Storyline Course Duration

Hey Blake,

That's kind of a gray area, I think. What your definition of "duration"?

 Some define duration as the actual time required to view all available content (timeline duration), others (especially e-learning vendors) define it as "the time required for the student to study all available material presented in the course (including referenced content, bibliography etc)"...

If your definition is closer to A, then adding the timeline duration of each "active" slide may exactly what you are looking for - especially if your course is linear.

Hope this helps,
Alex

Hi Blake,

I don't see any means of doing this?

Presenter showed the time indication at the top left. 

You can always send in a feature request

Cheers

Geert

Hello - I am creating my first course and also need to add duration.  Do you know how this can be done in Storyline?

thanks!

Hi Layda and welcome to Heroes!

Currently the duration of a Storyline course only appears within the Articulate mobile player, and as the article suggests you can submit afeature request.

You can have a look in the meta.xml file in the storyline output folder. You can read an evalutation of the total duration of the course.

-<project title="video marker 3" totalvideo="8767" totalaudio="0" duration="About 34 seconds" enabledownload="true" mobiledata="mobile/data.gz" html5data="mobile/data.js" flashdata="story_content/data.swf" version="1.0.0.0" datepublished="2015-03-19T22:27:30" thumburl="story_content/thumbnail.jpg" courseid="6UMVy1bPbUW_course_id" id="5YO8omVNEXY">

 This example comes from an LMS publish.

HI Eric,

One thing i would like to add is that the duration displayed there will not include the timeline of layers.

It is not really neccessary to know the exact duration of an interactive course because users pass through a training with a different speed. Usually you can try to calculate the time a user needs. 30 seconds for each slide, and up to one minute if the users are non-native speakers who do not speak fluently the language of the course.

For many interactive courses I would agree the length is not easy to estimate because of the multiple paths people take, but Storyline is also often used for courses where the most common path is for the learner to watch it from start to finish. In cases like this it would be sooooo nice if Storyline would allow you to display a duration. I am literally playing back a course with a stopwatch right now to get the duration.  

Thanks for pointing this out! I played back a course that as estimated at "About 39 minutes" (in the meta.xml file) with a stopwatch and I timed it at 39:30 seconds, so my bet is that it rounds down once you get to minutes in length maybe. It was close enough for my needs at least. 

Also, this post shows how to find that number within Storyline... (Publish > Title > ... )

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/tracking-course-length#reply-185017

Thanks for the link Will !

When you click "Publish" click the "..." button next to Title. Duration is listed in there as well as in the meta.xml file.

Thanks for popping in to assist Jay :)

This was very helpful. Thank you!

I checked both the .xml file and the "Publish ..." button as described below. Both stated my Storyline 2 course was "about 6 minutes". Knowing by reckoning that it was NOT just 6 minutes, I ran the preview and used a stopwatch. Actual time? just under SIXTEEN minutes.

What's wrong here?

Hey Patrick! Welcome to E-Learning Heroes-- I'm happy you're here 🎉

Can you share your unpublished .story project file here so I can take a look? You can add it as an attachment right to a comment here in the thread like this:

Thanks! 😊

Hi Patrick,

The duration shown in the Publish window is calculated based on the timeline length on all of your slides. Keep in mind some slides with interactions may take the learner longer or shorter to go through, so it's a rough approximation. 

Being 10 minutes off of a 16 minute course doesn't sound within the boundaries of even a rough approximation.
Unless Articulate Storyline doesn't count layers and only takes the initial slide length into account - which still wouldn't be accurate, as my slides all have fairly short introduction - I don't see how this isn't working.

Patrick Naillon

Hi Patrick,

You're right, layers are not included in that calculation. Layers could be triggered to appear automatically at any time during the slide timeline, or they could be triggered to be opened manually by the learner. 

You do have the option to enter a custom duration, since you manually calculated seat-time.

Hi Alyssa - does Storyline 360 no longer automatically calculate duration based on the timeline of all slides (layers excluded)? I have several files that I've created that are showing blanks in the Duration field within the LMS Publishing tab (image attached). Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Katherine

Hey Katherine!

There are actually two duration fields in the Storyline publishing window. The one you're looking at is always blank, to be filled in manually.

The one that is automatically calculated by Storyline can be found by clicking the three dots [...] next to the Title field. I hope that helps!

Thank you!  Very helpful after the fact.

Hey Gordon,

Glad that this thread was able to help you out as well. Thanks for chiming in to share :)

Is this option no longer available?  Using Storyline 360 and don't see elipsis.

Hi Don!

This option is available when publishing to Web or LMS. Here's what it looks like in Storyline 360:

So, I have tried the way, but it calculates each slide's timeline time and add it to give an approximation. But it only calculates base layer timing and not slide layer, so my point is, is there any way to get timeline time only but for full project include slide layers?

The other way to do is manually, go on each slide and its layers and add all time manually, but its tiresome for large modules.