Tutorial: Adobe Captivate 5 – Adaptive menu based on score

Yes another great tutorial from Lilybiri  in the Adobe Community Publishing.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a custom course menu in Adobe Captivate 5 that will adapt to scores achieved in a pre-test. Imagine that you have a large course with several chapters. In the beginning you could ask the user some questions to find out which areas they already know and which areas they need to go through. This tutorial will show you how to do that.

In addition to Advanced Actions and variables you will also get an insight into using the new Effects feature in Adobe Captivate 5.

You can access the tutorial by following this link.

You can follow Lilybiri on Twitter here.

Tutorial: Adobe Captivate 5 – creating tests with multiple scores

Another great tutorial from Lilybiri  in the Adobe Community Publishing.

This tutorial will show you how to create a test that can score on multiple parameters. It involves using variables, advanced actions and creating your own “question slides”.

You can access the tutorial by following this link.

You can follow Lilybiri on Twitter here.

Tutorial: Adobe Captivate 5 – Using Advanced Actions to show conclusions based on different scores

Lilybiri have created a great tutorial in the Adobe Community Publishing.

The Tutorial shows you how to create an Advanced Action that can show different conclusions based on multiple scores in an Adobe Captivate 5 environment. The tutorial gives you a great overview of Advanced Actions and the new editor in Adobe Captivate 5. The tutorial also include sample files.

You find the tutorial by following this link.

You can follow Lilybiri on Twitter here.

Adobe Captivate 5 system variables

Adobe Captivate 5 gives you access to the same system variables as with Adobe Captivate 4 as well as three new ones. These variables allows the Captivate developer to add extra functionality to their projects. The system variables in Adobe Captivate 5 have been assigned to some different groups than in Captivate 4 so here is a new updated list of the available variables and their function.

The layout of this site isn’t handling tables very well so the complete list of Adobe Captivate 5 system variables and examples of how to use in Adobe Flash can be downloaded as a PDF at the bottom of this post.

The System Variables in Adobe Captivate 5 are divided into different groups:

MovieControl lists variables for events that control the movie like pause, resume, previous, next slide, and so on.

MovieInformation lists variables related to the movie such as variables for the current slide, current frame, and so on.

MovieMetaData lists variables that provide information about the project such as project name, author, and company.

SystemInformation lists variables that can be picked up from your computer such as current date and current time.

Quizzing lists variables related to quizzing, such as the variables that capture the number of attempts and the percentage of questions answered correctly.

MovieControl Variables:

These variables can be manipulated through Advanced Actions, Flash animations and Widgets.

MovieInformation variables:

These variables can be accessed from Advanced Actions, Flash animations, Widgets and can be inserted in Text Captions to display their value.

MovieMetaData variables:

These variables can be accessed from Advanced Actions, Flash animations, Widgets and can be inserted in Text Captions to display their value.

SystemInformation variables:

These variables can be accessed from Advanced Actions, Flash animations, Widgets and can be inserted in Text Captions to display their value.

Quizzing variables:

These variables can be accessed from Advanced Actions, Flash animations, Widgets and can be inserted in Text Captions to display their value.

Accessing variables in Adobe Captivate 5:

The majority of the variables can be used in Text Captions to display their value. They can also be used in Advanced Actions to perform an action based on the value of the variable. From Advanced Actions it is also possible to manipulate the Movie Control variables.

Accessing variables from Flash in Adobe Captivate 5:

In Adobe Captivate 5 the runtime structure have been changed  a bit so you now have to access the “root” through a proxy. Furthermore Adobe Captivate 5 only uses ActionScript 3.0 (AS3) so the way you access variables are a bit different from Captivate 4.

In short this is how you can access variables from a Flash Animation inserted into Adobe Captivate 5:

For example this would pause your Adobe Captivate SWF:

I haven’t tested all the variables with Adobe Captivate 5 yet. In Adobe Captivate 4 some of the variables were not accessible on the main root. They were contained within a movieclip called “movie”. I’m not sure if this is the case here but I will update the post once I have confirmed it.

You can download the list of variables as a handy PDF file here:

Branching using Advanced Actions in Adobe Captivate 4

I have just been working on a large project involving a big course that would be distributed to roughly 18.000 users.  

The challenges were many but in particular these things made it pretty tricky:

• The course was to be delivered through an LMS (e.g. SCORM compatible)
• The course was multi-lingual (4 different languages) so the user should be able to pick their language of choice and then get the appropriate content.
• The course was aimed at 9 different types of people based on their functional area and job and all of them needed individual information but should also be allowed to view all the other areas.
• An earlier version of the course was already deployed in the LMS and this should replace that (e.g. the file structure and SCORM manifest should remain the same.)

Language selection:

The first task was the language selection. I decided that I would create 4 separate Captivate files  – one for each language – and then use a Flash loader to keep track of the selected language and load the relevant file. The Flash language loader basically asks the user which language they want to use when they start the course. This value is then saved in the LMS and used throughout the course by the Flash loader to display the correct content to the user.

Major branching exercise:

The next task was to figure out how to handle the branching when the course contained mandatory information for everyone as well as optional information. The information flow in the course was distributed like this image shows.

Figure: The information flow in the course

The blue boxes indicate mandatory elements that all students needed to go through. Then in the middle of the course we have the 9 different functional areas, which contains the information relevant to that particular area. After the user had reviewed that information they would then see some more mandatory information and then the course was finished.

The problem was that a person working in the office for example should get the mandatory information – then some information specific to his/her functional area and then some more mandatory information. A person working in production would see the mandatory information – then the information specific to his/her area and finally some more mandatory information.

However a manager would need to go through the mandatory information and then all the 8 separate areas and finally the remaining mandatory information. It should also be possible for interested employees to go through all the areas if they wanted to.

The solution:

So how should I handle these 9 different areas properly? It all needed to be within one Captivate SWF due to the restriction of reusing the old SCORM structure and I also had to keep the 4 separate languages in mind.

The answer was to use the advanced actions capabilities of Adobe Captivate 4. It wasn’t completely painless since I ran into some restrictions and shortcomings but I managed to get it to work.

I started off by creating a “launch” screen on the first page of my course. This screen contained information about the course itself (objectives, duration etc.) but also asked the employee to select his/her functional area.

Figure: An example of a launch screen

Once the user clicked on of the areas I executed an “On success” – Multiple actions that set the areaVariable to the relevant number and proceeded to the next slide with the mandatory information for everyone.

Figure: The action on the click boxes on the launch screen

At the end of the section with the mandatory information I inserted a blank slide with a 0.1 duration. This slide had an “On slide enter” event that executed an advanced action that I called branchingAction.

This action checks the value of the areaVariable and sends the user to the relevant slide for his/her area.

Figure: The branchingAction

The action contains the same functionality for all 9 areas. If the areaVariable is equal to zero then that means that the user is a manager (or have chosen to review the entire course). Then it will proceed to the next slide.

Check if (areaVariable is equal to 0)
begin
Go to next slide
Continue
end
Or Else
begin
end

This worked just fine but two new problems occurred.

Problem 1:

As you can see I have put a “Continue” command after the “Jump to slide” command. This is because that when you jump to a slide like this then the slide will start off with a paused state. It will not jump to the slide and commence playback but instead jump to the slide and pause. I needed it to start playback immediately after the jump so I put the Continue command into the advanced action.

However this does not work… The Continue command will NOT make the project play after you jump to a slide. I tried multiple ways of getting the slide to play from within Captivate but as far as I could figure out there is no way to do it from Captivate. Basically this means that the user needs to press play on your playbar to resume playback of the course. Since I don’t use the playbars (and I also find it stupid that a user needs to push play again) this was not an option.

Update: Based on Lori’s comment to this post I created a new test project to figure out why I was experiencing this problem. The reason is that if you use your own navigational buttons instead of the standard playbar then Captivate will not resume playback on a slide jumped to from an advanced action. In my mind it’s clearly a bug in Captivate and I will submit a bug report to Adobe.

The solution to problem 1 was to create a small Flash file that would force Captivate to resume playback after jumping to the slide. The Flash file can be downloaded here in case you need it -> resumePlaybackSWF (134)

I then inserted this Flash file on all the slides that my action would jump to and problem solved.

Problem 2:

So now that I got the resume playback to work I had another problem. Once a user had selected their functional area and had finished reading the information then they should be sent off to the rest of the mandatory content. However now if the user clicked next they would get the information from one of the other functional areas since those slides were located after each other.

My projects first 29 slides contained the launcher and the mandatory information. Then I had roughly 40 slides after these 29 slides that contained the information for each of the functional areas. Finally I had 10 slides in the end that contained the last part of mandatory information in the course.

Basically what I needed to do was to have a user that had read the content in their functional area to be sent off to slide 69 that contained the remaining part of the course. However I also had users that needed to review the entire course (managers) so I couldn’t just create a jump to slide 69 on the last page of all my functional area content slides.

The solution was to create another advanced action – branchingCompleted.

Figure: The branchingCompleted action

This action checks if the areaVariable is equal to zero (e.g. a manager that needs to complete the entire course) and if so then it sends the user to the next slide. In all other cases it will jump to the first slide of the last part of the course.

In order for this to work I had to insert blank slides of 0.1 seconds duration after all my functional area content. These slides contained an “On slide enter” – Execute advanced action that ran my branchingCompleted action.

This solved the second problem as Adobe Captivate now checked the status of the areaVariable after each functional area.

Wrap-up:

The above process allowed me to create a course in Adobe Captivate with four separate languages and 9 different branches. Works like a charm and it’s simple to update as each language is contained within a single Captivate file.

Hopefully this will help you a bit on the way if you a creating something similar one day.

/Michael

Tutorial: Lock the progress bar in the Adobe Captivate playbar

In some courses you don’t want the user to “scrub” back and forth by using the progress bar slider. Of course you can disable the progress bar alltogether but then you will loose the visual indication of how far the user has progress in the course.

By using a custom Flash file it is possible to manipulate this Adobe Captivate progress bar slider so that it will show the progress but the user can’t interact with it.

The progress bar slider uses an event listener to check if the user interacts with the slider. To remove the possiblity of the user to interact with the slider we can simply delete these event listeners.

Here is the code (AS2):

This is all the code you need in order to “lock” the Adobe Captivate Progress bar slider.

A word of caution! Once you have deleted these event listeners there is no way to reactive them again. Therefore you can’t disable the interaction on some slides and reactivate it on others.

I included the Flash source file and a published SWF in case you don’t have access to Adobe Flash.

You can download the files here: Download files to lock the progress bar slider (230)

Have fun.

/Michael

Tutorial: Hide the total duration in the TOC

I thought I would continue with a couple of more tips & trics for manipulating the standard TOC in Adobe Captivate 4. I spent a day breaking open a Captivate file and peered into the mechanics of how everything works so I still have a couple of new things up my sleeve ;o)

Unfortunately these TOC manipulations are exclusive to AS2 projects. If you publish your Adobe Captivate project as AS3 then there seems to be no way of manipulating the TOC.

One thing that has always annoyed me is the TOC duration timer in the bottom of the TOC. The TOC settings allow you to deselect “Duration” so that each of your slides in the TOC won’t display the minutes / seconds it takes to complete that slide. One would think that if a developer disables the duration view for the individual slides then the total duration would also be disable but unfortunately not.

There is however a very simple approach to disable this TOC total duration display. Again we will need a custom Flash file to do the trick.

The code is just two lines (three with the stop command) and it looks like this:

Basically what we are doing is setting the movieclips inside Adobe Captivate 4 that holds the duration as invisible.

Of course you can make them visible again by changing the property from “false” to “true”.

I included a zip file here with the Flash file and the published SWF in case someone without access to Flash would like to use this feature. Ignore the _root warning when you insert the animation into Adobe Captivate.

Download the files here: Hide TOC Duration component / widget (220)

Have fun ;o)

/Michael

Tutorial: Open / close the Adobe Captivate TOC from your own button

The Table of Contents (TOC) in Adoce Captivate is a popular feature, but unfortunately it doesn’t offer alot of customization options.

When using the TOC in overlay mode you will get a small button “>>” in the top left (or top right) corner. This button can be used to open and close the TOC. If you use one of the standard Adobe Captivate playbars you also have a “TOC” button there, which can be used to open/close the TOC.

But what if you don’t use a playbar in your projects? Well then you are actually stuck with the small “>>” button as the only mean of opening and closing the TOC. That little button isn’t very visible and if you like me use templates in your projects it will most likely be place on top of some of your existing elements.

The Captivate movie below demonstrates the various possibilities of the TOC including the custom button approach.

Luckily if you have access to Adobe Flash you can create your own button to open and close the Adobe Captivate TOC. Here is how it’s done:

Step 1:

Create your button in your program of choice.

Step 2:

Open up a new Flash file with the same dimensions as your button

Step 3:

Give your button an instance name (I used but_mc)

Step 4:

Open up the Actionscript window (F9)

Step 5:

First you need to stop the Flash timeline:

The we need to hide the “>>” or “<<” button:

Then we create our function that will execute when the user clicks out button. Notice that in the function we once again hide the “>>” or “<<” button since their status will reset when the TOCManager.showTOC(); function is executed:

Step 6:

Save and publish your Flash file

Step 7:

Insert the Flash file as an animation in your Captivate project. You need to insert this on every slide – you cannot use “Display for rest of project”.

Step 8:

Publish your Captivate project and enjoy your own custom TOC button ;o)

Full AS2 actionsscript for the custom Adobe Captivate TOC button:

Tutorial: AS3 code for the custom right-click menu

The tutorial om how to create your own custom right-click menu for Adobe Captivate showed you how to do it with Actionscript 2.0.

The same can be achieved with Actionscript 3.0 so I thought I would post the code here. The AS3 code is very similar to the AS2 code so I will not explain it in detail. Take a look at the AS2 tutorial instead for a full explanation.

Full AS3 code for the custom right-click menu:

Tutorial: Custom right-click menu for Adobe Captivate

Wouldn’t it be nice to add your own custom right click menu to your Adobe Captivate projects?  Actually that’s a pretty simple task using a little Flash file to “inject” a new menu and substitute the standard Captivate / Flash menu with that. You could add information about who developed the project, link to your website, contact details etc.

Here is a little tutorial on how to create such a custom right-click menu in Flash (AS2) and add it into Adobe Captivate.

Demonstration:

The movie below has the regular / standard Adobe Flash and Adobe Captivate right-click menu:

The movie below has a custom right-click menu:

The Flash code:

The full code is available below,  but I will go through all the code line-by-line and explain them.

This line will create a variable to hold our custom menu.

These two lines is what we will show in the custom menu. You simply insert your own text between the ” ” brackets and that is what will be shown in the menu. Now the important thing here is that you also need an “action” to occur when the user clicks that menu item. This action is usually a function and it can simply be an empty function if you don’t want anything to happen when the user clicks. The function names above are “emptyFunction” and “openWebsite”.

This will hide the standard right-click menu items.

This will put our custom menu items into the menu.

Here is our function called openWebsite. This will execute if the user clicks the associated menu item.

Here we have our emptyFunction, which will be executed when the user clicks the associated menu item. Since the function is empty no action will be taken.

Below here is the full code.

Full code for the custom Adobe Captivate right-click menu:

Steps to complete in Adobe Flash and Adobe Captivate:

So what you need to do is to create a new Flash file. Set the size to 100px x 100px as we don’t want to display anything - just execute some code.

Once you have your new Flash file open then click F9 to open up the actions panel and paste in your code. Now you just need to save your Flash file and publish it (CTRL+Enter).

Now you need to insert this Flash file into your Captivate project. Insert it on your first slide and just let it display for the standard 3 seconds. That’s actually all you need to do. Now when you view your published movie and right-click you will see your own custom menu.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

- Once you have injected your custom menu into your Adobe Captivate project you cannot get back the default Flash right-click menu without removing the Flash file and republishing your project.

- It shouldn’t be used in projects where you rely on catching right-clicks in Captivate simulations etc.

Hope you find this useful.

/Michael