Articulate Storyline Development Glitches

Rob Condon, Lead Media Specialist with PulseLearning came across a number of development glitches using the latest version of Articulate Storyline. Here he details them in a short blog post……..

Woolworths, one of our Australian-based Clients, recently asked us to develop an eLearning course (Site Access Control) using Articulate Storyline, their development tool of choice.

The eLearning course needed to be desktop and smart device (tablet, iPad, mobile phones) friendly. To ensure the course met these requirements, the output was to be HTML5 enabled and 508 compliant.

In this case, smart device friendly implies that the course will render correctly on tablets but will not enable components like GPS. It will also display on a smart mobile phone, but the text and buttons will not be responsive to the mobile screen size.

While developing and testing the course using Articulate Storyline, we came across a number of glitches completing the smart device output. Here are a couple of examples:

During the course testing, we found that on completion of the pre and post assessment sections, the \’your result\’ page that Articulate Storyline auto generated was appearing blank on smart devices (iPad) but generated correctly on desktop browsers. On investigating this problem, we found that the issue was due to the way the SCORM completion variable was being set in Articulate Storyline. To solve the problem, we created a custom assessment section and coded a function to “SetCustomCourseCompletion();” in order to ensure the assessment results page generated correctly across smart devices.

We also found a glitch when using scrolling text boxes. When developing the course, we had used scrolling text boxes for a transcript pop-up section. Similar to the first problem, when reviewing the section on a browser, the text scroll functioned correctly but when reviewing on the smart device (iPad), we noticed that there were long delays to enable the scrolling text, and sometimes it would not scroll at all. The folks at Articulate Storyline say that it works but we found that when viewing HTML5 content using Safari on an iPad or iPhone, you need to use two fingers to scroll through content in scrolling panels. We thought that having to use two-finger scrolling wasn’t very intuitive, so instead we opted for fixed dimension pop-ups, allowing us to overcome the scrolling problem.

Our client was happy with the completed course and is currently deploying it to employees across Australia. On the whole, we found Articulate Storyline to be a good content development tool with just a few minor HTML5 bugs. We look forward to seeing see how the tool evolves on the next round of updates.

If you would like more detail on the glitches we came across or information on our workarounds, please do not hesitate to contact me!

Rob Condon
Lead Media Specialist
PulseLearning Development Team
Email: Rob.Condon@PulseLearning.com