Track external resources (PDF)

Question

I published one course having 2 external resources (PDFs). When the user clicks on the PDF option available in the Resources section, it gets opened in the browser, but no statements are inserted into the LRS.

Am I missing some settings which will track the external resources?

Basically, I want to achieve following things:

1) Get how many times user referred to an external resource.

2) When user accessed the resource.

Is it possible? Sorry if it's a very naive question, I've just started exploring Storyline and xAPI.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Storyline's xAPI implementation is basically a replacement for the standard SCORM 1.2 calls. As such, I don't think it tracks PDF or resource clicks as they don't generate a SCORM event. It is a very limited set of xAPI calls.

You could try putting the link to resources on the master slide instead, with a button that launches some javascript to generate the xAPI call, but that would mean linking a lot of javascript (eg from the TINCAN resource website) to do one thing.

Answer 2

Here's how I've been doing it.

1. Create a new custom tab in Storyline instead of using the default Resources Tab (you can call it Resources or Attachments or anything else).
2. Set a trigger for the custom tab to open a lightbox slide that contains all the links to external resources.
3. In addition to the trigger to open a URL for each link, use the Execute JavaScript trigger to submit your xAPI statement when users click the link. Make sure the Execute JavaScript trigger is stacked in priority above the open URL trigger to ensure your xAPI statement fires.