Hands-On: Creating Branching Scenarios

[BrucUK]

Thanks David.
What I am trying to do is let consumers "investigate" 3 (or more) different options. At the end of each one, they go back to the initial "choice" slide, but at some point, when they have viewed everything, they can jump over ALL of the differing branches, and carry on with the rest of the course.
Almost like a loop, but the option to jump out of it at the end.
Bruce

[joe2008]

Hi
If I understand what you are trying to do, I think You can do what you want with multiple menus And a lot of duplicates. The basic idea is that you begin with a menu slide. The viewer chooses one stream. When they are finished, you branch them back not to the original menu, but a duplicate. If you want, you could arrange the settings (advance to slide x) so that they jump over the streams to the next section of the presentation. It gets tricky if you want to make sure they view all the streams before advancing ( you need a lot of duplicates and menus).
Joe

[joe2008]

Sorry, I got interrupted. Anyway, when they finish one stream, they get branched to a menu that they completed option A and now must choose option b. When they complete that stream, they get branched to a menu that indicates they have chosen all the options and are now allowed to advance to the next section. To the viewer, it looks like they are being looped, when in fact there are a lot of duplicates slides that are hidden. Problem comes if you allow them to choose freely. You need to plan for them to choose,say, A then B and to choose B then A. Anything more than 2 options gets really complicated
Joe

[DavidAnderson]

Joe - you're right about duplicating slides. The downside is it becomes a lot to manage with 3 or more learning tracks.

If all 3 learning paths are required, a linear path is probably most appropriate and manageable.

Now, another option would be to write your course, say with 3 learning paths, to include each of the non-selected learning path content in the selected path.

If learner selects path A, path A's primary objective addresses A-content but also provides overview and essentials from paths B and C. this addresses key objectives while providing summary, just enough info, from the other two. Just an idea.

[BrucUK]

Thanks - this is what I need.
I have come up with a creative and eloquent way of achieving the required solution...
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...three slides, one after another with bullet points
Sometimes it just works.
Bruce

[DavidAnderson]

Cool, and you're right, sometimes simple just works.

[flyteaxe]

Originally Posted by cstephenson

i love this - thanks for sharing!

question: how do you end up tracking completion in your lms for courses using branching scenarios like this?

it seems confusing for me. for example, if there are 4 slides in one scenario and you set the completion to 4/total, but they end up jumping around, it could potentially record it as completed before they truly are.

am i making this too complicated than it should be? this could potentially open a can of worms as to whether tracking is even necessary...

Hi cstephenson,

I had this exact same question every time I saw online examples of using Articulate/PowerPoint to create multi-path training of differing types. I didn't want to be forced to use a quiz.

The solution I came up with is to create a very simple, invisible at run-time, flash file that simply calls the JavaScript function to set the lesson to "complete". This can be imported like any other flash content using the Articulate > Insert Flash menu. It can also be reused and imported to multiple slides that may mark completion.

When publishing for LMS, I set the tracking to number of slides, but choose the total number of slides. The lesson is set to "complete" in the LMS before the user ever views all of the slides by viewing a slide with the imported SWF.

So, essentially, now instead of having only two options of tracking completion, you have 3:

1. Number of slides
2. Quiz score
3. Slide location

I've attached a zip file that includes the SWF flash file to import and the FLA flash authoring file in case you wanted to incorporate the code in some Flash content.

Cheers!