Storyline 2 | Elodie Chalmette

This week’s challenge asked course designer to show how to use an interactive timeline in e-learning. Creating an interactive timeline is now super easy in Storyline 2, because of the slider feature. Of course, this is not the only way to design an interactive timeline in Storyline 2. Actually, there are a lot of way to design a timeline with that software.

I chose to do something simple, using the slider features, layers and markers. In this interactive timeline, you can view a non-exhaustive list of seasonal vegetables in Northern California per month. Just move the carrot icon at the top of the slide to navigate in the timeline, and hover the green markers to learn more about each vegetable.

Click the picture to access the timeline demo:

As I already explained it, e-learning design is only a part of my current job. My main duty is to be a LMS admin, to manage training records, register trainees, create accounts for new comers, ensure they follow to e-learnings included in their training path, assist users, generate reports to get training data and send it to HR Managers. Obviously, publishing e-learning modules on the LMS is an important part of my job, and it’s very important to me to ensure the e-learnings are working well on the LMS. A lot of issues can happen if the e-learning has not been set properly in Storyline, or in the LMS itself :

Window size issue,
Compatibility and SCORM settings,
Sound issue,
Progress tracking – that’s the topic I will present today
Etc.

One of the most important topic is progress tracking: how to ensure the progress in the module is properly tracked and recorded by the LMS platform. If the trainees finish the module, but their progress is still 50% in the LMS, there is a problem. This problem can come from the LMS settings, or from a wrong design or wrong settings in Storyline. Today, I will focus on the issues coming from the Storyline settings, and explain how I proceed to ensure the progress is recorded and saved properly in the LMS.

First, it’s important to know you have two ways to track the progress in Storyline:

Completion: percentage of viewed slides
Success: success to a quiz included in the module

I don’t use the success setting a lot, but it can be interesting if your module ends by an assessment quiz. In case the progress is linked to the success or failure to a quiz:

Do not set the success score on 100%, but choose 75% or 80%. If you really want the trainee to reach 100% to pass the quiz, ensure the questions are not too tricky, so it’s not frustrating for the trainee. If the questions are very clear, not too hard, he/she should reach 100% without any problem if the topics were explained properly during the module. It can be interesting for basic topics such as e-learning modules for new comers (Code of conduct of the company for example), but avoid it for technical and advanced trainings.
In any case, allow the trainee to retry the quiz until he/she reaches the passing score. You can invite the trainee to retake a chapter if he/she failed the quiz, but always let him/her retry the quiz. You can set a “pool” of questions if you want the trainee to have new questions when he/she retries.
VERY IMPORTANT: if your module contains some questions that are NOT part of the final assessment quiz (example: questions that are more like an activity to help the trainee learn something), please ensure you do not include them in the “Result slide properties”. I say that because I have already seen it, and obviously the success to the final quiz was not properly tracked, because also impacted by questions that were not supposed to be counted in the final score. I’m talking from experience.

Click the “Edit result slide” button on the Result slide of your quiz.

Ensure you select the correct question slides and exclude the wrong ones in the “Include” column.

Most of the time, I use the completion setting. But there are also some mistakes to avoid:

Do not set the “minimum number of slides viewed to complete” to 100% of the slides. Prefer a lower number, for those reasons:
- First, in your module you can have slides that are not always viewed by trainees. In the modules I design, there are always two slides that can be skipped by trainees: a first “help” slide presenting the navigation controls at the beginning of the module, and another “help” slide available at any time similar to the first one. So, the trainees are not compelled to view those slides to continue.
- Second, because you never know if the trainee will always view all the slides. For example, you can have “lightbox slide” settings, but you have not added triggers that block the progress unless the trainee has reviewed everything. In this case, it is possible the trainee reaches the last slide but has missed one or two slides, and it can be frustrating for the trainee to not understand why the course is not considered as completed whereas he/she reached the last slide. Of course, maybe your course is not designed well enough if the trainee is able to reach the last slide without reviewing all the mandatory content, but sometimes, too many “mandatory” content with navigation restrictions can be frustrating too. One of my former colleague recommended 80% of the slides to validate progress. I think it’s a bit low, but it’s only my opinion, and it can depends on the kind of module you design.

Here, for example, I chose 33 slides instead of 35 because 2 slides can be skipped by the trainees. They can’t skip the other slides, so they should have viewed 33 slides when they reach the last slide.

If there are mandatory slides the trainee must see and that are included in the minimum number of slides viewed to complete, ensure your module is designed properly so the trainee can’t skip/miss them.

Final tip: if you want to ensure the progress is always recorded at 100% of progress when the trainee reaches the final slide of your module, use this trigger with javascript: