[Beta] Guided Journeys

The Guided Journeys feature allows instructors to organize course content into various sections, enabling participants to access relevant materials for each section and follow the steps throughout their course using CloudShare. This eliminates the need to refer back to other source instructions. This structured approach promotes effective content organization and criteria or skill performance assessment.

Additionally, the Guided Journeys feature automatically monitors participants’ progress based on their interactions, providing both individual and aggregated progress data. Instructors receive real-time reports on participant and class progress, offering valuable insights. Moving from a single-content format to a section-based system greatly enhances the learning experience, improves instructional oversight, and enables instructors to more effectively monitor class progress and structure their CloudShare experience into manageable steps.

Defining Visual AI Checkpoints in a Guided Journey enables instructors to verify that participants have achieved expected states. One Visual AI Checkpoint can be added to each section of a Guided Journey. When a participant clicks a Check button during a Guided Journey, CloudShare compares the participant’s current VM screen with a reference screenshot uploaded by the instructor to provide immediate pass/fail feedback and helps instructors identify where participants may be struggling. See Visual AI Checkpoints for more information.

Creating a Guided Journey

Guided Journeys can be created at two levels:

1. Blueprint Level

• When creating a Guided Journey at the blueprint level, you can customize or configure all of the information needed, save the Guided Journey to a snapshot, and set this snapshot as your default on the blueprint. You can then use the blueprint to create multiple experiences that share the same Guided Journey configuration.
• When new experiences are created using a blueprint, all the information stored in the blueprint is applied to the new experiences. This enables the same Guided Journey to be reused consistently across experiences.

2. Experience Level

• Guided Journeys created at the experience level are specific to that particular experience. All functionality and customization apply only to the selected experience.

You can also create Guided Journeys by importing content directly from a Markdown (.md) file. For more, see Creating a Guided Journey Using a Markdown File. 

To add a Guided Journey to your experience:

1. Open the experience’s Editor, click + Content Item, and select Guided Journey. This will open a window on the left where you’ll be able to create and manage your sections and a window at the bottom right where you can name the Guided Journey tab.

2. In the Editor, adding a Guided Journey will automatically generate a default chapter and section. You can create additional chapters as needed and arrange sections within them, as demonstrated below.

Chapters structure the Guided Journey into manageable parts, providing a clear hierarchy that improves navigation and enhances the overall learning experience. Each chapter contains structured sections, helping you organize training effectively while keeping participants engaged and on track.

The example below illustrates three chapters, each containing multiple sections:

You can click + Chapter at the bottom of the screen to add additional chapters.

Click the three dots to edit or delete the chapter.

Click the + sign to add additional sections to your chapter.

Click the arrow to expand/collapse the chapter.

You can re-order chapters using drag and drop. This can be done with sections within chapters as well.

You can move sections within a chapter to another chapter. To do so, click the three dots next to the section, click Move, and then move the section to where you want it to be.

Notes:

• A Guided Journey can contain multiple chapters, but at least one chapter is required.
• Deleting chapters will also delete all of the sections (and their content) within them.
• If you have only one chapter within your Guided Journey, it cannot be deleted.

3. Add sections to your Guided Journey. To do so, click the + Section button at the bottom of the Guided Journey window to add the first section.

This will open a settings window on the right, where you can add the section’s title, content, and visual check. For more, see Visual AI Checks.

 

3. Make sure to click the Save button at the top right after making changes to ensure they’re saved. You can edit your Guided Journey and save changes only before the experience starts and when there are no active student or instructor environments.

You can add more sections by clicking the + icon at the top of the sections window or the + Section button at the bottom, depending on where you are in the interface.

You can change the order of the sections by dragging them and dropping them in the desired location.

Sections can be edited or deleted by clicking the menu icon to the right of each section’s name.

Limitations 

• Multi-step Experiences: The new editor does not support multi-step experiences.
• Environment Deletion: If the environment is deleted and recreated as a new environment, the end user's progress in the Guided Journey will not be retained. However, if the environment is reverted, participants' progress in the Guided Journey will be saved.
• You can include one Guided Journey per experience.

Editing a Guided Journey While the Experience is in Progress

Once an experience begins, you can still make adjustments to your Guided Journey without affecting participant progress. This allows for ongoing improvements while preserving the user experience.

To access your Guided Journey, click the Guided Journey icon on the left panel in the Experience Editor.

This action displays all sections currently included in the journey as numbered tabs, each representing a different part. Hover over any tab at the top of the Guided Journey menu to view the section name, and click a tab to jump directly to that section.

While an experience is in progress, a notification banner will appear at the top of the editor, indicating that the experience you are editing is active. Any changes made will take immediate effect.

Editing and Updates

• If a Guided Journey created at the blueprint level is edited and the changes are saved to the snapshot, the updates will automatically be reflected in all experiences derived from that blueprint, ensuring synchronization and consistency across experiences.
• The logic for editing a Guided Journey in a live experience (detailed later in this article) is also applicable to this type of edit when saved at the snapshot level. Note that this functionality applies to both the blueprint level (when saving on a snapshot), and the experience level.
• If the blueprint is updated while the experience is live, it will follow the established behavior for editing a Guided Journey in a live experience (detailed later in this article).

Note: Making specific edits at the experience level will detach the experience from the blueprint’s customization. Once detached, the experience will no longer receive updates from the original blueprint and will operate independently with the applied local customizations.

To edit a Guided Journey:

1. Click on the section you wish to edit. The section’s content will open in the editor window, allowing you to update the text, HTML, or estimated completion time.

2. Always ensure changes are saved by clicking the Save button at the top right after editing. When saving changes to a live experience, a popup will inform you that modifications have been made. You will then be presented with options for resetting the Guided Journey progress:

• Keep Sections’ Progress and Check Results: Retain all current participant progress.
• Reset Progress and Check for All Sections: Clear the status for all sections, resetting them to Not Started.
• Reset All Sections’ Progress and Check Starting From: Select a specific section number to reset progress from that point onward.

The option selected should be based on the significance of the changes made and their potential impact on the overall effectiveness of the experience. This approach ensures that participants only need to revisit sections that have undergone substantial modifications.

 

3. After making your selection, click Continue. A second confirmation box will appear, reminding you that changes are being made to a live experience, which will have an immediate impact on participants. You'll also have the option to draft a message for participants and instructors to inform them of these changes.

4. Click Save to confirm and apply changes. 

Important information:

• Participants are automatically updated of any changes made by a push notification informing them to refresh the page to view the latest version of the experience. Refreshing the page will restore participants’ progress to the option selected above. 
• Participants who have not logged into the system for several notification cycles will receive aggregated messages upon logging in. This ensures that all users are informed of any changes made while they are absent from the platform.

Viewing Participant Progress

Instructors can view participant’s progress in near real-time via the collaboration room in the Instructor Console, where each section will appear below the participants’ screen, color-coded by status:

• Explored: Dark Gray
  This status indicates that the participant has invested an adequate amount of time in this section. The status calculation is based on whether the participant has spent more than 40% of the 'Estimated Time' configured for the section.
• In Progress: Gray
  This status indicates that the participant has started working on this section. The status calculation is based on whether the participant has spent less than 40% of the 'Estimated Time' configured for the section.
• Not Started: Light Gray
  This status indicates that the participant hasn't started working in this section.
• In Focus: Blue
  This status indicates that the section is currently being viewed by the participant.

When a live experience is updated, a notification will appear in the Console, alerting you to the modifications made. To view the latest updates, simply refresh the page.

The Insights icon to the far right of the screen opens an analytics window that includes a progress tab, indicating how participants are progressing through the Guided Journey, with color-coding based on the statuses used to indicate participants’ progress through each section.

These analytics provide detailed insights into participation, engagement, and instructor interaction, as well as a tab for class progress.

Key metrics include:

• 'Explored,' 'In Progress,' and 'Not Started' rates
• Overall progress along the guided journey
• Average time participants spend on each section. 

This helps instructors understand actual participant engagement with each section and adjust course timing for efficiency. 

In the Viewer, participants will see the Guided Journey structure exactly as defined here.

Participant’s Guided Journey

The participants click the Guided Journey icon on the left to view the list of all sections in the journey. They can click the section they want to see, or click Start at the bottom to start the Guided Journey.

Once a section is opened, other sections appear as numbered tabs at the top of the Guided Journey menu. You can hover over any of them to view a section’s name, or click them to move to that section.

The numbered boxes are color-coded by status:

• Explored: Dark Gray 
• In Progress: Gray
• Not Started: Light Gray
• In Focus: Blue

In the event that the Guided Journey is updated while you're in progress, a notification window will popup informing you of the update and to refresh the page, along with a message from the instructor.

Once you’ve completed the Guided Journey, you can click Finish. You can return to any of the sections you haven’t completed at any time.