What is the best way to create different customized versions of a Stoyline course?

Mar 22, 2019

Hi All,

We have a Storyline 360 course and have already produced a customized version of it for one particular market, which was a very laborious process  involving retesting everything to make sure that no new errors or mistakes were introduced.

We are now being asked to create other customized versions for other markets. I'd estimate that 85% of the content stays the same between each or these, and we consistently change the same content each time (eg market specific images, text and videos). 

Is there a smart way to do this so that Storyline can do some sort of automatic 'fill in the blanks ' approach that picks up the version specific version variables/date either at publish or run time?

Does the new 'Media Library' offer anything that might help?

Many thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Bryan

4 Replies
Daniel Brigham

Bryan:  We run into this as well, as my company sells different products in different markets. Of course, you can have specific branching within a module (say Colorado product branch vs. California), but the kicker is usually the quiz/assessment. I assume you offer some type of scored quiz learners must pass to get credit? 

Storyline will ask which quiz the learner has to pass to get completion. (And the Colorado quiz is no good for the California reps.) Maybe there is now away around this, and someone please chime in if that's the case. 

Or...maybe you could make an assessment general enough that it applies to any group taking the training. 

David Price

I'm not sure if I have fully grasped what you want to do here but you could potentially use a variable that determines what content a user sees.  You could hard code it to be set on the first slide when the project is opened, or you could get the user to select it.

You can use different slide masters to have different designs (if you need that) but I think this will have to be set before you publish it as I don't think you can change the slide master used on a slide on the fly by triggering it.

Its difficult to comment without knowing what the differences are between your different versions but the variable way could work like this:

  1. Create a variable called something like Version.  You can set it as a text variable or a number variable, depending on how you want to identify your different versions
  2. Somehow trigger what that variable is set to on the first slide.  It can be hard coded to be set automatically when you open the course or selected by the end user.  If you hard code it though it will mean you have to publish the course multiple times with different versions set (although if your content is changing this might be what you have to do anyway)
  3. In your content you would have different states on objects that would change depending on the version.  So for example:
    1. Textbox 1 has 2 states.  The first state contains text for version 1 of your content and the second state will have the content for version 2
    2. You would then have a trigger on the slide (or wherever you want it) that will change the state of Textbox 1 to the correct version based on what is set in the Version varaible (see screenshot below)

It might get a bit complicated the more versions you add, and it does completely depend on what content you want to change, but technically this method would work to have multiple versions of a single project.

Happy to discuss it in more detail if you like.

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