Adobe Captivate 5: Quickest Quizzes Ever!

by Kevin Siegel

 

Adding Question Slides has always been a necessary evil in Captivate. I'm not saying that including a quiz in your eLearning isn't a good thing... certainly quizzes are an integral measuring stick for the effectiveness of your course. However, adding question slides to a Captivate eLearning course was, at best, tedious.

Prior to Captivate 4, you couldn't duplicate a Question Slide or import them from one project to another. With the introduction of Captivate 4, both of those problems were a thing of the past. But anyone who created a quiz using Captivate 4 knows how much work the process was. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, it goes a bit like this: you'll choose Quiz > Question Slide. Select the Question type and click OK. Type the question, type the answers, select the correct answer(s) and click OK. Format the Question Slide to taste. Then repeat. Not difficult, but very, very click-intensive.

Quiz Object Styles

With the new Captivate 5, the mundane chore of creating a quiz gets a whole lot easier. Prior to adding any Question Slides, you'll choose Edit > Object Style Manager. At the upper left of the Object Style Manager dialog box, there is an entire Quizzing Objects group. There are several Quizzing Objects, and you can set the styles to suit your needs.



Improved Quiz Default Labels

Choose Quiz > Quiz Preferences. From the Quiz category, select Default Labels. When your Question Slides are created, there will be buttons added automatically along the bottom of the slide allowing learners to submit their answers, clear selections, skip a question and go back and answer skipped questions. Learners will also see feedback captions as they get the answers correct or incorrect. For the first time in Captivate history, you can elect to use the default values for your captions or create custom caption styles you can use on the Question Slides. The concept of Object Styles is new in Captivate 5 and will save you a significant amount of formatting time.



Add Multiple Question Slides

The best new feature Quiz feature you'll see in Captivate 5 will present itself when you insert the first Question Slides (via Quiz > Question Slide). Gone are the bad-old-days when you had to select a single Question Type and click OK. Then, when you wanted another Question Slide, you'd have to repeat the process. And again and again.

Take a look at the image below:



All of the Question Types available in Captivate 4 are still there. However, a wonderful enhancement is the ability to specify multiple copies of each Question Type will be added to the project with a single click of the OK button (in the image above, I'm only showing the first two Question Types but I've asked Captivate to create 11 of each).

Improved Question Editing

And finally, while it's not as awe-inspiring as the ability to add a billion Question Slides to your project at one time, in Captivate 5 you can now edit the questions and answers directly on the slide (goodbye unnecessary dialog boxes). Double-clicking the text on the slide will now take you directly into text-editing mode where you can make your changes without losing focus on the slide itself.

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Looking to learn Captivate? We have a couple of options... we offer two online classes (Beginner and Advanced). Click here for details on the Beginner class. Click here for details on the Advanced class. We also have a 3-hour class devoted to Advanced Actions. Click here to learn more about that class.

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Comments

[Diane Gregory]

Is this part of the new eLearning Suite? Is it now made for the Mac? If so, is the Mac version good?

[Kevin Siegel]

Yes, yes and wonderful! If you're a Mac fanatic, you're going to love CP5!!!

[Vilu]

You're talking about Captivate-5 here and promoting training for Captivate-4 at the same time?

[AJ George]

That's correct Vilu, until Adobe officially releases Cap5 and we can start offering classes on the new version, IconLogic is still offering training on version 4.

[Daniela Howard]

Is there no way to import quiz questions? We have about 700 quiz questions that we need to pool from to make a 100 question final exam. Yikes!

[Kevin Siegel]

Import, no. However, you can copy the question slides to the clipboard and paste them into other projects.

[Sylvain Contant]

Hi, I have create a quiz (20 questions) and I would like to publish it with adobe.com or on another server. What I have to do to recall the results?

[Jesica]

Hi Kevin,

I have a captivate 5 project with a quiz that uses the default labels. Now I want to change the default text of the retry message. But when I changed it in the Quiz Preferences, nothing changed. What have I done? Is there a way to change the text or is it only for the look of the box?

Thanks!

[Kevin Siegel]

The change will only affect new question slides. Existing slides will new to be updated manually.

[Audra]

Hi, Kevin.
I'm using CP5 to produce quizzes and need to set my project up to allow users to change their answers (if desired) once they've been submitted. Any thoughts/ideas on how to do this? I've exhausted myself and the online forums...

Thanks!

[Janelle]

Hi Kevin,

I imported a certificate widget and connected it to a TEB so at the end it will display the user name, pass/fail and percentage. Unfortunately, even when the user gets a 100% score the certificate still reads 80%. Do you know why this may be?

Thanks

[Chuck J]

A quick idea for this:

"I have a captivate 5 project with a quiz that uses the default labels. Now I want to change the default text of the retry message. But when I changed it in the Quiz Preferences, nothing changed. What have I done? Is there a way to change the text or is it only for the look of the box?"

Since google landed me here on 10/24/11 for the same question:

You can use Find/Replace to change the default text - and search/replace by Style. Very handy.