Non Traditional use of Stroyline output - Your thoughts please

Jun 21, 2018

I work for an in-house L&OD function (everything has to be stored inside our firewall) and we have used elearning for a number of years for developing training courses that learners access through our LMS (Cornerstone on Demand - CSOD). 

Thanks to this community, I now know how to develop something in Storyline, publish it to our LMS but then surface it directly inside pages on our intranet (or LMS pages - untracked). In my eyes, this opens up a world of possibilities to use Storyline to develop 'point of need'  resources & GUI type interactions rather than purely for traditional courses. 

To provide a bit of context I previously shared on this community a proof of concept that could replace 9 separate and static intranet pages (couldn't actually use at the time).  

The key bits of functionality I use to surface the content directly inside our LMS or intranet (with the course published in our LMS) are:

  • Untracked direct access to elearning publised in our LMS (huge huge huge thanks to Steve Flowers from this community on this) - bascially points to the published story.html file rather than the index_lms version
  • LMS deep linking (to get the content visible outside of our LMS - but inside our firewall) 
  • iframe (to get the content embedded inside a web page)

The question I'm asking myself is whether or not there could be any issues with doing the above as it has opened up a whole new approach to us. CSOD have no problems and nor do our IT people but I wanted to see if anyone here have done anything like this or can foresee any issues. If we had in house be development experts who could write code then I guess it would be better done as an actual webpage but we don't and Storyline is so much easier to use. It also gets round our intranet template driven structure. 

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

2 Replies
Alexandros Anoyatis

Since you seem to already have a working process and/or prototype, I say go for it. The only foreseeable issue you may face down the line is republishing using a newer version of Storyline, when browsers decide to change behavior that may break playback/functionality of output that used to work flawlessly.

That being said, I don't think its a universal approach. Characteristics such as "deep linking" and "untracked access" may work on your LMS and subsequent scenario, but they won't necessarily work on all LMS's (for example those using dynamic url's for greater security could break your process or ui logic).

On a (not so) related note, i think Storyline would really shine as an event handler - receiving and sending events, trigger/variable changes, as well as other calls between a reporting system/tool and a more sophisticated authoring engine.

 

Just my 2c,

Alex

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