be able to pick up where it stopped?
Any help would be appreciated,
Alyssa
16 Replies
Hi Alyssa,
Happy to help clarify! When a learner exits a slide that has a video on it, the default resume behavior is that the slide will reset to the beginning of the video. The only way to save video progress is by going to the next slide.
I know you don't want to force your learners to completely restart the video when they return to the lesson, so I found a workaround that should help! While a bit older, this tutorial may point you in the right direction!
I really wish Articulate would address this problem. We often have long video's incorporated into our courses and regularly have customer's that complain about having to re-watch the video upon resuming.
We've learned to try to design the courses to have smaller video segments, but this is not always possible.
The work-around of having a Save button point to a save slide is also not very practical when watching a video and then suddenly having to exit (either forced or not). In our in-house developed SCORM player, we save the seek point into suspend_data every 1 minute, as well as the precise seek point when doing a clean exit. I really just don't understand why Articulate can't implement a similar approach of saving a slide's current state every minute or on a clean exit. They currently are sending session time updates every minute. Most LMS SCORM interfaces (aka Rustici) also buffer the SCORM data on the client side of the SCORM API to minimize network traffic, so any excuse of this causing additional network overhead seems moot.
Hi Alyssa
I'm wondering did you get a fix for this as I am currently running into the same problem on a course I'm creating with video?
Hi Rachel,
I'm not sure if Alyssa is still subscribed here. You are welcome to reach out to the user directly via the 'Contact Me' option on the user profile if you do not hear back soon.
The details that Ren outlined above explains the behavior of the resume behavior in the software.
I've had this workaround in place for a series of several dozen video-based trainings for almost a year. It's not the greatest, but it is functional (when people pay attention and don't just click the course window closed.)
I now have an issue where this workaround does not work. Clicking on the on-screen button to jump to my "Your Progress has been Saved" slide only half-loads the slide (the player settings change) and no progress is saved. It is impacting new projects and projects which I published last year.
I worked with my team internally and we were able to determine that it is related to this type of error: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/articulate-could-not-fi[…]e-and-articulate-actionator-exejavascript-is-not-defined
Thank you in advance - I'm happy to send packages or links to these in Articulate Review.
(EDIT: I was never able to isolate what the specific issue was, but I was able to publish functioning packages after rolling back to v3.46.23620.0 - I will submit a bug report).
Hi Pete,
did you get a fix for this? I am running into the same problem, using a "save your progress slide" does not actually save the video progress.
Welcome to E-Learning Heroes, Webinar! ⭐️
I hope Pete is still subscribed to this thread and will see your follow-up, but feel free to reach out to him from his profile page if needed.
A year later and this is still a very much needed feature. I have tried jumping to another slide following the instructions in this thread to no avail. I assume I am missing a command but just can't figure it out. Very frustrating! Beginning to wonder if Lectora offers this feature and maybe switching over to them.
Hi, Lisa.
Thank you for reaching out!
While not currently a feature in Storyline, we have a feature request logged for the ability to resume video after exiting course.
I've added this discussion to the report, and we'll come back to update you if I have any news to share or if this request makes it to our feature roadmap.
In the meantime, if you can share your .story file, I'm happy to take a look at why the workaround is not working for you.
Are there any updates to this? I also was using the work around of having the user jump to the next slide to save the video progress and it no longer works.
This is a huge waste of time for our employees.
Hi, Betty.
We are still tracking this feature request. When there's an update on this request we will update this conversation. Until then, would you be willing to share your files here or reach out to our Support Engineers privately in a support case?
Thanks for reaching out!
I would like to throw my name out there and say that having a save place incase someone needs to exit the course and pick back at a later point is a much needed feature. It would be nice to extend to review 360 as well
I would like to throw my name in on this as well.!
If there is a feature request for this to be a 'built-in' feature, I will add my name to the list as well!
To update on my post from three years ago. The issue was related to a corrupted font, though the support staff and I were perplexed as to why the issue disappeared when I rolled back my version of Storyline. So the workaround I was using (to create a "Your progress has been saved" slide, and on-screen buttons to go to and from that slide) was back to working in published output once I dealt with that.
I have 176 courses loaded using this workaround and those courses have been completed almost 5300 times. Considering that it relies on end users to click somewhere other than an "X" when they want to exit, the fact that I've only had one user issue that was related to the specific wording on the button itself makes me feel pretty confident.
(I do want to note that I do not have video controls turned on for these courses. The video files are inserted into the slides and the main timeline runs the show.)
In the last week or so, I've been playing with dialog layers. I ran some quick tests to see if they would also save video progress and triggering the dialog layer (with default settings) works enough like a slide state change that the progress/bookmarking data captures it for the LMS. Since dialog layers can be designed and managed within slide masters, there should be some extra versatility when it comes to templating this mechanism across slides and across courses.
As long as my testing keeps going as it has been, we've got two workarounds for this now!
there is an undocumented feature since Storyline 3.69 (November 7, 2022)
if you open a layer, the state (progress) of the course will send to the LMS
Well, that would definitely be the reason why the dialog layers would work in this use-case! Is there a place where people can generally find undocumented features like this?