Participant

Question

Menu for Multi SCO

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
March 29, 2011
1 reply
2934 views

Hello,

I am trying to find the answer to a question that has bugged me for a long time. I can't find the answer in here (not to say its not here) so I was wondering if anyone can help.

I want a multi SCO file.

I want a main menu that isn't the Moodle (what I'm using) SCORM menu.

How do I do this?

I have tried creating links using the "open file" option in captivate (5) but it doesn't seem to work. It's quite a common thing to have a menu where users can select the different modules. Why can't I easily find/ make one in Captivate? My people will not use the Moodle one so I really have no option here.

Thank you for any help or suggestions you can give.

Ian

Quizzing and LMS

This topic has been closed for replies.

RodWard

Community Expert

Yes it's a common thing to have a menu page to launch course lessons. But when you're using an LMS it has to know exactly WHEN you launch each SCO module so that it can begin communicating with the SCO for tracking purposes. So this situation requires some compromises if you want everything to work well.

In Moodle, you can either have separate SCO modules set up in a course as individual SCORM resources and launched via links on the course home page, or you can have a MULTI-SCORM package that is loaded all in one go and navigated via the links in the Moodle SCORM Player. Moodle works quite well with Captivate SCORMs when you set them up either of these two ways.

What you're trying to do is have a separate menu page to launch the SCORMs, but NOT do it in a way that let's Moodle know what's going on.

I have heard of people on this forum that managed to get an Aggregated course to work with a SCORM LMS, but it requred hacking the imsmanifest.xml file that Captivate creates. Not something for inexperienced users.

Why do your people have a problem using Moodle's links to navigate the course modules?

I

irossclcAuthor

Participant

Hi Rod,

Thanks for your prompt reply.

The plain and simple answer is that the people I am providing for don't care about the technicalities behind it. Also, they have been shown other software that does do this, so the gauntlet has been thrown down. Captivate must do or die.

They care about the look and feel from a learners perspective and the thing about how Moodle handles it is that this takes learning in itself on top of being ugly. I have to agree with them really. It's ugly and clunky.

Do you know any tips around the hacking required? I am more than eager to learn these as selling the other advantages (like you say having multiple SCORMs in one Moodle course means you can track a score for each 'module' of a course) hasn't worked with the prevailing message being "It's not user friendly." I'm not a developer but I'm sure that I could manage it with a little explanation.

I toyed with the idea of using the Dreamweaver multi SCO packager to do this but it came with very few instructions. Strangely, most stuff with e-learning comes with too few instructions.

I really don't want to loose Captivate . It works brilliantly with most other things ((omits the issue about transparent text boxes))

RodWard

Community Expert

Captivate can also be used to create a menu page to launch other courses. You just create a Captivate project with a single slide containing clickboxes, button, or interactive widgets that open the HTM file for another Captivate module when clicked. If you weren't trying to use an LMS, this would be dead easy.

These other tools that they've seen create a menu page for a course...did they also work and track successfully in your Moodle LMS? If so, use them. If not, then it's not really an apples for apples comparison is it?

The limitation isn't related to Captivate's ability to create a menu page. It's related to getting your LMS to know that you clicked something on this menu page and launched something that the LMS needs to track.

By definition, a Mulit-SCO SCORM module doesn't have it's own inbuilt menu page. It leaves that to the LMS to create based on the course modules and other resources listed in the package's imsmanifest.xml file.

I can appreciate that your user's don't care about how difficult it is for you to pull this off, but frankly I find this kind of narrow mindedness quite frustrating. We're supposed to work miracles because they don't want to have to learn how to do anything more than click a link...and even that link cannot be on anything other than a menu page?! Heaven help them if the e-learning itself ends up being more challenging than a 6 year old could handle.

You can try some experiments with your Moodle system to see if you can fool it into tracking a SCORM module that wasn't launched via it's default SCORM player links. To do this, load a Captivate SCORM module into Moodle and set it up as normal. Then see if it's possible to work out the exact HTTP pathway to launch this file directly in a browser. This may or may not be possible depending on how your Moodledata folder is set up. Mos Moodle installations have the Moodledata folder (where all your courses live) located in a virtual folder that is not under the web site's normal root directory. This is for security reasons. So Moode usually has to dig out the content to launch it. If you can get a link to the course module to work, it might just start doing the API calls to Moodle and get tracked. But personally, I think this whole approach is way too risky...just because some people are too stubborn to use an LMS the way it was designed.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded