Learning analytics are in vogue in the training and development world. Stakeholders want to see ROI for investing in trainings or gathering insights for process improvement. Without data collection, you have no analytics. While analysis of the data may fall to a data specialist or IT manager, course designers and developers will often be the “boots on the ground” for collecting the data.
Storyline provides some standard ways to collect data via the Survey Question types using their quiz tool. However, you may want to ask multiple questions on one slide. I recently created a survey like this because it streamlined the experience for users and gave us a little more control visual design of the survey.
This article will walk you through how to create a custom survey using variables. I recommend having some familiarity with variables and triggers in Storyline before trying to set this up.
Credit to the original concept from Matthew Bibby, who wrote an article about how to do this for Storyline 2 years ago.
Part 1: Create the Slide for User Interaction
Create the slide to collect the survey data
First, your going to work on creating a slide that collects the actual survey data. Below, is a finished result.
Starting with a blank slide (or a background of your choosing), layout the text and graphics for the questions you will be asking the learner. In the image above, this would be the survey questions on the left.
Next, we will be adding the interactive elements that learners will click to record responses that we can capture. Go to the Insert tab and select Input under Interactive Objects.
The Input feature will give you options for how you want the user to interact with the page. Depending on the type of question you are designing will dictate your choices here. Notice that radio buttons and checkboxes will have an area where you can type in accompanying text. Otherwise you can just place textboxes next to each radio button if you want them in different positions than to the right of the radio button.
Next, you will need to highlight all the related radio buttons or checkboxes and create a button set. You can do this with ctrl +click, clicking through all the buttons. Once you highlight them, right-click over the buttons and select Button Set -> New Set.
This will let Storyline know that the buttons are related and not separate entries. Once you finish this, you are ready to start creating the variables and triggers that will allow Storyline to collect the learner responses.
Note that there are some options for styling your buttons under the Radio Button tab. The tab only appears when you click on a radio button with your cursor.
Part 2: Create Triggers and Variables for Data Collection
Now that you have a finished the layout of the survey slide where users will take your survey, you are ready to have Storyline collect data from this slide and store it somewhere.
We will use variables to store this data in Storyline. Variables are a must have skill in the designer toolbox. If you don’t know about variables yet, pause here and read up on them before continuing.
Open variable tool and create variables for each question created
The first step is to go into your Variable tool. Here, you will be creating variables to store each entry from the user.
This goes without saying, but make sure you set them up with the right value type, or you will run into some issues.
I gave every variable a name that corresponds to the question learners are answering, so they are easy to work with later (e.g. if you have a question that collects someone’s dog’s name, call the variable “dogName”).
Create triggers to capture user responses
Now we need to create triggers that will tell the variable what information to remember when the learner clicks the inputs you put in the slide. For example, lets look at my first question:
In this question, users will click one of the 5 options to rate their experience. We want that click to get stored in a variable. I created a variable called “Overall” for this question to keep it simple. Here is an example of the triggers that collect data for this question:
Looking at the image above, you will notice I have a separate trigger for each button. If the learner clicks the Excellent radio button (from my example), my variable Overall is set to a value of 5 (I chose to convert the text to numerical values since this was essentially a rating question, but you can store text too).
Note that you can also store short answer responses too like in the slide below:
For short answer questions you will need to use a slightly different setup since users do not click anything to indicate they are done typing their response. The trick for moving text to a variable — use the lose focus trigger. This trigger completes an action when the user is no longer engaged in that text box (the flashing vertical line you see when typing). So, when the user loses focus on the textbox, your variable will be set equal to whatever they put in the box. If they go back to the box a second time and add more, the trigger will run again once they leave the box.
To make sure everything is working, you can add the variable to a textbox on a slide proceeding the survey slide to verify that the data was properly collected. You can do this this by using the Input reference after you create a textbox:
I recommend doing a test with the reference input to see how the information is being passed for each question. When the number of triggers and variables accrue, this can be a lifesaver in troubleshooting.
Part 3: Create Generic Survey Slides to Report the Data to the LMS
Creating the basic survey slides to pass the data to the LMS
Now you will create standard survey slides for the data that you want to collect. These slides will ensure that the data you collect gets passed to your LMS. You can find these under Slides -> Survey Question. You will be creating one Survey Question slide for each question in your survey.
Once you pick a question type, make sure you think carefully about what you will name the slide. This field will appear in the LMS under the Question Description field, so it is important to be pick something you will easily recognize. Note that with the way we are creating this survey, learners will not actually see this title, it is for the people collecting the data from your LMS.
Now that you have your slide created, we are going to make some adjustments to the preset triggers for this slide so it takes the data from the slide where learners are taking the survey and puts it here for the for reporting to the LMS.
Setting up Triggers and Variables on the survey slide
On the sidebar you will notice a trigger like this (it will vary depending on the type of survey slide):
The slide automatically created a variable called NumericEntry1 for me, which is designed to capture the learner’s survey response. Let’s change that to match our variable we used to collect the learner’s response for clarity. For instance, I have a question that asks the learner how helpful the training was. The variable on the survey slide is called Helpful, so I will rename the survey’s slide’s created variable to HelpfulEntry:
Next, you will need to create a new trigger that sets your renamed variable equal to the variable that is holding your question data from the slide where the learner enters her answers. This will replace the trigger shown in the image above. You can use that little lightning bolt icon (it shows up when you hover over a trigger) to cancel out the old trigger.
In my example, I renamed HelpfulEntry from NumericEntry1 variable and set it to the variable Helpful, which collected the data from a question on the survey slide. I think it is smart to leave Entry in the name of the variables that you are renaming for clarity. Note, I have it set to activate when the timeline starts on the slide — so immediately when the user lands on this slide, Storyline puts their answer in the input box from the variable you created.
Moving along, once you have the aforementioned trigger set, you will need to add one more trigger to your survey slide. This trigger will make the slide automatically submit the question after the user lands on the page and moves on to the next slide:
Make sure this trigger is after the one that sets the entry field equal to the variable from your survey slide (the first trigger in the image above). You don’t want the submission to occur before something is in the entry field!
Part 4: Finishing Touches
Add a loading screen
Now I like to add a “loading” screen to cover up the survey slides that collect the data from the variables. Basically, what will happen is the user will take the actual survey on those first slides you created, then Storyline will take them through all the survey slides that are reporting data automatically. However, instead of the user seeing behind the curtains, we will put an image and some text over the entry field. Mine looks like this:
You can add more trailing dots after “Loading Results” on subsequent slides if you want it to look like its animated with each passing slide.
That is basically it for the set-up. You can repeat these steps for setting up the rest of the data collection slides. Keep in mind, you will need to pick the right type of survey slide depending on your question data (text or numerical). I usually stick to the short answer and numerical entry slides as templates.
Making sure the survey slides report to the LMS
As a final step, make sure your survey question slides are reporting to the LMS in the same way a standard quiz slide would. They will register in the LMS as “neutral”, so they will not impact the learner’s completion of the course or their transcript. You can check this on the Results Slide by clicking “Edit Result Slide.”
So far, I have used this to successfully collect survey data in our LMS Cornerstone as well as Adobe Captivate Prime. As long you are using at least a SCORM 2004 compliant LMS, the data should be captured without any issues.
Hope you found this tutorial helpful. It is not a simple project, but if you are looking to capitalize on all of the features of Storyline to capture data, this method is helpful and can be extrapolated to other forms of data collection.
