Afternoon - just a quick comment on whenever we think we are cornered - along comes another company or instructional designer who has thought of it.
High Level Problem - I needed a PDF to be in a web object available directly in the course. The order of information in the course caused a challenge with a section that was a reference only in my primary driver these days, EasyGenerator.
Authoring Platforms - EasyGenerator, Rise, and Storyline primarily
EasyGenerator is awesome at what it does, but it doesnt offer tons of flexibility with navigation. It can lock you into an implementation that you would not be happy with as part of a user experience.
The key problem with it - we attempted to use this format:
Section 1 (read and sign PDFs)
Section 2 (a read only reference section)
Now the problem with this is that it actually impacts and narrows how to get to and trigger the results page - a key with many SCO authoring tools to do that final commit to the LMS. We found ourselves pointing people to the navigation in the left hand menu. Problem there is responsive design will start off with that menu collapsed….and my gosh after clicking 10 pages of read and signs and next buttons? Noone is gonna read….they would land up at the reference section.
The only place the “trigger” button became available was at the end of the reference section. Not a good deal either….because you want to get adults to get in and out as cleanly as possible with their learning.
So we had two choices - we could change the order of information a little (there is an afterwards section in EG that we could use that would offer the references after the activity with the policies - and this actually is not a bad approach) or we would take alot of passive measures to guide people to the navigation.
Trust me when I say - I have helped to deploy courses for 10s of thousands of learners in my tenure - you always want the most frictionless approach and deploy solutions that should trigger a minimal support response.
So I spun on a few things today:
EasyGenerator - was probably gonna miss the bar that I wanted to get to.
Rise - well I could figure out something clever, but it would have to include storyline files and a web object and leverage Articulate Review….no good! I didnt want to do that 12 times.
But Storyline has a great community of folks that are hacking the story all the time.
And this one designer came up with this awesome solution - essentially using a webobject to not point at a farsite or another web server, but to point inwards into the course for an html document and the PDF. He leveraged that when the course compiled it would do relative mapping of the url. Once you know the pattern it is then rinse and repeat.
What is even more elegant of a solution with this is that a resources section is already built into the player of Storyline. Meaning I had a full blown solution. I had my read and sign section. I had my reference section.
So I figure share this with folks as an approach. Here is the awesome approach broken down in our fav and probably at least one of your favorite mediums to consume info from - you tube -
Last note - with everything that inherently triggers the need for a browser to open third party documents, there will be other concerns with this. Not every browser is built the same - and not every browser will be configured with the same helper application. And once you are down the mobile device path - well - I have a statement for you that may not be appropriate for the community.
So if you use this approach and your browsers are locked down by your IT?? Test test test.
If you think this is going to work on every phone?? Test test test.
Once you think you are done and even when your SMEs said great. Before you commit….Test test test.
