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Participating Frequently
October 22, 2008
Question

Linking buttons

  • October 22, 2008
  • 7 replies
  • 536 views
Before I continue, I'd like to state that I've been "forum trolling" to try and find an answer to this but have been unsuccessful in finding a helpful answer within another post. If this has already been answered, I apologize for this redundancy.

I've been trying to assemble a series of software lessons into a single module for my company. We designed and scripted the different modules on various topics and recorded them as such. After editing the individual lessons into a usable format, I put them together into one large master lesson file. My intention is to have the lesson load and, along a brief recorded introduction, give the user a series of buttons which they can click to load into the lesson file, while having the rest of the lessons "unclickable" until they have completed earlier lessons. However, I'm having a bit of trouble achieving my idea for a table of contents within Captivate. Here's my problem...

Let's say I had 3 lessons in a module - Lesson A, B +C. After the intro, they would be able to click on the active Lesson A, but lessons B+C would be in active. However, once watching and completing Lesson A, the users would then be brought back to the "main menu" and Lesson B would now be active would be able to watch that lesson. Now, I was planning on making multiple "main menu" slides that would the lessons would link to on completion. So Main Menu 1 would have only have Lesson A active, but Main Menu 2 (linked to at the end of Lesson A) would have have both Lesson A+B active. I want these previously viewed lessons active so that the user can jump into them and rewatch them as needed. The problem is that, with how I have the lessons linked right now, if the users rewatch an earlier lesson, the will be linked back to an older Main Menu slide with inactive lessons. Any idea how I can fix any of this? I know it's a bit complicated and I'd be happy to clarify any points that are unclear in an attempt to solve my problem. Thank you!
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    7 replies

    October 27, 2008
    Is it a SCORM LMS? Technically, I think you can control access to the modules by defining them as SCO's. But that SCORM navigation bit gave me a headache...
    Participating Frequently
    October 27, 2008
    Ah, you didn't mention you were using an LMS. That's a whole different ballgame.

    I wouldn't try to monkey with the navigation when an LMS is involved. Doing so usually results in Very Bad Things.

    *** Edit: And by that I mean to say that I wouldn't try to create my own navigation functionality outside that provided by the LMS. Doing so would very likely break the reporting functionality of the LMS. ***

    Regards,
    John
    dsobolewAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 27, 2008
    jbradley - I'm not particularly worried about students abandoning the course and restarting. The LMS that these lessons are going to be uploaded to prompts students to return to the last place they were in their lessons if they restart for whatever reason while taking said lesson. It tracks their place even if they log out. Thanks for the heads up though - I had to scratch my head about it for awhile.

    So I'm pretty lost looking over the Java scripting stuff - I've never been very good at coding. I might ask a programmer in my company for a had, but before I do that - any other ideas on how I could make this work?

    (I appreciate all the help thus far!)
    Participating Frequently
    October 22, 2008
    Also, before you commit to a course of action, have you given any thought to the case where a user revisits your lessons for some reason? Either to review a lesson or to complete an earlier session that had to be abandoned?

    Without a reliable persistent data storage method, such users are going to potentially have to retake a lot of content.

    The extreme case would be where a user completes lesson A and B, but not C. If they come back, they must start over and retake both A and B just to get to C. Same holds true if they just want to review C again.

    We faced this very issue at work and decided that we couldn't enforce a locked-down lesson path.

    We use a browser cookie to track which lessons a user has visited, but that's only available when the user returns using the same workstation and browser they used the last time. In our environment, such consistency is not assured.

    So we use the cookie to check off completed lessons on the menu for convenience, under the assumption that the user *might* return using the same workstation/browser as before. The user remains free to take any lesson at any time, including the end-of-course assessment.

    It's not ideal, but in our case we're talking 20+ lessons per course, so we can't take any chances on potentially aggravating our audience.
    Participating Frequently
    October 22, 2008
    Captivate allows you to make Javascript calls in the HTM page hosting a movie, so if you're publishing to a web server, you could leverage that to create your menu using HTML and Javascript instead of Flash.

    Requires a fair level of web development skills instead of Flash skills, but I thought I'd throw that out there just in case.

    Regards,
    John
    dsobolewAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 22, 2008
    Rick,

    Thanks for your quick reply. I have CS3 and some basic understanding of Flash. Is a Flash wrapper easy to construct, or will it require a lot of variable construction? I'll do some research on how to do it online, but if there is a good tutorial you could recommend, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    October 22, 2008
    Welcome to our community, dsobolew

    Tough one to be sure. I'm not sure if you have Flash or Flash skills. (I'll admit up front that mine are in the "baby steps and very confused" state right now)

    But I'm thinking that you would need to construct some sort of a Flash Wrapper for this.

    Cheers... Rick