Response Latency Widget for Adobe Captivate 5

I recently developed an Adobe Captivate Widget for a person working with Behaviour Analysis at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was his wish that the Adobe Captivate Widget would be available to the Captivate community as well so here it is.

What does it do?

This Adobe Captivate Widget records the response latency from the time that the user enters a question slide until the Submit button is clicked. It will also grab a variety of other data from the project for each of the questions. Now the really cool thing is that the Adobe Captivate Widget actually stores all the information as comma separated text files on a webserver. This data can then be imported directly into Excel or similar and analyzed.

What type of data does it collect?

UserID, date, time, slide number, time until submit was clicked, type of slide, MS since project was started, Project Name, Points scored in the project so far, Question Slide Type, Total Correct Answers, Total Unanswered Questions (skipped questions), Total Points available in Project.
Example:
Michael,12/22/2010,9:17:15,2,2.288,QuestionSlide,7672,Test Project v1,0,choice,0,0,20
Michael,12/22/2010,9:17:47,3,20.422,QuestionSlide,40406,Test Project v1,10,choice,1,0,20

Definiton of the variables:

UserID: Grabbed from a User Defined Variable in Captivate called “v_user”. This variable is also used for the filename of the text file.

Date: The date on the user’s computer

Time: The time on the user’s computer

Slide Number: The actual slide in Captivate for which the data is applicable to.

Time until submit was clicked: The response latency

Type of slide: The general slide type in Captivate (Normal slide, Question Slide, Random Question Slide)

MS since project was started: A counter that will start when the project is launched. Value is in Miliseconds

Project Name: The Project Name from the Captivate Project Properties

Points scored in the project so far: The aggregated amount of points scored by the user. Note that this does not include the slide that the data is sent from. Basically if a user scores 10 points on slide 1 then this variable will still show 0 here, but on slide 2 the variable will be updated to show 10.

Question Slide Type: The type of Question Slide (Choice, True-False, Likert etc.)

Total Correct Answers: The number of total correct answers in the project. Just like “Points scored in project so far” it is updated on the slide after the current slide.

Total Unanswered Questions: Shows the number of unanswered/skipped questions. Behaves similar to “Total Correct Answers”.

Total Points Available in Project: Shows the total/maximum points available in the project.

How to use the Adobe Captivate Widget:

Step1:

The Adobe Captivate widget itself simply needs to be inserted on a quiz slide. It should span the entire timeline for the slide. A separate copy of the widget needs to be inserted on each quiz slide (you can insert it on one slide and copy / paste to all other slides)

Set up a Text Entry Box (TEB) on your first slide (or any other slide as long as it is before the first instance of the widget) and associate the TEB with a User Defined Variable named “v_user”.  This is a required variable and the widget will not work if this is not present since it is used to create the filename.

This concludes the things you need to do in Captivate.

Step2:

Once you have published your project then you manually copy the PHP file “write.php” to the directory where you published your Captivate project to. Upload the files to a web server running PHP.

Step3:

Make sure that the directory on your web server has the correct permissions set in order for the PHP Script to create and write files. You could just set it to CHMOD 777 to be sure.

Step 4:

Enjoy the data you are collecting ;o)

Limitations:

No known limitations

Requirements:

Adobe Captivate 5, a webserver running PHP, the ability to CHMOD a directory on your web server to allow PHP to create / write to files.

Download: