Creating Custom Courses in HTML5

What to do about SCORM and how to make your HTML5 course work in Workhub

Updated over a week ago

Background

SCORM is a great standard but it has never quite worked for our purposes. We've developed our own LMS within Workhub and while we've previously developed in Adobe Flash we've made the switch to HTML5 now. 

If you're already familiar with SCORM, the good news is that you'll have minimal changes migrating from SCORM to HTML5. 

The key difference between the two are that we don't utilize quiz tracking from within the course. Quiz questions will need to be moved into our quiz builder, which are completed as each lesson is finished. What's great about this is that you as the administrator for your company can change or add questions at any time and you get a running tally of quiz difficulty. This allows you to make changes on the fly without talking to a content person.

Before you Begin

If you previously have courses done in SCORM it should be as simple as opening the master files and exporting the course into HTML5 instead of SCORM. The most popular course authoring tools are Captivate and Articulate Storyline and we'll cover them below.

If you're building a new HTML5 course it's good to know our organization structure that we recommend for courses.

It goes something like this:

Main Topic
    -Section 1
         -Topic 1
         -Topic 2      
    -Section 2        
         -Topic 1
         -Topic 2
         -Topic 3
    -Section 3        
         -Topic 1
         -Topic 2
         -Topic 3
         -Topic 4

Our software will name these the Course Name>Lesson>Lesson Topic. We recommend not having lessons over 15 minutes to help with memory retention. Our quizzes have been taken over 7.5 million times so we've gotten some good feedback in that time.

Articulate Storyline - Adding Workhub Code into your Project

For your project you will need to add a trigger on the first slide when the timeline starts:

The javascript that is executed is:
parent.startLesson()
This will log an attempt in the worker's activity history letting you know that they started watching the lesson.

Next add a trigger on your last slide when the timeline starts with the following javascript:
parent.completeLesson()
This tells our server to enable the quiz for the worker(normally the quiz is disabled until the training content has been viewed.)

Lastly, on the timeline end of the last slide add a trigger that executes the following javascript:
parent.closeLesson()
This sends the worker back to the course details page where the quiz is available so it's important that this is the last thing that happens in your lesson. You could also add this to a button that says "Complete Lesson" if you want the worker to return at their leisure.

Adobe Captivate - Adding Workhub Code into your Project

The same javascript is applied but in Captivate they call them Actions instead of triggers.

When you're Ready

Publish your content in Articulate with the following settings:

or in Captivate with the following settings:

To get your HTML5 course into Workhub you'll need to contact someone on our support team. There's a little bit of back-end work we need to do before uploading each course. We'll set you on the right track.

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