Brush Up on Your Quizzing in Storyline 360: Webinar Highlights

In this month’s blog, we’ll take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this special “post webinar” post! We recently hosted our annual free webinar series; this time focused solely on quizzing. During the live webinar sessions, participants kept our team busy with some great questions in the Q&A panel.

Today, we’ll review some of the top questions asked and then get you access to the recordings and virtual reference guide. So, let’s get to it and learn how to Brush Up On Your Quizzing in Storyline 360!

Brush Up on Your Quizzing in Storyline 360 with the Articulate Trainer

Paint-by-Number Quizzing in Storyline 360

In the first webinar session, we reviewed how to use Storyline 360’s robust built-in quizzing features to create assessments. During that session, one feature stood out and received great reactions from attendees…and that’s how to anchor or lock answer choices in a quiz. Let’s learn more.

You may be aware that you can shuffle (or randomize) the answers that display after your question, which allows you to mix up the choices each time a learner receives that specific question. But, did you know that you can also shuffle some of the choices, while keeping others locked in a specific location? You can! In Storyline 360 language, we call this anchoring.

Anchoring is really helpful if you use “All of the above” or “None of the above” responses. You wouldn’t want those to appear at the top of the answer choices, right? Well, Storyline 360 has you covered! Here’s how you can anchor specific answer choices:

While in the question’s Form View, select the Question tab on the ribbon.
In the Shuffle drop-down, make sure you have the Answers option selected.

Right-click on the answer/option/choice you want to anchor or lock.
Select Anchor Choice.

Tip: Use the Move Choice Up and Move Choice Down options from the right-click menu to put your choices in the correct order before you anchor anything.

Voila! You now have happy little anchored choices (sorry, I couldn’t resist a little Bob Ross reference!).

From Paint-by-Numbers to Vincent van Gogh: Custom Quizzing in Storyline 360

In the second webinar session, we reviewed how to create custom quizzes using Storyline 360’s freeform question functionality. We discovered that you have complete control over the canvas on the quiz slide, which led us to the Feedback Master. And that was so popular, we wanted to also highlight it again. So, what’s the deal with Feedback Masters?

By default, Storyline 360 provides pre-designed layouts for the feedback layers (the correct, incorrect, and try again layers). These are great, but what if you want a more customized appearance that matches your branding and course design? Enter the fabulous world of the Feedback Master. Think of the Feedback Master as the base canvas for your feedback layers. Just like with Slide Masters, you can edit the existing ones provided by Storyline 360 or create your own.

To edit an existing Feedback Master:

Select View > Feedback Master.

The Feedback Master layouts open, showing all of the existing layouts you have in the course. The top ones are those created by default in Storyline 360.

Select the layout you’d like to edit. The existing layout’s design fills your slide canvas.
Edit the layout as appropriate.

Here’s the new set of layouts we created to match our webinar design:

On the Feedback Master tab on the ribbon, select the Close Master View option.

Tip: Make sure you close the Feedback Master when you’re done editing (just like you do when editing states). Otherwise, you could add items to the Feedback Master by mistake.

From here, any new questions you build will now automatically use the new layouts you edited or created.

Behind the Canvas in Storyline 360

In our third and final webinar session, we were joined by Articulate’s Chief Learning Architect, Tom Kuhlmann, for a unique and intimate “Ask Me Anything” session. We collected your questions and answered as many as we could during our time together. However, some of the questions went unanswered. So, we’ve provided answers and/or resources to most of your questions in the third lesson of our webinar’s virtual reference guide. And below, we’ll also explore a few questions that were asked in the Q&A panel during the webinar.

Question: What is the book you mentioned on “backward design”?

Answer: The book we love is “Understanding by Design” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. The 2nd edition is available on Amazon here if you are interested in learning more.

Tom also mentioned a book titled “Map It” by Cathy Moore. You can learn more about her behavior-based model “Action Mapping” here.

Question: Shouldn’t courses be driven by the learning objectives: stuff you need to KNOW vs need to be ABLE TO DO?

Answer: Yes, it definitely should! Courses should always be driven by the learning objectives, including your assessment. If it’s important enough to be a learning objective, you should ask learners to “prove” they retained the information. This is the second step in “backward design” – to determine acceptable evidence.

In the webinar, Tom defined the difference between “explainer courses” (stuff you need to know) versus “performance courses” (need to be able to do). In performance courses, you’ll want to have learners actually perform (or do). Make learners apply the learning in a safe e-learning setting. Stories, case studies, system simulations, and scenarios are great for performance courses.

Question: Do you have a webinar about building master slides coming up, or already available?

Answer: We do! On our Webinars page, the first session in the “Build a Storyline 360 Course from Scratch in 4 Easy Steps!” series covers designing a template. We also have a new training offering coming soon that dives into that topic even further. Stay tuned!

We hope you had a great webinar experience! As always, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us if you have any further questions or need assistance.

And, if you enjoyed these tidbits from the webinar, make sure you also check out the full webinar recording and accompanying virtual reference guide, and our Webinar Archive for even more recordings.