Fill in the Blank Spelling

[Ivey5C2B]

I need to use fill in the blank questions for certain knowledge checks, but there is a significant risk of frustrating the student when they get questions wrong due to misspellings. On my end, I don't care about the spelling, I need them to understand the attribute. So far, we have gone the route of guessing every possible alternate spelling of words and setting those as acceptable answers, but I keep thinking that there has to be a better way. Is there any way to have a spell check feature on the student end? Any other solutions to this problem? 

To clarify, this is not the course creator end. This is for the student taking the elearning course. Other question types (e.g. multiple choice) will not work.

[RodWard]

This is one of those questions where the answer is:  Current technology in Captivate is not able to deliver the advanced functionality you want.

What you really require is what Artificial Intelligence is supposed to one day deliver.  But while AI is being used in a lot of areas, I have not seen it yet used in e-learning authoring tools.

Fill in the Blank and Short Answer quiz questions all rely on there being a finite number of ways a correct answer can be defined.  But human language is notoriously 'fuzzy' when it comes to what might be regarded as a correct answer to a question that is somewhat abstract.  This is where actual people need to be involved in assessing the answers.  Captivate is mostly aimed at creating quiz instruments that can be evaluated by machines such as Learning Management Systems.

[Lilybiri]

Great answer by Rod! 

As a former professor I do always care about spelling, but understand that it should not lead to a complete loss of a score. Why not offer the students more than one attempt, and remind them in the Retry message to check the spelling?  It is not an answer to your question but in the present situation could remediate at least for some students.

The Short Answer question is completely useless if you let it be scored by the application, but that is my personal opinion. I either looked for some keywords in the answer (can be done by advanced action) or checked them manually.

[Ivey5C2B]

Thanks all for your input. I would argue that there is an answer for this that fits technology today if Adobe would add the feature, and that would be to allow for a spell check button for the student side, able to be added or removed by the course creator. Maybe one day!

[RodWard]

Feel free to suggest it to Adobe: https://adobe.allegiancetech.com/cgi-bin/qwebcorporate.dll?Y9CHVD

But I think you will find that they are more likely to want to leave this to the web browser builders.  There are probably several add-ons for web browsers right now that allow end users to spell check.  Adding this type of functionality into a Captivate course would just bloat the file-size and might not work with every browser, adding even more headaches for Adobe.

[Ivey5C2B]

That's a great point. I've noticed that my users on Chrome effectively already have this feature but we can't rely on it because they may be on another browser. The browser preference is not something that I can force in this particular situation.