How Many IDs Does It Take to Complete a Course?

I’m currently working on trying to finish a new branching course. There have been some challenges:

  • The SME was recently out for nearly three months due to an illness and then a contract delay.

  • I’m the third instructional designer to work on this project.

  • The decision to make this a branching course was made about half-way through its original design and build.

  • The Articulate Storyline360 file is an absolute mess.

As someone who is still pretty new to the team, this has been an awesome learning experience; especially for how I do not want to approach future projects.

Trying to Follow More Than Just the Branching

Work on this course started more than two years ago, and it shows. Between the number of people who have worked on the course, the number of template themes that have been incorporated into the Storyline file, and the shift to make it branching with a fairly lengthy knowledge check at the end, it can be a little confusing as to what was decided on when and why and by whom.


Unfortunately, though likely not surprisingly, no notes or emails or planning documents are available. The initial needs analysis form that the department uses is just that: a form. There’s a lot of room for improvement there to include more specifics about the work to be performed. However, this makes it more challenging to wrap your head around as the new person on the project.

The SME has not completely made the mental transition to elearning. In their perfect world, this course would only be taught in-person as a day-long session with a written exam at the end. Ouch. Some of the history of the project was the desire to just create an online study guide for the exam (yawn). That just sounds painful to me.

About a year ago the decision was made to incorporate some branching options for learners to try and apply some of what they’re learning. Great idea, especially for the content of this course, but there should have been some basic mods to the organization of the course before they just threw in these branches. Some of the content could have been presented in a slightly different manner that would have brought out more of exactly what was going to be experienced in the branching section. Some of the emphasis was on things that did not appear in the branching section while not drawing enough attention to specifics that will be important.

The File

Oy. The file.

There’s more than one way to create a course, and as the third ID to work in this file I can tell you that not all those ways are compatible with one another. And the inconsistencies experienced based on who was working on the file make it more challenging to troubleshoot – did they turn off Previous/Next in the player, did they create Previous/Next triggers that are dependent on other triggers? Did they use the timeline to bring in content? Did they use layers or lightbox slides? All these things are important for consistency and to be able to modify the file in a reasonable timeframe.

And don’t even get me started on the use of different templates, fonts, colors, graphic types, etc. Just thinking about it makes me roll my eyes way into the back of my head.


Because of the adjustments that have been made to the course over the two years it’s been in development, a lot of scenes and even slides are out of order. I try to not even look at the scene view because it just looks like visual vomit and makes me confused before I even get started. At some point, like when the branching was introduced, it would have been ideal for someone to have just started a new Storyline file.

I’m not ever going to be afraid to start over on a course in the future. When there are significant changes in how the course is meant to work, that’s a good time to review how things are set up, organized, and linked and whether or not that continues to work with the changes needed. Patchwork quilts are heirloom items, patchwork courses are an ID’s nightmare.

Keep On Plugging Away

As this course is part of a larger deliverable on this contract, there is a deadline approaching. As of Friday, I had about 20 comments on the most recent version to start working on. At this point, the best approach for me inside my head is to just focus on what’s been started, incorporating whatever mods the SME is looking for, and making sure the functionality works backwards-forwards-and-sideways.

The course is 95% complete at this point (about 80% when I took it on very early in my tenure) so reworking the whole thing is not the best use of time. But this learning experience will stick with me. When a project shifts, it’s worth the time to take what you’ve learned about the project so far and starting over on the digital file. When things are designed to work from the beginning, and not adjusted and re-adjusted to try to fit, everything runs more smoothly (including the learner experience).

References

Reyes, A. (n.d.). Workflow with yarn image. https://unsplash.com/photos/qWwpHwip31M.

Kaleidico. (n.d.). Two people at whiteboard image. https://unsplash.com/photos/26MJGnCM0Wc.