Have you heard requests from stakeholders to view data about what learners are doing in courses? With timelines and competing projects, it is difficult to find the time and energy learn how to collect data on your learners. If your organization is using an LMS, there is a good chance that you can take advantage of some of the built-in tools in Storyline to collect more information about your learners.
One of the easiest ways to collect data, without resorting to Javascript, is using the survey tools that are built into Storyline. Survey questions were originally designed to collect information from learners that would not affect their transcripts on the LMS. However, even though survey questions do not affect learner transcripts, they still report to your LMS, similar to a graded quiz question. These survey questions will just show up as neutral when they are recorded on your LMS. So knowing that we can pass data to the LMS with survey questions, we can use those questions as a means of collecting other types of information about our learners.
Instead of limiting ourselves to just collecting data that is qualitatively given by surveys to our learners, we may choose to learn about what slides they visited or what objects they interacted with on a slide. By using triggers and variables, we can capture an expanded array of behaviors and communicate them to survey slides.
Step 1: What type of data do you want to collect in your course?
First, you need to determine what type of behavior you want to collect from your learners in the course. This will lay the foundation for the variables and triggers that you will need to create to collect your data. Also, you should determine if you want learner data to be information that they are explicitly giving you or information that is collected without their awareness.
For example, I worked on a course where we wanted to learn how users perceived the video in the course. To collect the information, we had a survey page like this:
The user would land on this page automatically following watching the video. They would subsequently click one of the two choices before moving on in the course. Note that we set this interaction up in a way where the learner only sees this interaction the first time they view the video. Once they clicked a choice, we would automatically move them to a menu where they could choose what they wanted to do next in the course.
Another way you may choose to collect data is related to a user’s behavior on a page. For example, you might want to know what objects they interacted or slides that they visited. On the slide below, I wanted to know when learners clicked to view one of the two resources. This data would help us decide if it was worth while to continue to add resources to our courses for learners to download. Similar to the example above where users gave the video rating by clicking one of the icons, we set up triggers in Storyline to collect data when learners clicked one of the resource buttons on the page below.
Step 2: Setting up Triggers and Variables for data collection
I recommend basic familiarity with triggers and variables before you start working on collecting data in your Storyline course. Once you get comfortable with these tools, many possibilities open up for you when developing courses.
Both methods of collecting data that I mentioned in the previous section use triggers and variables to capture information. We will look at the interaction where the user clicked a button to indicate if they found the video helpful. To start things off, we need to create a slide design with the question for the users.
Once we have the slide design solidified, we can add a variable to capture their selection. In this case, I called the variable VideoLiked. I set this variable up as a Text variable. This gives me flexibility in how the information is reported to the LMS. However, if the user only has two choices, you could also set this up using a True/False variable.
Now that you have a variable to hold the information from the user interaction, you will need to create a trigger to tell Storyline what and where to put the information. I used a user clicks trigger to put the value “Yes, Helpful” or “Not Helpful” into the variable VideoLiked. You can put anything in as the value as long as you understand what it means when you are evaluating results later.
Note that I needed two triggers in this specific example; one for each button on the page. You may have also noticed the “Jump to Slide” trigger that I added after the variable is set in each trigger. After the user answers the question on this slide, they are automatically taken to the next page. This just saves them a click since there is nothing else on this page for them to do after answering the question. However, you may want an intermediary page thanking them for their feedback or confirming that their response was recorded.
Step 3: Sending the data to an LMS
Now that you have captured information from the learner, you want to pass the information to your LMS. You can do this without affecting a learner’s transcript on a course through using Survey Questions. Survey Questions are reported as neutral to the LMS, meaning they do not affect the user’s pass/fail score. That being said, I believe you want to use at least SCORM 2004 3rd edition to get all the reporting data when you publish.
Getting started here, create a short answer survey slide somewhere in your course. Give your survey slide a name that fits with the information you are reporting. For the example mentioned in the last section, I called mine “Data — Video Likes.” As a side note, I put my data slide right up against my assessment questions. If you happen to allow learners to review quiz results, Storyline will try to send them to this slide as one of the quiz questions. Putting it up against the other assessment questions insures they do not get dropped somewhere random in the course.
We will need to do some more trigger work on this slide to make sure the data is captured properly. Survey slides actually come with a default variable created. The variable is named, by Storyline, based on the the type of survey slide, so it should be TextEntry in this case. Its good practice to rename this variable, because you will get confused if you have multiple data collection slides. I renamed the variable, again, to match the information to “VideoLikedEntry”. I left “Entry” in the name so that I could remember that this was the variable for storing the answer on a survey slide.
Now, we need to create a trigger that sets our Survey Question Entry variable equal to the data that we captured in VideoLiked from the user interaction.
Notice that I set the trigger to transfer the data from VideoLiked to VideoLikedEntry to occur when the timeline starts on this slide. This means the slide will immediately set the Survey Question slide answer equal to the information stored in VideoLiked and then submit the question to the LMS when the timeline ends. Important: I set the timeline to end in .5 seconds. I found that shorter times were too quick for Storyline to process the data. This wasn’t always true, I used to be able to submit the question when the timeline started, right after I set the variable. However, as of August 2020, Storyline had released an update that slowed down its ability to process these triggers back-to-back (confirmed this with one of their software engineers in a ticket).
The plan for this data collection slide is for the learner to unknowingly pass through it without interrupting their experience in the course. To keep them from realizing they are passing through a data collection slide, I cover the whole slide with a black rectangle. So, when the learner hits this slide, they will see a black screen for half a second and then the next slide will appear. It was nice when Storyline processed this faster because I could have each slide last less than a quarter of a second.
If you happen to have more than one data collection slide back-to-back and the waiting period becomes longer you can add text to your data collection slide so the learner knows things are progressing.
The final step is to go to your Results Slide and make sure all of your data collection slides are reporting to the LMS. Remember the data will be captured as neutral questions, which do not affect a learner’s transcript.
As I mentioned earlier, this data collection method is not limited to situations where learners answer a question. You can store information, through a variable, when a learner lands on a slide, clicks an object or even when the mouse hovers over an object. It really is only limited to your creativity! I would love to hear if you have used this method in some different ways to collect data in the comments.
