Intro
If you are a 'fan' of my blog, you'll know that I blogged several times about creating custom Question slides, to have more control such as partial scoring, customized feedback, customized Retake features etc. And this was achieved using standard objects and/or widgets in combination with advanced actions. More than once I got the comment: 'is it also possible to report from those question slides, to have the score transferred to a LMS (or parallel solution)?' This is indeed possible, but not for everything and I promised to have some blog posts explaining the possibilities and the limitations. In this first part I'll try to explain the basic principles, the content of the 3 planned posts and some examples of the first type of custom questions. Of course - those are the easy ones. Part 2 and certainly part 3 (prepare your maths skills) will be more complicated, but...that is the challenge!
Basics
From my observations and testing, I learned that:
- Quizzing system variables are read only, you cannot change them
- Scores can only be acquired using question slides and interactive objects/widgets - those are the scoreable objects
- Only integers can be used as a score
- You cannot add a negative score
- All scores available in the project (Advanced Interaction - F9) can be added to the Total Score (cpQuizInfoPointsscored) in the Reporting accordion of the Properties panel
Based on this knowledge this are the possibilities for reporting, and will be subjects for the three blog articles:
- If you use interactive objects or widgets, the scoreable objects you can attach a score directly to them (part 1 - see below);
a question widget behaves like a default question slide, so will not talk about them in this article
- If you use static widgets, you'll need interactive objects to add a score for the question (will be treated in part 2)
- if you are using partial scoring or decrementing score in some situations as a guess correction, the situation is more complicated than if you have only a Pass/Fail possibility for a question (similar to the Default Question slides coming with Captivate) (possibilities and limitations - see part 3)
Those three situations will be treated in 3 articles, here you'll find the first one about using interactive objects and/or widgets for question slides
Question slides with scoreable objects
Example
Play this movie, it has 5 custom question slides and a score slide. And in the image of the Advanced Interaction panel, you'll see which objects are scored and added to the total score. This total score will be reflected in the quizzing system variables cpQuizInfoPointsscored and cpInfoPercentage that can be reported to a LMS or by a parallel solution.
Description of the Question slides
No extra features were added to the question slides, they were created as simple as possible (no Review, no Retake, no resetting possibilities) since the purpose of this blog post is to illustrate only the reporting possibilities. There is only one advanced action on entering the score slide that will show the appropriate Text Caption for Pass/fail.
On the question slides you'll see the status of the system variable cpQuizInfoPointsscored inserted in a Text Caption placed on the master slide. This will only be functional for version 5.5, because in previous versions this system variable was not immediately updated with scores attached to scoreable objects. This is one of my favourite new features as I described in a previous blog post: What I (dis)like in Captivate 5.5.
Slide 2: MCQ
Each sentence is covered by a click box. The click boxes over a correct answer have a score of 5 points, to be included in the Quiz and added to the total score. The click boxes over incorrect answers have no score at all. Because the user has to be able to stay on the slide, the action on Success for the click boxes was changed to 'No action' instead of 'Continue'. Since each Click Box is reported individually, partial scoring is here functional contrary to the default MCQ-slides.
Slide 3: True/False
Here I used two customized Image buttons. The button with the correct answer has again a score of 5 points, is included in the Quiz and added to the total score, the button with the incorrect answer is not reported.
Slide 4: FIB
Text Entry Boxes with a default setting were used (Submit button for each of them), and they are validated. Each TEB has a score of 5 points, included in Quiz and in the total score. No action is used again to avoid that the playhead continues after submitting an answer. Again, because of the individual reporting of each TEB we have the possibility of partial scoring for this question.
Slide 5: Hotspot
A click box with a score of 5 points and included in Quiz and score, is used as hotspot area. More than one hotspot is also possible.
Slide 6: Drag and Drop
The DragAndDrop Interactive widget (InfoSemantics) was used here once and it has a score of 15 points to be included in the Quiz and total score. Here no partial scoring because I used the widget only once, and all answers have to be correct to get the score. It would have been perfectly possible to use this widget multiple times on the slide to have real partial scoring as well (see previous blog post: Playtime with Audio and Widgets)
Slide 7: Score
You do not get the score slide automatically, because I do not have any default question slide. You can get the score slide by activating 'Show Score' in the Quiz settings, but here I preferred to create a custom results slide, using Quizzing System variables. And a conditional action on entering this score slide shows the appropriate Text caption. The PassPercent is set at 80%.
