Forum Discussion
Erratic State Behaviour
Hi everyone,
I hope I've posted in the right place.
I was wondering if anyone could tell me why learners are having an issue with a course I produced on Storyline 360.
I have a slide with four boxes. Each box corresponds to a location. Learners click on each box to visit the locations, then return to the main slide. The slide is set to resume saved state. After all four boxes are visited, a new button appears allowing learners to advance to the next part of the story.
I published the activity to SCORM 1.2 and uploaded to my institution's Moodle. For the majority of students, the activity works fine. For a minority, it doesn't work. The states don't remain visited, which means that next button doesn't ever appear, which in turn prevents the students from continuing.
This is an asynchronous element of a blended course, and the students aren't mine. As such, it's quite hard to contact them to find out what behaviour triggered the issue.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Hello Jonathan,
Thanks for reaching out, and I appreciate the thorough details! I can understand the difficulty pinpointing the issue here, and we're happy to lend a hand.
- Have you tried testing your course in SCORM Cloud to see if you spot the same erratic behavior?
If you're comfortable sharing your project with us, we'd be happy to investigate this with you! Feel free to connect with one of our support engineers here.
I had not, but I will. Thank you for your help!
The quickest, most reliable way to cure this problem is probably to use T/F variables instead of states to track completion. Moodle is a frequent theme of funny occurrences here, and a minority of students could have funny settings, or be doing funny things. Variables are pretty much immune to funny stuff.
Whatever action returns them from each location should (before it returns) set a variable that means that location has been visited. The main slide should be set to return to initial state on revisit. (That restarts the timeline.) When the timeline starts on the main slide, the variables are checked one by one. For the ones that are visited, the corresponding box is changed to Completed state. (Using Visited state can cause conflicts with the built-in triggers when the box is clicked.) Then if all the variables are true, the next button is enabled.
For a sample, check the mixed Navigation in the sample at this post:
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/free-sample-restricted-and-free-random-navigation-using-variables-and-triggers
It has four buttons that take the learner to different slides, and when they are all visited, a button appears that can be used to advance. In the restricted navigation, the four buttons appear in order, only after the previous one is visited.I think this will correct the problem without you having to find out what it is.
I haven't gone back to fix this task, but I applied this to a different activity and it seems to be working just fine for everyone so far. Thanks!
