Vacation time!

I will be taking some vacation now and therefore be away from the blog until the beginning of August.

I wish you all a very good summer.

Sincerely,

Michael

Using Advanced actions to store and show a users answers in a quiz

Sometimes you would like to present a summary slide after a quiz where you present the user with their answers to the questions and give them some extra feedback.

If you run your courses in an LMS this can be achieved (with most LMS’) by reading the data stored in the LMS database. However, if you don’t deploy through an LMS you need to take a different approach.

You can achieve this by using user defined variables and advanced actions.

Basically you need to create one variable per question. I named my userQuestion1, userQuestion2, userQuestion3 etc.

These variables will be the containers for the answer the user selects on each question in your quiz. It’s not possible to run an action (or assign a value to a variable) on a question slide in Captivate. Therefore you need to insert a blank slide after each of your questions. It just needs to be 0.2 seconds long and here we will assign our user defined variables with the relevant value.

In Captivate 4 we have a system variable called cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice. This variable contains the selected answer to the question the user just answered. Note that this variable will be overwritten when the user answers a new question.

On our 0.2 second slide we go to the slide properties – navigation area and select the “On slide exit”. Here we want to assign a value to a variable so we pick Assign from the drop down list. In the Assign field we select our user variable – userQuestion1. In the “with” field we need to select what value to assign to our variable. Here we insert the cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice variable name.

Basically what will happen here is that when these 0.2 seconds are done Captivate will assign the value of cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice to our user defined variable userQuestion1.

On to question 2. Again we need to make a 0.2 second slide after question 2 and then assign userQuestion2 with the value from cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice. Do this for all your questions.

Now we should have a number of variables that will be populated with the values and we need to go to the next step.

The next step is to create a slide that will show some specific information based on the values of our user defined variables.

In my example I just used some text captions, but basically you can use whatever you want.

For each question we need to create a text box for each of the answer possibilities. I just have 3 answer choices to each question so I need to create 3 text captions per question.

In the text box you can write whatever you want. As an example you could write “You selected option A: 2+2 = 4. That is correct! Good job.”. You then need to go to the options tab of the text caption and assign it with a proper name. I used question1_a, question1_b etc. Also uncheck the “Visible” tick mark.

Now this text box is invisible until it is told otherwise by Captivate.

Once you have set up all of your text boxes it’s time to create an Advanced Action to handle the showing of the relevant text captions for each question.

Hit SHIFT + F9 to open up the Advance Actions part and create a new action. I called mine “showAnswers”.

Here we will set up a number of conditions and appropriate actions to perform when these conditions are met. For each question you need 3 conditions.

Here is the script you should use for each answer possibility on each question:

Check If ( userQuestion1 is equal to A)
begin
show question1_a
end
Or Else
being
end

Repeat this action for all of your answer possibilities and all of your questions. (don’t you just hate the fact that you can’t copy/paste in the Advanced Actions panel!!)

Now that we have our showAnswers action set up we go to the slide properties in the navigation part and select “On slide enter:” – Execute advanced action and select our showAnswers function.

Now when you run your quiz you should have a custom slide that shows you information based on what choices the user made.

Sample project (published and CP file) can be downloaded here: www.captivate4.com/demonstrations/quizAdvancedActions.zip

Have fun ;o)

Woops.. Login to the site

Looks like I forgot to add the register / login function to the new site layout ;o)

Please use this link to register and login until I get it fixed: http://www.cpguru.com/wp-login.php?action=register

/Michael

Redesigning the blog!

I decided to implement a new design on this blog. I’m getting a bit tired of the current theme and I would also like to add some new functionality here.

Therefore you can expect to see some weird things going on here in the next couple of days. I need to change a lot of things in the backend settings and the whole setup of the blog.

** Update 04-may-2009 **

Most of the things are in place now so I switched over to the new design. Hope you like it ;o) I still have some things to do, but it’s all the minor details that needs to be sorted out now.

/Michael

Spring cleaning and upcoming forum

A lot of people added comments to the “About this blog and me” and “Captivate components” pages.

I made this post so I can move those comments here instead.

It seems like there is a need for visitors on this blog to ask questions etc. so I decided to make a forum. In the forum people will be able to ask questions, put ideas of development and hopefully help eachother. Currently I’m looking in to the various forum solutions on the market. Once the forum is up and running I’ll put a post on the blog.

New resource site for graphics

I am a big fan of Flashden.net, which allows me to purchase stock flash items to use in my projects for very little money. The guys and girls behind Flashden.net – Envato – just launced a new Stock site with graphics.

The site is called Graphic River and is a stock site containing layered Photoshop files, Vector graphics, Icons and much more.

I just looked through the various categories today and it looks like it will be very interesting in the near future. Right now they are starting up so they don’t have such a wide portfolio yet but the things they have look pretty good. One of the really great things is that you actually get the layered Photoshop files. That makes the images easy to customize and use in your own projects.

Graphic River - Stock site for photoshop and vector files

Computer problems

Sorry I haven’t posted anything on the blog or replied to your comments. I have had some major computer problems the last couple of weeks. I finally got the new RAM I needed so now the computer seems to be stable again. I need to do a complete reinstall of everything though but I should be able to do it sometime next week. Once everything is up and running again I’ll start posting again ;o)

Istockphoto.com promotion codes

I buy alot of images on Istockphoto and I found some promotion codes which will help you save a little bit.

They all worked for me so try them out. In case you find one that’s not working leave a comment so I can remove it.

XARACOM – this one will give you 20% discount on your first purchase over US$ 50 on http://www.istockphoto.com

STOCKLAYOUTS - 20% discount on your first purchase over US$ 25, but it worked for me again even though I am a long-term customer on http://www.istockphoto.com

H1P203 - 20% discount on your first purchase over US$ 60

TWIP – 20% discount on purchases over US$ 60

5EDUFREE – 5 free images when you sign up.

Good luck!

Check out the resources page!

I started on making a list of sites that I use when I develop E-learning courses. In my world course assets like high-quality images, interactive flash components etc. are important to make the course more interesting and appealing to the students.

So far I have added the 4 different sites I use to find Royalty Free Stock Photos. I use four differents sites because sometimes you cant find that perfect image your looking for on one site so you need to have different alternatives. Also the style and focus of the four sites are different so it gives you alot of different possibilities of creating unique designs.

Next up will be the list of sites I use when I purchase Stock Flash Components.

Stock Flash Components

Well I thought that I would kickstart the blog by adding some posts about some of the various components I have been using in E-learning courses recently.

Most of my production of E-learning is done in Adobe Captivate 3. It’s a great program and the ability to add Flash content is one I use alot.

Be aware that you can’t add Flash content designed for Flash Player 10 or Flash Content written in Actionscript 3.0. When Adobe releases Captivate 4 I’m sure they wil have fixed those issues, but until then stick with Flash content for Flash Player 9 and AS2 only.

Sometimes when you import Flash content into Adobe Captivate 3 you get a notification that the component contains references to “_root” and that this could result in problems. I haven’t experienced any problems with it so far, but it’s something to keep in mind.

I can develop my own Flash content for courses, but for the most part I buy a stock component from another site and adapt it to my needs. It’s a cheap, quick and effective way of adding Interactive Content to your courses.

If you don’t have any experience working with Adobe Flash you can still find some great components, which uses external images and XML files. That way you can just change the images and the XML file and still get a more interesting course.