How Do You Keep a Storyline Course from Autostarting?

When building courses in Storyline, an important final step is publishing the course. Recently, after covering publishing in a Storyline training, we were asked this follow up question: “How do you keep a Storyline course from autostarting?”

When hosting your course on a website, it may be challenging for your learners if the course begins as soon as the site is opened. We find this most common with courses placed on sites with multiple purposes, not just used to host the course. Due to the fact that the course is set to begin once it’s launched, we have to be a little creative with the way we handle it. But without fail, there’s always an easy way to make it work in Storyline!

Let’s take a look at one work-around for quickly answering this question. Take a look at the finished solution: Click here to check it out.

Build the Slide

To start, we need to add a “Start Layer” to our introductory slide.

Edit the Slide Layer

On the introductory slide’s “Start Layer,” add an image to be used as the Play button.

Trigger the Play Button

Use the Trigger Panel to trigger the Play button to “hide this layer” when clicked by the user.

Adjust the Slide Layer Properties to pause the timeline of the base layer.

Trigger the Layer to Show

Lastly, we need to trigger that start layer to appear. As we say in training, “Nothing happens without a trigger!” We will need to go back to the base layer and trigger the layer to show when the timeline starts.

Summary

As you can see, this ensures that the start layer appears immediately and pauses the base layer from playing until the learner clicks the Play button. In an LMS, this may not be as needed, but in a Web environment, it may be necessary to keep things from starting before the learner is ready to view the course.

Click here to take a look “under the hood” at our example.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions, or if you use a different approach to keep the course from autostarting.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” ~Benjamin Franklin

~Katie

Update: Please note that the interface of the faster new trigger workflow (in Storyline 360 update 3.33.20625.0 or later) will appear slightly different! While the process is the same, this article uses screen captures from the classic trigger workflow.

Update: Depending on the browser you and/or your learners use, the autoplay functionality may have changed. In addition, Storyline 360 now allows you to set a custom cover photo to display on the initial course (“play button”) screen. Learn more here!