Customized Progress Indicator

Intro

Do you use the Progress Indicator for Quizzes? I'm very frustrated about that indicator: you have the choice between a Relative or an Absolute indicator, you can adjust the style using the Object Style Manager, but... no way to change the phrasing of that indicator. It is always 'Question X of Y'. If you are an unhappy Captivate-user that needs to localize a lot of courses, this is really annoying. My Dutch-speaking students want a Dutch indicator, my French students want a French indicator etc.
 
It is really not so hard to create your own Progress indicator for Question slides, using rather simple advanced actions and a dedicated Master slide. In this tip I will explain the work flow step by step
 

Example

Play this movie to check the result. In this Quiz I do have 6 question slides. The first 3 questions use a master slide with a progress indicator in English, the last 3 use a similar master slide but with an indicator in Dutch. Do not panic: all questions are in English.

Work Flow

  • User variables: create 2 user variables, I labeled them
    • v_begin  to store the slide number of the last slide immediately before the first question slide 
    • v_current  to store the number of the question; since there is no accessible system variable for this information I will have to detect it from the current slide number

  • Advanced actions: create 2 advanced (standard) actions, I labeled them:
    • IndBegin: to be triggered on entering the last normal slide before the first question. It has only one real statement: to store the current slide number (system variable rdinfoCurrentSlide) in the user variable v_begin. First image in the Gallery shows this action.
    • IndCurrent; to be triggered on entering each question slide, it calculates the question number and stores it in the variable v_current. I do use the system variable rdinfoCurrentSlide again combined with the fixed  number stored in v_begin. Second image in the Gallery shows this action.

  • Attach the actions IndBegin to On Enter for the last slide before the questions and IndCurrent to all Question slides as the same On Enter action (can be done in one operation, select all the Question slides and use the Properties panel, Action accordion)

  • Master slide: create the master slide to be applied to all the Question slides. In this example I created 2 Master slides for the English and the Dutch questions, both based on the General master slide (for the background). Insert the text caption that shows the sentence to be used for the Progress indicator. The used variables in my Progress Indicator (see third image in the Gallery) were:
    • v_current the current question slide number, calculated with IndCurrent action
    • cpQuizInfoTotalQuestionsPerProject is a Quizzing system variable that shows the total number of questions in the project, you can of course also introduce this manually but I do not like to count myself
    • cpQuizInfoPointsPerQuestionSlice this is a bonus, not necessary but extra information for the learner, a Quizzing system variable as well. 

Conclusion

Hope you liked this small tip, and will be inspired to use variables on master slides.
 
 
 

 

Upvote Upvoted 4
7 responses
Hi Lieve,
I wrote a comment on my blog with an alternative (more easy) way to achieve a customised progress indicator for quizzes.

You can find the article here: http://blncqrt.be/n

— Dieter Blancquaert
Thanks for sharing above article.
— ralph eggleston
I am struggling to get this to work with Random Questions slides. It works perfectly on regular question slides. The difference is that I can't find a way to add an action on enter in random slides.
— Debbie
4 visitors upvoted this post.