Forum Discussion
Storyline block autoplay in Rise
I'm having an issue with Rise. As others on the discussions have reported, when you embed a Storyline file in a block, the Storyline file automatially plays when the Rise lesson begins. This is problematic if the Storyline block is not the first block in the lesson. The simple solution shared in the discussions is to add a continue block to the lesson right before the Storyline block. The learner needs to click it to open the Storyline block, and then it autoplays. This works well, unless the learner reloads the page. In that case, the Storyline file will autoplay when the page loads, as if the continue block was in a visited state. Is there a way to deal with this aspect of the Storyline autoplay issue in Rise? Thank you for any ideas!
Hi Ramraj,
I would suggest restricting the navigation in the Rise 360 lesson so the learner cannot move to the second Storyline block until the first one is complete.
You can do this by adding a "complete course" trigger on the last slide of the Storyline block, then setting the Rise 360 continue button to "complete block directly above." This article includes details of those steps.
By requiring the learner to complete the first Storyline block before moving to the second, you can be sure the audio won't overlap. Let me know if that would be an option for you!
Thank you for your reply, but our courses can't use such restrictions due
to set standards. The users should be free to navigate to any storyline
block based on own preferences. Also we have to use multiple storyline
blocks in each rise lesson as per design.Please suggest other ways to fix it. Also it's very critical request for us
to publish our courses on LMS and we can't do it now because of this
problem.Thanks for that understanding, Ramraj. Storyline blocks in a Rise 360 lesson don't communicate or affect one another, so there currently isn't a way for one Storyline block to automatically pause when another Storyline block starts playing.
I would suggest a slide without audio at the beginning of your Storyline interactions. That way, you can let the learner control the audio experience in the same way they have control over how they navigate. Another way is to include a trigger to pause the audio in Storyline so they can stop and move to another Storyline block with audio at their choosing.I hope that helps for now!
Hi Alyssa,
I'm using a storyline block so that audio will autoplay. It's the first block in the lesson. I have a continue button at the end with a few blocks after the storyline block. The setting 'Complete All Blocks Above' is not unlocking the continue button. It only unlocks if it's directly after the storyline block. I have the 'Complete Course' trigger at the end of timeline in the storyline file.
I want to make sure the user listens to all of the audio while reading the text blocks after the storyline block before moving forward to the next storyline block. If I don't lock the continue button, it's possible that more than 1 storyline audio plays at the same time.
Do you have suggestions or know why the continue button is not unlocking?
Hi Jess! Did you set up a Storyline completion element? Please take a look at the article here on how to set up the Storyline block to track course completion.
Hi Ramraj,
Thanks for opening a case and working through this with our team. You're in good hands with Chino.
Rise 360 does pause audio or video files to prevent overlapping because those media files are directly uploaded to your lesson, but Storyline Blocks are handled differently because they have their own player.
Hopefully Chino can suggest a solution that works for you!
Running into this problem on our end, too, and am currently troubleshooting for the best solution. To begin with, I really just want to use the built-in media player within Rise. It works exactly how we want, it just doesn't do captions. Embed media players with caption toggles won't work either, because the learner can skip the video without it completing. So here we are, building a SL block per video.
This would work fine-ish, if it weren't for a very persistent auto-play feature for Storyline, which means all the videos startup at the same time after you have visited the site once and 'cleared' the continue blocks.
Does anyone have a way to make a Storyline video not auto-play while keeping the seekbar and media in-sync?
Here are the workarounds I've tried:
- Pause timeline trigger when slide loads, so it never autoplays
- This separates the timeline seekbar from the media. If I pause or start the video by clicking the video, it starts the video, but not the seekbar. This is really confusing UI.
- Any triggers that try to pause the timeline OR pause the video if the video has been viewed
- See triggers. I've tried pausing timeline, pausing media. Nothing. I've tried lots of these.
- The slide is set to resume saved state.
- I've even put the variable in text on the slide, and it won't "remember" that it was changed to true when I revisit. It will flip to true, then on revisiting, it flips back to false. How can it retain these triggers? Again, slide set to resumed state.
- Set media to play only when triggered/clicked.
- This again separates the seekbar from the playbar. The user stares at a black screen while the timeline is going. I thought something was broken before I realized I had to click the video.
- Removing the seekbar and only using the video player controls.
- Ok, I'd have to make the story size bigger on all 19 videos. This is probably my next thing -- but really?
Again, this is a LOT of work to just get captions to work.
Thanks!
- Pause timeline trigger when slide loads, so it never autoplays
Hi Alex! It sounds like what you really need is a closed captioning feature in a Rise 360 video block, is that right? We're tracking that popular request, so I'll add your vote to the list.
In the meantime, I'll open the floor to the community for their ideas of how you can best configure the triggers in the Storyline block.
So as a follow-up, this approach is really a band-aid to the lack of CC support in Rise.
The end result for us was a 220mb published file from Rise. There are 19 videos that are like 110mb together. When we inserted them just as videos and NOT as Storyline blocks we saved 70mb in the published output. (Videos were compressed in both and the same size).
On top of that, it's an extra place of complexity and I fear the LMS we're working with doesn't super love it. Learners going through it so far have had some squirrely issues.
Anyways, we may opt to publish out a captioned and non-captioned version to 'solve' this for now.
Thank you for sharing your solution, Alex.
Good news, everyone!
Now you can make your videos accessible by adding closed captions in Rise 360. Simply import a caption file for each language you want to support. Check out the video demo in this discussion, and find more details here!
I think I just answered my own question (the first one anyway). Safari for mac was set to not allow auto-play of videos. Allowing autoplay for the sites with articulate files made all the storyline file with audio load and play smoothly.
Hey, Stephen!
You're absolutely correct - web browsers like Chrome are blocking audio from playing automatically. That's why you'll see a play button covering any Storyline blocks that have media on the first slide. I'm glad you were able to adjust the autoplay setting in Safari!
Storyline blocks don't have a fullscreen option, but you can adjust the size to "full width" to give the block more real estate inside the lesson. I would also suggest using a widescreen aspect ratio for your slides, such as 16:9.
You can even completely hide the Storyline player so the interaction will seamlessly blend into your Rise 360 lesson.
I have run into this same issue, but with different results in the same RISE course. One lesson has a View Me from storyline and it just starts playing and does not have the gray screen with the play button. The fist slide in the View Me is just a screenshot with caption, no audio. The other lesson in the same RISE course is a Try Me. It has a gray screen with a play button, which is what we want. In a second RISE course, I have a Try Me lesson and a View Mode lesson and both have the gray screen with the play button. I am using Chrome and none of these have audio. I can find no distinction as to why one Storyline insert does not work like the others I have done. And my co-worker is getting the gray screen with the play button every time. Seems like a bug to me. Can we investigate it as such?
Hello Jeanne. We'd love to help! If you can privately share your files with us by clicking here, we'll try to understand why these interactions are being treated differently. We'll delete everything when we're done troubleshooting. Please include a Share link to the course, or the zipped output if you exported for LMS or web. We can go from there!
I encountered the reverse issue (but similar) - I wanted the storyline embed to immediately play adn reveal the infographic in rise (it was an interactive infographic). I did not want the play icon on a black screen.
I had two identically created seperate storyline interactive infographic embeds - one immediately showed the infographic landing slide (which i wanted) the other did not. The second one had some slide layers with video, so I made an identical first slide stripped of all interaction and at 1 sec had it switching to second slide (with interactions and video) this resolved the play screen and instead showed the interaction slide immediately.
