Using Rules is an effective method for creating a personalized experience for your learners by offering different pathways through your course.
Rules enable you to split your course content into different branches depending on how your learners interact with your course. This can allow you to cater to several different types of learners in one course rather than having separate training materials for specific roles.
For more information on different types of branching scenarios, see Feature Focus: Creating Branching Scenarios.
How do they work?
A page that has a Rule applied will be omitted from the course until a specific condition has been fulfilled.
Until it has been revealed, the page will not contribute to a learner's total progress or score. This means that the learner is only judged on their completion of the page when it has been revealed and is available to be interacted with.
For example, I have a course with ten pages but I want to add a small section in my elearning which is only applicable to a certain group of learners.
This will mean that:
- Learner Group A will only need to work through eight of the pages in my course.
- Learner Group B will need to work through all ten.
To do this, I apply Rules to the two pages which are specific to Group B. In other words, I'm creating a branch specific to this group.
These pages will remain omitted for Group A but will be revealed for Group B. Even though Group A are only seeing eight pages of the course, they are still able to achieve 100% Completion as the two pages that are omitted by Rules are not counted in their progress.
How can I use them in my elearning?
There are several types of Rule criteria that you can use including branching based on a learner's score, which pages they've completed, their overall result, and more. This can help you create different scenarios. These are just a couple of examples of how you can use Rules to create different journeys in your course.
Create a role selector to direct different types of learner down different paths
One possible scenario could be to use Rules to guide learners with different job roles down distinct branching paths. Rather than creating three separate courses for Managers, Sales, and Support, you can instead create one course with three separate paths created with Rules, each of which is specific to a certain job role. Any pages that have been hidden from the learner using Rules won’t be counted towards their overall progress or score so they will only be assessed on the content that is relevant to them.
A learner can select their job role by answering a question: 'What is your role?'. Answering 'Support' will hide all of the pages that are for Managers and Sales and leave only the content that is relevant to Support. This means that Support won’t accidentally come across or be graded on any Manager or Sales learning.
For more information about how to do this, see Displaying course content based on a learner's role.
Create Pass/Fail scenarios in a quiz
Another could be to use Rules to direct learners to different results pages based on how they scored in an assessment.
One page is set up to be revealed if the learner has passed or achieved over a certain score, and another is set to be revealed if the learner has failed or achieved below a certain score.
This is particularly useful for situations where you need the learner to finish with a passing score. Directing them to a Fail page if they haven't achieved the required score can give them a chance to go back and retake the quiz.
If you'd like to learn how to create this, see Creating Pass/Fail scenarios with separate results pages.