Prevent Captivate from sending question data to LMS

Report · Feb 16, 2010

For this course we want the LMS to report on "slide views only," NOT on successfully answering the questions. (We have included questions only for review and reinforcement of learning, NOT for reporting or scoring.) Note: We are using Captivate 3, and our LMS is SkillPort.

These are the settings that we've selected for Quiz Preferences:

Plus, for each question, we have de-selected the "Report Answers" checkbox.

The good news is that our LMS (SkillPort) is correctly basing "course completion" on slide views only. However, for some reason the LMS is also reporting on how the learner is answering the questions (e.g., in a SkillPort report field called "Overall Results High" SkillPort shows 40 for the person who answered 2 out of 5 questions correctly, or 60 for the person who answered 3 correctly). We would like SkillPort (and Captivate) to totally ignore how the learner answers the questions, and not report on it at all.

Is there any other setting that I should change in my Captivate 3 course file? Has anyone else had a similar experience or might you have any insights? Or is it not possible to stop Captivate from sending the question data to the LMS?

Thank you for any insights or similar experiences!

P.S. Adobe Technical Support has told me that they no longer will answer questions about Captivate 3, so it would be great if I could get some support from some fellow-Captivate-users.

Report · Feb 16, 2010

I don't know - that's very odd. Can't say I've ever tried it but strange CP would be sending the score data when you've selected Slide Views Only (which should be enough) and Complete/Incomplete. Perhaps it's due to the Report Score option (though it's not like you can deselect it).

So all I can suggest is playing with other settings and see what happens...

What about trying 'Status as defined by Report Data'? as that's the section the 'Slide Views Only' falls under?

And are you SURE you've deselected Report Answers for all the Interactions? I don't know how CP is determining a score if you've specifically told it not to score those interactions (other than CP just being buggy).

One other suggestion, download the latest version of CP and open a copy of your project with that, validate the settings, and see if that behaves as it should. If not, try Adobe Tech Support again and tell them you're using CP4... (or do they require a serial number to validate against?).

Good luck! And curious to know what you find...

Erik

Report · Feb 17, 2010

Erik, thanks so much for your considerations and thoughts!

I may try the "Status as defined by Report Data" setting, as you suggested, since the other options don't work as expected.

Regarding de-selecting "Report Answers," yes I did de-select all five questions -- Here's a copy of the Advanced Interactions window:

Regarding downloading the latest version of Captivate, I'm hesitant to do that, as our company's budget may not allow this purchase. And if there's actually a free trial version, I'm also hesitant to download that, as it may interfere with my older version (3) of Captivate; and with my current deadlines, I can't afford any downtime that could possibly result due to Captivate system problems. Have you run two versions of Captivate at the same time with success?

Jan

Report · Feb 17, 2010

Hello,

No problem with CP3 and CP4 running on same system, there I can reassure you.

Lilybiri

Report · Feb 22, 2010

Here's the result of trying the option "Status as defined by report data" (under the "Report Pass or Fail" section of the Quiz Preferences window): (Reminder about my goal: I want SkillPort to totally ignore the question results and to base course completion on the learner's having viewed all of the slides.)

The SkillPort "Completed" field was still correct (i.e., Completion was based on viewing all of the slides, not on the question answers)

However, Captivate apparently still passed the results of the question answers to SkillPort, because SkillPort's "Current Score" field still continues to reflect the percentage of questions answered correctly, rather than the percentage of slides viewed.

So the "Status as defined by report data" option didn't seem to work any better than the "Complete/Incomplete" option.

Here's an idea -- What would happen if I de-selected the "Enable reporting for this project"? (see illustration below) Then would the LMS (SkillPort) totally ignore question results and base course completion simply on slide views?

Thanks again for any insights.

Jan

Report · Feb 25, 2010

Unchecking that option makes (should make) the entire lesson non-SCORM compliant any longer, so no statuses would be recorded at all. The LMS may not even accept the lesson...

However, what about changing the SCORM version? Try the opposite of whatever you have selected, 1.2 or 2004?

I don't know how the LMS would be getting the quiz scoring data if CP isn't sending it, so it must be sending it, which is a huge bug if you've told it not to. How odd. Can you run it through Rusici's Test Track (http://testtrack.scorm.com) and see if you can tell for certain that CP is actually sending the score back to the LMS?

Good luck!
Erik