Update form when user completes a lesson

Mar 31, 2017

Howdy all!  Using Storyline 2 and course will be hosted on the Internet. The course will include a series of six lessons and the user chooses which ones to complete. When the user has completed the lessons he/she is interested in, we want a form to update, displaying the lessons he/she did not complete as "crossed out".  The user will then print out this form.

Can anyone provide guidance with how to make this work?  Thanks!

5 Replies
john faulkes

Hi Lynn,

In your message, everything up to '....''crossed out"' can be done with SL variables / states. You can set elements in a 'form' to be crossed, or checked upon completion of lessons. Apologies if you know this already! However, you would need to learners to 'resume from where they left off' upon returning to the course to retain these settings. As for printing the form, this is more tricky. There has been a lot of dialogue in this forum about printing stuff and I'm not sure where it's got to, but it's a lot of javascript which some find daunting.

There is another option and that is to send the variables' states to a database, build the form as a web page (displayable in the SL course as a web object) and have a much easier print option, and/or indeed autocreate a PDF which can be emailed.

This second part is not too difficult for someone who can code but usually beyond the reach of an SL power user like me; I have a colleague programmer who understands SL and can do these things. let me know if you'd like more info.

Lynn Harrison

Thank you so much for your response John!  I am relatively new authoring and any insights you share are very much appreciated!  Thanks to your direction I was able to learn how to use variables to change the state of an object on one slide as a result of an action on a different slide (very excited about this!).  I notice that you put quotes around "form" is this because the user won't actually be accessing a form, but rather a slide formatted to look like a form? 

Thanks again!

john faulkes

Hi Lynn,

The conventional meaning of an online form, for example, on a web page, is something that will collect data and save it onto a database of some kind. It is made up of text fields.

In that you can put text fields onto a slide in SL, you are building a form, and with some tech input you can save the data out to a database, so it is a form, yes. It's just that there isn't ready functionality built into the day to day functions of SL to save the content externally. Essentially it saves it locally for use within the course. That's why I put it into quotes.

Lynn Harrison

Perfect - thanks so much for the explanation!  My final (hopefully) question to the community is whether there is a way to have a single slide in my story formatted as portrait, so that my "form" can display completely.  I have attached a copy of the document that I want to display in its entirety on the slide.  

The "This child is exempted from the following vaccines" lists the lessons in the course that the user had access to completing.  If the title is crossed out, the user did not complete the lesson.  Since we don't have access to a java programmer and because we need to deploy this course soon, we may just instruct the user to do a screen print of this form.  For this reason, I need the form to display in its entirety.  Is there a way to format only the this slide to portrait?  Is there a better way to accomplish what I want?

With tremendous gratitude,

Lynn

 

john faulkes

Hi Lynn,

I doubt whether in SL you can format a single slide to be in a different orientation. Hopefully someone else will answer this and confirm either way.

Assuming you can't, there is one fix, albeit an awkward one and that's to format your form so that it's sideways on your landscape slide. As long as you warn your learner so that they don't panic! That way, when they print your screen, the output should be fine.

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