Using Interactive Checklists and To-Do Lists in E-Learning #291

I have a back catalogue of small instructional design challenges and charrettes that I’ve been meaning to build into something bigger one day. That is obviously taking too long, so here’s a new idea. The Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community runs a weekly eLearning Challenge. I’ve mentioned before that often different IDs in different contexts will use different tools, and while I’ve used some of Articulate’s products, I’m primarily a Mac user. This means that a number of their products are not available to me. So instead, I thought, rather than being an Articulate eLearning Hero, that I could be an InArticulate eLearning Hero. So here it goes.

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Checklist interactions are a great solution when you need to list materials, products, ingredients, action items, and more.

You can also use checklist-style interactions to let your learners:

• Walk through a process, workflow, or procedure.
• Provide instructions or reminders.
• Identify dos and don’ts or generate a to-do list.
• Show and track course progress.

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an example that demonstrates how checklist and to-do interactions can be used in e-learning.

– David Anderson

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Walkthrough

Some processes do not have defined orders, and others have very specific orders. Depending on your use case, the branching scenario might work well. You can set your paths to have consequences or lock-in pathways to show where things need to be done in a certain order, or as you progress through the scenario, answers can slowly pair down until all of the required steps are complete. A rough sketch of what this might look like is^[1]:

Notice that the order of preparing the work piece and PPE in this case don’t matter, but you want your PPE before starting up the welding machine? The idea here is that you could prepare the workspace and gather PPE in any order, but definitely need to do both of those things before doing the start-up procedure. You can also sprinkle in addition items you need in terms of checklists, such as the presentation that follows the choice to gather PPE. Each pathway also ends in a custom scenario that issues points. That’s not necessary, but provides that option if wanted. Due to the points being issued, that created some mind bending and praying to the branching scenario spirits to get my head around. Normally, I would have just had a few decisions jump branches, but having the different scores required more roots on the decision tree. A screenshot of the paths is here (no peeking if you haven’t tried the scenario yet):

So, from left to right, as you move right the number of points issued at the red flag (custom end scenario) is less and less. Overall, I think this approach has very specific use cases, and doesn’t serve a general checklist purpose.

To-Do List and Reminders

This is the style of list that came to mind first when thinking about checklists. Maybe that image was influenced by the checklist in RISE360 itself, but I did also see this one over on eCampus Ontario’s H5P Studio that got me thinking:

The example includes the items to complete, but no explanation. Using the MCQ content type you could provide hints and feedback on items, but there you are limited to just text, which will work for some cases. But I wondered what you could do to provide a closer look just in case more explanation was needed. Not only that, but I didn’t want to clutter up the checklist with too much information, so someone who can use just the short list would be ok, and someone who wanted more information about any item could get it straight away. This time, it looks like the Course Presentation might be an interesting option^[2]:

Two things I like in particular with the Course Presentation checklist are that as long as you don’t close the browser tab or navigate away from the page the H5P is on, the items you check are saved. That is, they stick. For example, if you click on two and then get a further explanation for the third item, and go back to the checklist, your checked items are still checked. Another thing I liked here was the print option the presentation has. I completely forgot that was a setting you could choose, so you can grab a static copy of the checklist to take with you.

Show and Track Course Progress

Many elearning courses will have a progress bar  to show how far along in a module or course the learner is. For this quick demo, the Interactive Book content type will be our closest approximation to that, as I don’t think any other H5P content type has such a tracker. For this demo, I opted to front load the information (contrasting with the previous example’s approach). I haven’t used the book much yet, I’ve stuck mostly to columns for embedding longer H5P content into an online course.

The interactive book allows you to show progress in the table of contents. If there is an interactive item such as a quiz on a page, then when all the interactions have been tried, the default is to mark the page complete. If a page is just text, by default it will be shown as complete once it is viewed. I turned that off, and edited the text so that a user could check off each item as they completed it. I thought this was a nice work around for having to load a T/F question onto everypage. An unforeseen problem with that approach is that if there are no interactions in the book at all you do not get the Summary and Submit page. From there I added one T/F question on it’s own page, but the previous setting of requiring users to manually mark pages as complete is global! So I couldn’t turn it off for just the one page, so now the final page requires 3 clicks (select T or F, click check, click the task is completed).

Generally I think the review page is nice, and if you have submissions set up and want to track that kind of thing then this sample would work. It also provides a nice review of what all you did at a high level again. As a straight checklist though, I think leaving this particular sample as just 5 pages and omitting the Summary and Submission page would be the way to go.

Review

I think after having created these three samples that for a general digital checklist, made with H5P, I might lean towards the course presentation myself. If I needed xAPI ability and reporting the Course Presentation can do that. It enables a user to interact with the checklist, but also get more information if needed. Finally, that print button takes it to a different place than many other H5P content types, bridging the digital and analog gap.

Which approach do you use?

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Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash

[1] This was adapted from BV52’s Crude Sample shared on the H5P forums.

[2] This checklist was adapted from Dan Levy’s sample checklist provided at Teaching Effectively with Zoom. Check out the website for more useful resources including his new book.