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Tutorial: Locking content in Adobe Captivate 4

by on October 16, 2009 with 5 Comments in Blog , Captivate , Tutorial

In some courses / projects it might be a good idea to lock some content so the user can’t access it before completing some required slides in your project. This is especially relevant when using the TOC as the user can navigate to any slide in the project as they please.

Normally this is handled by an LMS, but you could also do it by using Advanced Actions in Captivate 4.

This is how you would do it:

On each of the required content slides you would assign a variable with a value. Then on your locked content you create an advanced action that checks for the values of these variables. If the values are okay then you display the content. If not, then you put a highlight box over the content and display a text box stating that they need to complete some required content before accessing this page.

Click here to see an example of locking content in Adobe Captivate 4

In the example project linked above I have created 5 slides and 5 variables. On slide enter these variables are assigned the value 1. On my locked content slide I perfomr a check to see if all variables are equal to 1 and then take appropriate actions.

You can download the Adobe Captivate 4 project file here: lockedContent (346)

/Michael

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  • Lieve Weymeis

    Very fine, just one problem: if a user clicks on the slides quickly in the TOC, and doesn’t watch every slide to the end, he will nevertheless be able to see the locked slide. Your solution only detects if the user has been on the slide, even if less than a second. The slides are not marked in the TOC as ‘read’ in that case. Could you have a solution that checks this?

  • http://www.cpguru.com admin

    Just set the variable value on slide exit instead of on side enter then. Unless they view the slide to the end then they wont be able to see the locked content. It would also take care of the slides not being marked in the TOC as that required that the slide is played to the end.

    /Michael

  • Lieve Weymeis

    Thanks Michael, for explaining, and for your suggestions. I’ll certainly try this out.

  • Ana

    I am creating a course where I need the students to go through the course in order from first slide to the last. I want the TOC to be unlocked for good once the student has gone through the slides, is there a solution for this? I have only found where I can set the slide action on enter and end to unlock the slide once the student starts and finishes the course, but once the student leaves the section slides to open a new one in moodle (scorm) then the ‘unlocked’ course is locked again if the student wants to review the previous section.

    Anyone know how to fix this, or where the information is stored when you set the navigation on the slide properties to enter on ‘assign’ cplockTOC?

  • http://www.cpguru.com Michael

    Hi Ana. As far as I know you wont be able to first have the TOC locked and then on subsequent visits have it open. There is no functionality for that. I’m not ruling out that some form of manipulation could be achieved by using a Flash file to take control of the TOC but I think it would be pretty advanced and not fail-proof.

    /Michael