102 Replies
Tom Dorsey

Mike Enders said:

Sigurd Eliassen said:

Seriously? How hard can this be? I don't get the "difficult to calculate time" argument. At least leave that choice to the user! I use SL mainly for video files. If i insert a video with 3.25 duration, then the slide will be 3.25. This is not rocket science. I'm not trying to be rude here, just frustrated, especially given that this was a feature in Studio.


Hi Sigurd,

Sorry to hear that you're frustrated about the time calculation in Storyline.  You are correct that it seems like it should be a fairly simple thing to do.   I'll take a shot at trying to explain the difficulty in automatically calculating time in Storyline.  Let's start with Studio.

Calculation in Studio is fairly straight forward because the slides and the course are pretty linear in nature.  By adding the audio time on each slide, you can arrive at a total time for the course.  

However, in Storyline it becomes much more problematic because of the interactive capabilities of the tool.  For example, let's say that you have a branching scenario with 15 possible routes through the course and each route varies in time from 5 to 18 minutes (based upon reading the audio time).  If we simply follow the Studio example, we'd add the audio up for every slide (let's say it's 2 hours, 6 minutes) and display that as the total course time.  However, it's not an accurate number given that the learner isn't going to travel every route.    

Added to that, what if we are going to force the learner to successfully navigate a successful branch before they can complete the course?  This means that they might need to travel through the course multiple times (via various routes) before they finally meet the completion criteria.

As an additional complicator of time calculation, each slide potentially has multiple slide layers of content that may or may not have an easily calculated time.  For example, how do you calculate a tabs interaction with 6 layers where each layer has no audio, but rather, text to be read?  

I hope this helps a bit and we're definitely open to suggestions for how to effectively calculate the time in an interactive course.  So your thoughts are definitely appreciated!  Please feel free to send them via a feature request.  

Thanks!

Mike


One very simple solution to this is allowing a quiz timer to be paused upon timeline ending - adding the capablity for this simple variable will make a ton of people happy. 

Tom

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