Widgets in Adobe Captivate (list)

Intro

If you have been visiting my blog you'll know that I wrote quite a lot of articles about using the Widgets that are available in the Captivate box (both in versions 5, 5.5 and 6). There is not much documentation about those widgets available. So I decided to list up the widgets, possible use cases and sometimes a link to blog posts that are explaining more in detail the use of that widget. And of course, added my own comments. Feel free to download the list, link is below.

Structure list

I grouped the widgets this way:

  1. Static widgets without variables (those widgets are supported for HTML5 output)
  2. Static widgets with variables (supported as well)
  3. Interactive widgets (not supported for HTML5 output)
  4. Question widget (not supported)

In the table you'll also see if the source code is available for the widget, which is the case for all, except the A3C widget.

Link

Download the list from acrobat.com using this link. No need to have an Adobe ID.

Would appreciate if you let me know this list is useful, or if you want to add more comments. It is limited on purpose to the widgets that are included with Captivate. If you are looking for external widgets, I recommend visiting the Widget Treasury.

Upvote Upvoted 2
12 responses
Nice Widget List Lieve and thanks for the mentions. http://lilybiri.posterous.com/widgets-in-captivate-list #AdobeCaptivate #CPTips #eLearning
— CaptivatePro
Thanks, Jim! And thanks for the new free widget (Timebased Actions Widget), great idea to cope with the On Exit event restrictions. Will try it out ASAP and perhaps blog about it?
— Lieve Weymeis
Great stuff Lieve. I'm pretty new to Captivate, but that A3C widget is exactly what I was hoping was supported. The only functionality I would like to see added would be for a text box that a user enters their name/student ID number which gets stored as a variable, which the widget would then use to identify specific users. Though that doesn't seem to be natively supported, I'm hoping it will be in the future.

Cheers!

— Robbie_teach
Robbie, what you are asking for is typically a functionality of the LMS. Validating an account means that you should have been able to retrieve information from a database. Think it can be done using JavaScript, but not really a subject for a widget. If you use a LMS or acrobat.com as alternative, they have the possibility to check if an account is valid.
— Lieve Weymeis
I'm not really following to be honest. My understanding is that the Learner ID that the widget allocates to each user is randomly assigned. As such, you can't compare that learner ID against information from a LMS database to identify who did what. I've emailed Adobe for further clarification on this, but if you have any insight I'd be interested to know more. Not that I think it matters, but Moodle is the LMS I'm using, and the Captivate file is therefore inside of a SCORM package.
— Robbie_teach
This explains what I was referring to. Not sure if this has changed, but if not, I don't see how extracting user information from the LMS database matters if the Learner ID is randomly generated anyway?

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/953256?tstart=0

— Robbie_teach
Robbie, now I get it: you are talking about the learner ID in the A3C widget. Think this is a problem, because of law in a lot of countries (privacy). It is not meant to see the behavior of an individual student but to offer feedback to the developer about the efficiency of the elearning course, the issues most users do encounter when taking the course etc. Perhaps I'm seeing it differently, but that is my personal opinion.
— Lieve Weymeis
Privacy could well be the issue, though if it's an optional component I don't see the harm. Regardless, what I was referring to was a text box in the captivate file that a student could enter their student ID number into. That then gets passed as a variable to the widget, and it uses that ID number instead of the default learner ID inside of the widget. This wouldn't be fool-proof as it has no authentication behind it, but I would still find that more useful than the default Learner ID. The real question is that if there is no way to identify individual learners from their Learner ID, why bother giving them one, or even separating the data into colums for individual student progress at all?
— Robbie_teach
Links do not longer work
— Frido
Adobe did stop the service I used here 8 years ago. It has no sense to switch to another depository since widgets can no longer be used for HTML output. You need to look for my post about Learning Interactions, which are compatible with HTML output.
— ir. Lieve Weymeis
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