Using creative interactions to build engaging courses , part 1: locking screens

Take control of how your learners progress through your courses with the actions and display conditions in your eLearning authoring tool. This article, the first of two exploring how creative interactions can make your courses more engaging, looks at how to lock screens, with practical examples demonstrated in Gomo.

In order to pace and manage your learner journey, you need to master actions and display conditions. These elements of your course do the following:

• Actions: Define what happens when the asset or element is interacted with.
• Display Conditions: Defines when an asset or element will appear on a screen.

This post will show you some practical ways of controlling your learner journey, ensuring key messages are delivered and understood by your learners. Join us as we explore how to make it more difficult for learners to rush through the course by locking screens (and in part two, topics and distinct routes) through features in your authoring tool. We've also included some handy step by step videos to show you how to do this in Gomo.

In Gomo, actions and display conditions can be edited in the screen editor by clicking on a specific element and clicking on the ‘set actions’ or ‘set display conditions’ options in the right-hand menu.

Note that display conditions that affect how an individual screen behaves can also be set in the navigation and tracking section of the right-hand menu.

Ensure all your content is seen by locking screens

A common worry for learning designers is that learners will simply click their way through every page in a course in order to get it over with, thus failing to learn anything in the process.

This may be particularly relevant for compliance, risk, and governance courses where there is a regulatory requirement to prove understanding. Locking screens and influencing the learner journey can help demonstrate specific learning objectives have been met.

Whereas a compliance course will likely have an assessment to demonstrate understanding, other types of learning, for example leadership training, should still apply similar principles. This means every screen should engage and cover something useful and applicable to the learner’s day to day responsibilities.

To make sure learners get the most out of these kinds of courses, you have the option of locking screens until certain conditions are met.

Using the ‘screen status’ display condition to hide the next button

In Gomo, by default, courses will allow learners to move as quickly through your screens as they want to. However, by applying a screen status display condition to the ‘next’ button, you can easily prevent this behavior. Here’s how to do it:

1. In the ‘screen properties’ menu on the right-hand side of Gomo’s screen editor, scroll down to the navigation and tracking section and click ‘configure’.
2. You will then see a menu on which you can hide, label, and change the function of the ‘next’ and ‘back’ screen navigation buttons. You also have an option to set display conditions for these buttons (showing how many conditions are currently applied).
3. Add a screen status display condition from the drop-down list of options. Select the name of the current screen and set the requirement to ‘complete’.

The ‘next’ button will now only ever appear when all of the assets (e.g. carousels, filmstrips, videos, accordions, etc.) on your screen have been interacted with.

How to make sure your learning videos get viewed

A quick video-related tip: when using the above method, you may find that learners simply use the progress bar to skip right to the end of your video. This would end up triggering the completion condition without them watching the content! To prevent this, simply hide the progress bar. In Gomo, click your video asset, scroll down to ‘media settings’ and untick the progress bar option.

Skipping the next button with the ‘link to screen’ action

There may be occasions when you want to automatically move on once the video is finished. A classic use case for this is when creating a video scenario: you want to have the learner watch a video and then answer a “What would you do next?” question without making them click ‘next’. In Gomo, click on your video asset and:

1. Scroll down to ‘video completed actions’ and select ‘actions’ to attach an action
2. Just like display conditions, there are several options. Choose ‘link to screen’.
3. Change result to ‘next screen’

Upon completion of your video, the learner will now be automatically moved to the next page.

Using ‘asset correctness’ to control question progression

If you purely want to lock access to the next question until a question is answered, you can simply use the ‘screen status’ method described above.

By instead using ‘asset correctness’ in the same menu (and pointing to the question asset), you can prevent the learner from clicking the ‘next’ button unless they specifically get the question right (i.e. result set to ‘Equals’ and ‘True’).

If you’re running a particularly strict assessment, you could even create a button set to appear if a false answer is given. Simply click on the button, click ‘add action’ in the right-hand menu, and use the ‘link to screen’ action type, pointing to their revision material with a suitable CTA.