Unleash Adobe Captivate's Full Power with Advanced Actions
Intro
You know from this blog that it is possible to create your own question slides, using standard objects and advanced actions. That allows you to have functionalities like partial scoring, selective Retake, two quizzes in one file, etc. On the user forums I see a lot of questions concerning the default question slides, and in this post will try to list some tips about using those 'normal' questions. if you understand their functioning well, you'll be able to tweak them and perhaps avoid to invest a lot of time in creating custom questions. Beware: this will not allow you to realize quizzes with partial scoring etc! In a previous post: Customizing Review Messages I explained some of the work flows repeated here, but so many questions about this subject appear on the user forum, I thought it to be useful to have a general article that summarizes both default work flow for questions/quiz and possible ways to tweak them.
Watch this movie, where you can see some tweaking applied to.
What is typical for Question slides?
- Only one Timeline with pausing point is available: no separate timelines for the different objects, no timing possible
- Most Question Objects have their proper Object Style (missing are the ....
- You can move the pausing point visible in the timeline manually, but its timing is not available in the Properties panel
- Default objects on Question slides are always on top (see also Other Buttons)
- Whereas you can add non-interactive objects, it is impossible to add interactive objects; one big exception is the hybrid Static button widget
- You can use the slide event On Enter to trigger an (advanced) action, but the Exit event is not available (really replaced by Success/Failure events)
Analyzing Default Work flow
Start Settings
- Two attempts on Question level, two attempts on Quiz level
- All captions are visible: Correct, Incomplete (check Options in Quiz Properties), Retry Message (Action Accordion in Quiz Properties) and Incorrect (not available in Options)
- All buttons remain visible: Clear, (Back), Skip (Options in Quiz Properties), Submit
- Retake and Review allowed as well as Backwards navigation (if not, the Back button would have been contradictory)
Process on Question Level
First step
- User answers a question, clicks Submit button; the pausing point of this button is the one you see on the timeline, slide level
-
The conditional action executed as a result of clicking that button:
- pops up Correct/Incomplete/Incorrect/Retry caption, depending on the answer (conditional action)
- the message to press Y or click on the slide to proceed is included in the Correct/Incorrect;
- slide pauses, will not proceed beyond the pausing point; user can watch the captions as long as he wants
Second step
- User presses Y or clicks on the slide; see this as a click box all over the slide with a shortcut key=Y: its pausing point is the same as for the Submit button.
- The conditional action executed as a result of this user event:
-
- if answer was Incorrect and attempts not exhausted: Incorrect caption disappears, playhead remains paused, user can change his answer
- if answer was Incorrect and attempts are exhausted: Incorrect caption disappears, action specified in Action accordion of Quiz Properties panel 'Last Attempt' is executed and the playhead moves on
- if answer was Correct: Correct caption disappears, action specified Action accordion of Quiz Properties panel 'On Success' is executed and the playhead moves on
Other Buttons
-
Back: If you allow Backwards navigation, you have to know that the answer given on a previous slide cannot be changed by the user if he comes back to that slide, his answer is blocked, the Clear button will not be active either. It is only sort of a Review option of that slide. Personally I will never allow backwards movement and this is one of the reasons. If you agree with me, do not try to delete the Back buttons on the slides because they can reappear miraculously, but uncheck the option "Allow Backward Movement" in Quiz, Settings.
- Clear: will allow the user to clear his answer, as long as he remains on the slides and did not submit his answer
- Skip: doubles up as real Skip during answering questions and as Next during Review which can be a bit confusing
All objects on the questions slides have top priority, and this is the sequence of the stack:
- top most is Back button
- Clear button just under the Back
- Skip under Clear
- Submit is the bottom object
Because of this priority you cannot cover a button with another object. Possible however is:
- to make a button invisible to the user: delete its text and make the button transparent
- moving buttons, for putting one on top of the other (depends on sequence just described) or put them where the user will probably not click
Process on Quiz Level
Retake/Review
Both buttons are available on the Score slide (see Tweak Possibilities) which can confuse the user because:
- he is supposed to click Retake if he wants another attempt: this button will disappear automatically when attempts are exhausted
- if he clicks Review before exhausting attempts, all remaining attempts will be lost
The action triggered by the Continue button on the Score slide depends on the Pass/Fail status of the Quiz. Default actions are Continue for both Pass and Fail. Those actions can be changed in the Quiz Preferences, Pass/Fail as you can see in this image. The whole list of actions are availabe, you can jump to different slides, open a URL/file/project, execute advanced actions etc.
The quiz scope is a range of slides where the Quiz is 'active'. This scope starts with the first slide that has a scored object, which can be a question slide but also a slide with a scored interactive object. The scope ends with the score slide, or if you do not have a score slide, with the last scored object. Whenever the user gets out of that scope, the attempt is considered as finished if multiple attempts are allowed. Getting back into the Quiz scope will then not allow to continue the attempt. This jumping out of the quiz scope can cause issues if you are choosing one of the strict Required options in the Quiz Preferences like Pass required.
Some Tweak possibilities
On Question level
Replacing the 'Press Y or click on the slide' by a 'Next button'
OK, I do know that you cannot add a button, which is an interactive object, to any question slide. But since this step is in reality triggered by a click box that covers up the whole slide, any object that looks like a button (image, rectangle) will cheat the user to click on it, and he is just triggering the Success action of the click box.
Skipping first step of the two step process without captions
If you think it annoying that the user has to enter his answer in two steps, and you do not want to show the Correct/Incorrect text captions, just delete them. For the correct caption this can be done using the Quiz Properties panel, Options accordion. The Incorrect caption has to be deleted on the slide. In that case the first step is skipped completely: when the user clicks on the Submit button and it has been the last attempt, the Success or Failure action specified in the Quiz Properties, Actions panel are executed immediately. If you change those actions from 'Continue' to 'Go to Next Slide', the user will get immediately to the next slide. When allowing multiple attempts on question level, it is perhaps better to keep the 'Retry message' to avoid that user is just waiting, because nothing will happen. I illustrated this work flow on the first Multiple Choice question in the example: when clicking Submit, only caption that will appear is 'Retry' as long as attempts are not exhausted. When attempts are exhausted, navigation is immediately to the next slide.
Skipping first step of the two step process and showing captions and/or offer audio feedback
Little bit trickier, because you'll have to create simple advanced actions. Start by deleting all the default captions as in the previous solution. Prepare your own feedback objects:
- either text captions for correct/incorrect eventually with audio clip attached, and set them to invisible
- either 'invisible objects' like a rectangle without a stroke and with a fill that is Alpha=0% and attach the audio feedback (correct/incorrect) to those objects; set the objects to invisible
- Show the appropriate object (either Text Caption or object with audio attached)
- Hide the opposite object
- add the Skip button, but make it invisible to the user (no text, transparent); this Skip button by default jumps to the next slide, it will remain active but invisible
- on top of the Skip button add a rectangle with the text Next; this is possible because it is a static object; make it invisible in its Properties panel
- to the advanced actions described before, add a third statement that shows the rectangle
In that case you can add the static button widget that has navigational actions like 'Go to Next Slide' in its functionality list. You can even hide that button widget and show it with the Success/Last Attempt actions as well. The third question uses that approach. No need to extend the slide duration in this case. You'll have to use the static button widget with pause, CP5.5 users can download this widget from my blog: What I (dis)like in CP5.5
If you allow multiple Quiz attempts (Retake) and/or Review, you have to hide the custom text captions, fake button/button widget whenever the user reenters the slide. In the Image Gallery you'll see one of those actions 'EnterMCQ', triggered on entering the second Question slide (MCQ)
On Quiz level
Hiding the Review button until attempts are exhausted
Drag the Retake button on top of the Review button on the stage. This is possible because the Retake button is higher in the timeline stack of the Question slides. User will not see the Review button until he has exhausted the attempts. At that moment the Retake button is hidden automatically and the Review button gets visible. This functionality is used in the example movie.
Changing Skip button to Next button during Review
The same approach as for the Next button during answering could be used, but in this case you'll need to track if the user in in the Review situation: either he has exhausted the attempts and Failed, or he passed in one of the attempts. So we'll need an advanced conditional action to check that. In the example movie I did not use this approach but hide the playbar during the quiz by a simple action 'Assign cpCmndShowPlaybar with 0' on entering the first slide (instruction slide). The playbar will be set to visible when entering Review mode with this work flow:
- on entering the score slide I increment a user variable v_counter with the advanced action EnterScore (see image in Gallery)
- on entering the first Question slide I trigger an advanced action EnterFirst: since Review situation can happen either after two different situations I had to use a combined OR condition to turn on the playbar when Review status is reached (see image in Gallery)
