What’s the Best Method for Tracking Progress?

Learners are empowered when they can track their progress through a course, and at Yukon Learning, we find this to be a popular concept in both our custom course development as well as our hands-on Articulate 360 training! Why don’t we explore this “as heard in training” question today: “What’s the Best Method for Tracking Progress?”

We’ve talked about displaying course progress using a slider and variables in the blog post, “How Can I Use a Slider as Progress Meter?” We enjoy and recommend that method for e-Learning developed in Storyline 3, so if you aren’t yet a Storyline 360 user, head over there…go on…what are you waiting for?! If you’re a Storyline 360 developer, however, read on.

Articulate has since streamlined progress tracking with a simple feature—Storyline 360 Slide Numbers—and we thought this could be an opportunity for us to revisit, reconsider, and reboot an “as heard in training” blog topic in a way that truly holds up to 2021 standards.

Where do we begin?

As you can see in our example, when we display course progress in Storyline 360, we place the Slide Number feature directly on every single slide (or most of them).

What we find is the most straightforward way to implement the Slide Number feature is by editing the Slide Master.

Regardless of the progress you’ve made in the development of a course, you can navigate to View tab | Slide Master now. In Storyline 360, what we’re about to create will always be updating as you work on your projects. …Now that’s “progress!”

Once in Slide Master view, let’s track both slide count and progress percentage. This time, we’ll only count slides in the Player Menu, which won’t include slides in the “project” that we may hide from learners’ view, and we’ll do so with just the following steps:

1. Select (or create) a Slide Master layout.
2. Add a text box (off to the side or in a corner) and type something like “Viewed,” “Visited,” or “Completed” to tell the learner how much of the course is done.
3. Type a space at the end and then select Insert tab | Slide Number drop-down | Slides Viewed in Menu.
4. Type a space, the word “of,” and another space.
5. Select the Insert tab | Slide Number drop-down | More… | Total slides in menu | Insert.
6. Type another space, a dash (“-”), and one more space.
7. Select Insert tab | Slide Number drop-down | More… | Progress through menu | Insert.
8. Done! Exit Slide Master view by navigating to the Slide Master tab | Close Master View and then preview the entire course to test what you’ve just built.

Tip: You may find that you don’t need to track every slide currently being tracked, such as a navigation help slide or a slide with contact information. In our example, we decided to exclude our title slide and our conclusion slide. Well, Articulate has thought of that too…

To exclude slides from our slide count:

1. Select the Insert tab | Slide Number drop-down| Exclude Slides…
2. Uncheck any slides that don’t need to be counted toward the learner’s progress.

Easy, right?

Perhaps the most magical part of this feature is that Storyline 360 is constantly updating the Slide Number references in your course, even as you add or remove slides from a project. Less worry, more development. Plus, since the Slide Number feature uses variables, learners can revisit slides, slides can reset, and the variables will always be keeping track of learners’ progress.

Peek into our file if you like but know that you also have a lot of agency over just how to display course progress to your learners. (Experiment with the options and design and tell us what you prefer!)

Want more? Follow along here in the recording of our Beyond the Conference webinar session, “Dialing Up Your Progress Meters” to bring a rotating dial into the mix!

“Progress is not accomplished in one stage.” ~Victor Hugo, Les Misérables