Forum Discussion
Using variables
Hello Heroes.
I used variables on two slides in an e-learning course that has about 50 slides in total. During testing, these two slides worked fine in the LMS. However, once the course was officially launched, we found that quite a few users had problems specifically with those two slides.
Is it generally possible to say that using variables in a course can be problematic when the course is intended for companies with a large number of employees?
I suspect the issue might be related to differences in individual users’ PC settings, but I’m still surprised that only the slides using variables caused problems. It took a lot of effort to build such a large course, so of course I’m disappointed that technical issues occurred. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to completely avoid this when deploying the course to thousands of employees. For now, it looks like I’ll avoid using variables in the future, since I don’t understand what caused the problem. Thank you for your comments/ideas.
5 Replies
Can you share more details such as how the variables were used and what issue the viewers experienced? It may be that it's something simple like needing to reset the variables or the slide if the user replays the slide.
Here’s an example of one of those slides. I had to change everything there and remove the audio (internal info), but basically, the task is to drag and drop three options correctly. After that, a layer with additional information should appear, and the “Move Forward” button should become active.
In practice, users did drag all three options correctly, but nothing happened afterward. Thank you.
I added a second slide for testing.
When I then Previewed the entire project, I was able to get through the activity, as you said you were during testing as well. FORWARD took me to the next (new) slide. I got those same results whether I put the correct answers in one box or separate boxes. Whether or not I attempted to put wrong answers in the box.
However, if I reached the second slide and used the menu to return to the first slide, I could not run it a second time. The drag functionality worked, but it never showed the layer.
This is because you never reset your variable. So, on the second time through, it was already 3 and the user is adding another 3 to it. If you reused the same variable in your second slide, then the same thing would have happened.
To fix it, all you need to add is another trigger:
When Timeline starts on this slide, set DSR_TEAM to value 0
From a usability viewpoint, I would suggest that you also prevent the user from putting their answers in the same boxes. This can be done by sliding the drop zones off screen as soon as a correct answer is dropped on it.
Thank you for checking. The sample included only one slide, so I’m not sure what you mean by the second slide and going back. The issue didn’t occur when people revisited the slide, but when they accessed it for the first time and couldn’t complete it. When revisiting, the status is set to “Reset to initial state.”
I attribute the problem to differences in PC configurations across such a large company. If, for example, 30,000 people complete the course successfully and about 70 encounter this issue, that seems to be the case. It would be interesting to find out what exactly causes it on those specific PCs, but unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to investigate that further. Thanks again!!!!!
I added a second slide for the purpose of testing.
Reset to initial state does not change the value of your variables. You still need to tell it that you want the variable to be set to 0 when you start the slide.
Different PC configurations will have no impact on how it handles variables. If you're not comfortable using variables, then you may be better to use state changes. These will not need to be reset via trigger.
