Storyline video with embedded quiz questions

May 11, 2017 at 10:07 am | Posted in hands-on | Leave a comment

The Articulate Community was, as usual, immensely useful when I wanted to learn how to embed quiz questions in a video, and this post builds on advice and examples from David Anderson and Montse Anderson. In particular, I liked Montse’s use of Storyline’s Lightbox feature to show normal question slides on top of the paused video… but the template she provides does not include this feature, so I needed to figure it out for myself and ended up with an elegant hybrid of their two approaches. Try this for yourself by clicking the screengrab – and/or download the Storyline 2 .story file.

Step-by-step process

• Start by creating a slide for your video and a set of question slides.
• Add a hotspot over the video, right-click on it and deselect Show Hand Cursor on Hover. This prevents learners from clicking on the video to pause it.
• Press spacebar to play the video and tap the c key to add cue points when you want your questions to appear. The cue points show on the timeline and be dragged to fine-tune their timing.
• Add a new layer to your video slide for the first question. I called this layer Q1marker.
• Add a graphic marker to this layer – I used a circle with a ? You can set the size, colour, font, transparency and location as required. You should change its duration from the default 5s to whatever is required – so mine are on screen from 0s to 4s on the layer’s timeline. I also used animation to fade the object in and out (0.2s each); this looks much smoother than a sudden appearance and disappearance. Finally, I added a Hover state to the marker – I just changed the fill colour and font colour.
• On the video’s base layer, add a Slide Trigger that shows layer Q1marker when the timeline reaches Cue point #1. Add similar triggers for the other question layers.

Now when the video plays, the marker will appear on top of the video for its set duration when the timeline reaches its cue point. The video does not pause, and learners do not have to click it – so short durations could test observation and speed of reaction. Markers could even be (nearly) transparent so avoid giving a visual clue to a critical event in the video e.g. a mistake in a medical procedure.

• Add another layer which will pause the video and display the question. I called mine Q1lightbox. This layer has no objects; just a Layer Trigger to Lightbox slide ‘question 1’ when the timeline starts.
• Click the Properties gear icon next to the layer’s name and select Pause timeline of base layer and Hide slide layer when the timeline finishes. The first pauses the video while the second un-pauses the video after the lightbox slide closes.
• I adjusted the duration of this layer’s timeline to 1.5s. This means that the video will resume playing 1.5s after the learner completes the question, giving them just enough time to re-focus on the video.
• Now add a trigger to the marker on layer Q1marker to show layer Q1lightbox when the user clicks.

So now if the learner clicks on the marker, this layer is shown, the video pauses and the first question slide is lightboxed (i.e. displayed on top of the current slide). The final step is to adjust the question slides to work using this lightbox approach.

• Add a trigger Close lightbox when the user clicks to the Continue button on both the Correct and Incorrect layers.
• Delete any Next and Previous buttons – these questions are ‘stand alone’ and are only seen if the learner clicks the marker while it is visible.

Now when the learner reads their feedback from question 1 and clicks the Continue button, the lightbox closes, the layer Q1lighbox plays out its 1.5s timeline before automatically closing, and the video resumes playing.

The good news is that after testing that this all works as expected you can now copy-and-paste the elements to quickly create further questions:

• Video base layer: copy the Slide trigger and edit the layer shown and cue point used.
• Q1marker layer: copy and edit the layer’s name, the location of the marker and the layer shown when the marker is clicked.
• Q1lightbox layer: copy and edit the layer’s name and which question slide is lightboxed.
• Question slide: copy and edit the question. responses and feedback.

This example will no work on iPhone or iPad at the moment, but after some investigation I eventually found this was a problem caused by the Edshare repository I used to store the output files.

Click video to start it playing?

In the course of this frustrating series of tests I tried an extra step required if you want the video to click when played:

• Set the video option to Play video when clicked
• Create a graphic saying ‘Click video to start’
• Add a Slide Trigger to Pause timeline on this slide when the timeline starts
• Add a trigger to the video:
  Resume timeline on this slide when the user clicks
  (optional: Change state of “Click video to start” to Hidden when the user clicks)
• Move the hotspot so it starts at about 0.25s on the timeline

You need to pause the slide timeline and restart it with the video, or they get out of step, and start the hotspot after 0.25s so you can click on the video to start it!