Two weeks ago I’ve got the a question from the user scinats ( I hope I pronounce this correctly) what the options are to limit the number of times a user can take a quiz in Articulate Storyline.
In this video, I show you some options to solve this problem and tell you what to look out for when building this in your next Storyline course.
cta under video
I have a short dummy module here with a startscreen 3 question slides and a result slide. Now let’s built the functionality that a student can take the quiz only once.
QuizFailed
The First step is to create a True/False variable called “QuizFailed”. The Next step is to create a trigger on the failed layer of the Quiz result slide. With this trigger we set the variable QuizFailed to True when the timeline starts on the failed layer. When the Variable QuizFailed is Tue we know a user failed the Quiz.
Now we can create a layer with text on the Startslide that will be showed when the timeline starts on the Base layer of the Start Slide if the Variable QuizFailed is True. Because the initial value of QuizFailed is False the student doesn’t see the layer. If the student fails the Quiz, The QuizFailed variable is set to True. If the student launches the course again in the LMS, The trigger on the first slide checks If the QuizFailed is True. If so, Storyline shows the layer QuizFailedText. On this layer there is also a button to close the Course.
Some things to be aware of.
The first thing If you have a button on the base layer and you don’t want that a user can click the button you can cover the button with a shape on the slide layer.
If you have a design where it isn’t possible to cover a button on the base layer you can do something with the settings of the slide layer. Right click with your mouse on the slide layer and go to properties. The Slide layer properties will open. Here you can check the option to Prevent the user from clicking on the base layer of this slide.
The Second thing is if you use the standard player navigation to navigate through your course you want to disable them. You can do this with a trigger that is executed when the timeline starts of the Slide Layer.

The third to be aware of is to change the resume setting in the Storyline player. Let’s open the player and click on other. Here you see the option Resume on Restart. We want that a user always sees the first page of the course when he opens the Course therefore we set the Resume setting to No Resume.
Now a user can only take the quiz one time. If a student can have multiple attempts to finish the quiz we can add a counter on the result slide. And add a condition to the trigger on the failed layer that the trigger is only executed when QuizAttemps for instance is two.
This is one way of restricting your e-learning course for Students when an LMS doesn’t offers the functionality. But there are other options. Do you want to see more options for instance how to restrict your course can only be viewed on a specific date or date range than leave a comment below the video and I will create a video about that next week for you.