Shortcut when testing long courses?
Feb 05, 2014
Hi! Does anyone else find doing QA testing tedious? Especially in longgg courses.
I'm hopeful that a SL Guru has come up with an efficient way for a developer to go through the slides faster. In my last position, we built a player with Flash that used xml. We installed an invisible button on every screen that allowed us developers to bypass it. Then we removed it before the final launch.
After numerous reviews of a course in SL, I don't want to review every slide to the end again. Navigation is currently set to either wait for the timeline to end or for variable(s) to be triggered, before I can move on. So, these things need to occur on the slide, even if we devise a way to skip or bypass.
Setting the menu to "Free" is not possible, as I have a custom menu triggered by unique section variables.The menu structure on the master slide changes the state of each menu item as users move from section to section.
Changing the course structure, layout, navigation, is not an option - A sister course has already been launched and it must be consistent. Besides, it is a rather nice navigation system. :o)
So...what ideas do you all have? Thanks for your time!
7 Replies
One option may be to add a keypress trigger to the master slide that jumps to the next slide when a 'shortcut' key is pressed.
Michael, that was a great idea, but it didn't work for me. I'm not sure why, because adding a small hotspot did work. I've got more testing to do after publishing, but adding a hotspot that jumps to the next slide works in Preview mode! Thank you!
This is a great question. Just going to add that I select the Seekbar option when setting the slide features. the Seekbar allows me to fast forward the slides so that I can quickly view interactions before moving to next slide.
I'll also be using Michael's suggestion in future as there are times when the Seekbar can be tedious.
First review I add a sidebar menu and have it set to free so I can check the content of all slides - then if it needs locking down I do that on second review publish and have the source file open at same time so I can make on the spot tweaks as needed.
Wendy's sidebar tip a personal favorite of mine as well.
Hi All, I agree with everyone's good comments:
- I leave seek at and free Nav as long as possible;
- when reviewing in the early stages I have comments in a published Word version of course whilst playing the story or preview version
- when locked down I like to do Wendy's two screen option (ie watch published version whilst making small tweaks on open working file on next screen); and
- last week (I haven't been back to find attribution, sorry) there was a post with the tip that pressing SHIFT + TAB, in the published course, lets you tab through on screen Nav buttons - tab til yellow box on next button and enter to work around locked Nav items. (Great new tip to add to options).
Cheers Christine
Ooh Christine - I missed that SHIFT+TAB tip - thanks for sharing that one!
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