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Erik Lord
Guide
Erik Lord
Guide
Activity
‎Oct 31, 2010
06:50 PM
Is this CP4 or CP5 (or other?) Captivate 4 definitely has this problem. It seems to send too much data and/or at timed intervals....that, as you say, result in missed data if the user goes through too quickly. We saw this issue couple years ago with a CP project that was 50 questions long... I don't know if CP5 has rectified this approach yet or not. With no official solution, our workarounds: 1. Don't send back 'interactions', just send back 'score'. This cuts down on the chatter immensely. 2. If you need the interaction data, reduce the number of questions in the quiz. 3. If you need all the questions, do something at the end to prevent the user from closing the lesson too quickly: a. Instruct the user not to close the lesson until the see no more communication activity in the browser status bar. b. Add several screens of 'good bye' content, maybe something that takes them a minute or two to read or listen to, or maybe a simple game. c. Add review slides between each question which the user has to wait several seconds to read before they can continue. With those options, we've cut down on this issue to not be a problem much anymore... HTH Erik
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‎Oct 31, 2010
06:42 PM
If the custom-button idea doesn't help you, then the solution is - I believe - to not use quiz slides for the non-graded test questions. It's a bit more of a pain to setup manually, but then the graded-quiz buttons won't see them as part of the overall quiz itself. HTH Erik
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‎Oct 31, 2010
06:40 PM
Captivate 5 can be setup to track responses to an acrobat.com account or a custom PHP script on a webserver. I'm not sure how robust either option is, not having needed them since all our CP lessons (that need tracking) are developed for LMS delivery... However, if it's similar and you can track 'interactions and score' to acrobat.com or the custom PHP location, then that's how you'd see the answers and such. Sending the 'interaction data' is how you see what the correct answer was, what the user answered, and whether they got it correct or not - per question. In an LMS, this requires 'interaction data' support. Whether the acrobat.com account or PHP solution supports that, I don't know offhand... Erik
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‎Aug 19, 2010
06:55 AM
Are you asking cause you really want to use Google Analytics? Or because you don't have an LMS and want to track CP use? If Analytics, I defer to Michael's replies. If need an alternative to an LMS, note that CP5 now allows tracking to a custom webserver script. They provide a PHP version with the program... No LMS needed. (It can also track to acrobat.com as an option). Erik
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‎Aug 19, 2010
06:48 AM
Ah, ok, so the 'jumps' never actually happen. Perhaps it's something with when they're supposed to be triggered. I would guess that a quiz summary slide would need to be in place in order for the success status to be evaluated and that 'jump' to happen. However, maybe it's better to put those jump settings on the summary slide itself, or elsewhere on the timeline, instead in the overall preferences? Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
11:03 AM
In the scenario your screenshot shows, does a Fail go to slide 25? If so, what does THAT slide do? If it's set to 'continue', then it's going to slide 26...the certificate slide...right? Could that be what's happening? What if you make slide 25, that a failure jumps-to, then jump to a final concluding slide. Same with the certificate slide...once a user gets there, that too then jumps to the same concluding slide. Remember Captivate wants to play linearly...you can make it jump slides, or go back to slides, etc...but after that happens...it's going to progress linearly again until a slide tells it not to (by jumping it somewhere else). Helps? Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
10:54 AM
1 Upvote
CP projects are exported as Flash... ...thus it's the Flash web player that's playing-back the Captivate projects. So first, ensure the client is running the latest version of the Flash player. There are supposedly substantial memory improvements made in the most recent (10.1) releases. Otherwise, can't Citrix limit the amount of resources a given application can grab? I thought such environments could be setup so, for example, Citrix would only allocate xx amount of CPU and memory to a given process...in this case, the Flash player. On your end, the best you could do is make your projects less-intensive. If they have video included, for example, the demand the Flash player will place on the system resources (Citrix or not) is sure to be higher than a more simple text/audio Captivate lesson. HTH Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
10:48 AM
All (? or most) SCORM calls for published CP projects are contained in an external file. In CP4 it's "scorm_support.js". So you could likely, if you have any JS expertise or resources, look at that...see where it attempts to connect to the API and customize it to throw an alert if it fails? Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
10:46 AM
1 Upvote
Since your CP project is a series of separately-published Captivate files, you likely want to look at Captivate's 'Aggregator' feature to stick'em all into one package. How your LMS handles that depends on the LMS...but it may be worth a shot (I don't have CP5 installed here...is it still 'Aggregator' in CP5? Maybe it's now referred to as 'SCORM Packager'? Or if that's a separate feature, look at that too 😉 Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
09:08 AM
If you can figure out what the function is that Post button calls, or if Adobe can just tell us (?), then it should be possible to automate it with an Advanced Interaction? But maybe what that Post button does requires a bunch of internalized CP events, which is then passed to a JS function, so maybe it's not that easy 😉 Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
08:59 AM
How does it 'not work'? Absolutely no change from how it worked before you made this change? If accessing the published lesson from the web, be sure you clear your cache before trying the updated lesson? Perhaps you're just not seeing the latest version? Erik
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‎Aug 18, 2010
08:57 AM
Is the Captivate quiz set for multiple tries? I'd assume so... If it's sending the updated score, it is likely sending the updated status... But only way to be sure it to see what the Captivate lesson is actually sending. If your LMS does not offer any way to 'trace' or otherwise see the actual lesson communication, perhaps try something like 'SCORM Cloud' (websearch) or the Reload Editor. I know the first, and perhaps the second, offer ways to see the actual communication between the lesson and the LMS. (the official ADL Test Suite also offers this functionality but is more complicated to use, at least last time I tried it). IF you can validate that the CP lesson is indeed sending the updated status to the LMS, but the LMS is not showing that updated status, then it's something to take up with your LMS vendor. If CP is not sending that updated status...then it's a CP setting...somewhere...(I don't have any precise things to try, but the setting the quiz to allow retakes would be the first thing to look at). HTH Erik
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‎Aug 09, 2010
07:38 PM
Is the lesson launched in a new window or in a frame within the LMS window? If it's own window, it would be very odd that closing that would also close the LMS window! So I assume the lesson is launched in a frameset, yes? Either way, how are you closing the window? IF with the Captivate X in the playback bar, that must be calling something like parent.window.close...yes? And the parent is the LMS window... So don't use the CP button and make your own that does it different....but what works depends on how the LMS handles it. Some LMS products will close the window as soon as LMS.terminate is called. Some LMS products wait for the lesson window to close out (in which case, maybe you can use something like history.back(2) or something?). I'd say this is more a question for the Joomla group. What do they expect from the lesson to note that the lesson should close and the LMS resume? Erik
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‎Aug 09, 2010
07:31 PM
SCORM only allows one final 'score' per SCO so, yeap, gotta put the pre-test and post-test in different lessons. Whether you can actually do a 'multi-sco' file depends on whether your LMS can handle that. If not, you just make two separate SCOs. You'll then have to depend on the reporting options in the LMS to compare the pre- and post-tests scores... It would be great to be able to setup a dual-quiz lesson but you can't do it with two actual final scores via SCORM. You *could* do it internally to the lesson by reporting interactions, but then that's where Captivate breaks down with its inability to decipher one set of questions from another (at least, as of CP 4, not tried CP 5 yet). Erik
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‎Aug 09, 2010
07:27 PM
Do you have a Mastery Score set anywhere? If so, try getting rid of it and see what results. I've seen a variety of troubles with Mastery Score...though can't say specifically Captivate...sometimes the tool, sometimes the lesson, sometimes the LMS... Hmmm, maybe not. I see in Captivate that the manifest option is not available with AICC....only with SCORM. Is there perhaps such a setting in the LMS itself? Maybe the LMS reports the minimum passing score if the lesson is passed instead of the actual score (which would be weird)? What if you set your lesson to, say, 91% passing score. What results? How about running it through testing environment like Test Track or maybe Reload or a free trial of Inquisiq (use the search!) ...that may reveal a consistency in error....or perhaps show the results you're expecting, leading you to an issue with Kaplan's LMS. Have you checked the Advanced Interaction dialog as Lilybiri suggests? You said you double-checked but looking through that Advanced Interactions can be revealing... HTH Erik
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‎May 27, 2010
11:23 AM
Did you make the button or is it one included with the slide? How many slides in your lesson overall? Looong lessons can be problematic. What if you do a 'Save As' a couple times, then try to publish? If that still doesn't work, create a new project and import all the slides from the previous project. To test how this will work in a final version, definitely do a full publish. Try publishing to a new location. If that published file doesn't work, how exactly does it break? Erik
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‎May 27, 2010
10:02 AM
Re: Metadata...It kind of depends what you mean and why you're asking. Generally, 'metadata' is recorded to the imsmanifest.xml file, assuming you'rve enabled SCORM reporting... But perhaps back up a step and clarify why are you asking? Generally it's a pretty unusual thing to worry about. Re: .zip file....Assuming you've enabled SCORM, that would be why you'd want to output to a .zip...in order to have a SCORM-compliant 'SCO' that you would then upload to an LMS. Do you have an LMS available? If not, how are you planning on presenting, delivering, and tracking these lessons? Additionally, if no LMS, there's likely no need to publish with the .zip option checked at all. If you DO have an LMS, then you'll want to upload that SCO into the LMS...however your LMS so dictates. Re: resources...there are lots out there for Captivate. IconLogic is a great one, from the books to the live training to the web-based training (http://iconlogic.inquisiq.com) [by the way, that web-based training is presented through an 'LMS'] HTH! Erik
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‎May 27, 2010
09:53 AM
What are your CP SCORM settings? Are you reporting 'score'? Do you have scored interactions in your lesson? Only? Or are you using Quiz Slides also? Need a bit more detail about your lesson and how it's setup... in other words, why do you think it *should* be sending a score to the LMS? 😉 Erik
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‎May 17, 2010
10:04 AM
Per the SCORM spec, as I understand it, the cmi.exit value has everything to do with the LMS sending back resume data. If cmi.exit is set to 'suspend', then the LMS (if it's programmed to) will provide the suspend_data to the lesson on request. However, cmi.exit is not set to suspend when the lesson exits, then the lesson itself (I forget the variable) is not set to 'resume'...so suspend_data is NOT sent back to the lesson, even if it's requested... So that could be the issue? What's the cmi.exit value in various cases? Can you tell? Erik
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‎May 13, 2010
03:13 PM
You do NOT have 'Never send resume data' checked, right? One of Captivate's flaws is it doesn't set the cmi.exit parameter correctly. If it's meant to resume, it should set that parameter to 'suspend'. Technically, per SCORM, if the lesson doesn't set cmi.exit properly, the LMS should NOT give back resume data.... Few LMS products actually do this, so it's usually not a problem with Captivate...but if ELM is enforcing this and not giving the lesson back its suspend_data because the cmi.exit value isn't being set properly....it's really CP's fault....and unless there's a way to change that in the ELM LMS, there's probably nothing you can do about it (unless you can figure out how to make your CP lessons force the cmi.exit value to set correctly via custom code....?) I'm not guaranteeing this is the problem, but could be likely. I'm sure your ELM admin would like it to be 😉 Erik
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‎May 13, 2010
03:09 PM
It may be possible, but will require some Actionscripting (custom interaction) and a knowledge of the internal values CP uses; you'll have to reset whatever variables/array it uses to store the question responses and score. I don't know this offhand, but maybe it gives you a direction to search for. Anything outside a simple quiz isn't Captivate's strong point! I look forward to what's available in CS5... Erik
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‎May 13, 2010
03:07 PM
Perhaps best to try the Captivate lesson in the ADL TestSuite, or Rustici's TestTrack, or perhaps the Reload player, to see if your CP lesson exhibits the same behavior there. I know it CAN get the data when it resumes, as we've built lessons that do...but your settings all seem correct, I think...so it may be a JS or API issue? Erik
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‎Apr 27, 2010
06:50 PM
I've responded to such questions before, suggesting there's really no easy way to do this. I've had a customer ask me directly and I've offered the same advice, but figured I should check with the collective wisdom here... Ideal: 1 CP file, 2 sections. Section 1 has a few information pages then a test. IF the user does not pass the test, then they advance to Section 2, but they only see remediation screens that apply to the questions the answered incorrectly in Section 1. Once they've made it through those remediation screens, they see a new quiz bank...but again, only questions that were answered incorrectly in Section 1. Any way to do that in Captivate without some crazy AdvancedInteraction coding? I could do this, I think, if the lesson structure is changed.... So they see the few information screens in Section 1 then are asked a base question on, say, slide 4. If they get it wrong, they advance to (say) slide 5 - which is the remediation slide for that question. They then click next to slide 6 and get the related/remedial quiz question. If they get that question on slide 4 correct, they skip over slides 5 and 6 to slide 7 - which is the next base question... ...and so on. Two issues though; first, that's not an ideal way to do it from the customer's perspective and, second - which is an issue regardless of any approach that's used, how to deal with scoring of questions in such a situation... I'm sure that's at least going to require its own custom scripting... Thoughts appreciated! Erik
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‎Apr 12, 2010
01:44 PM
SCORM essentially dictates web-delivery. SCORM does not account for locally-delivered files with tracking to the web. I'd love to know how you plan to 'access the local PC files through the LMS'... Regardless, one approach is to create some custom SCOs, though I'm not sure this would work. A SCO manifest can point to resources outside the LMS itself, so you could theoretically...maybe...deliver the large media files to customers via CD or network share, then have the SCO launch an HTML file that looks to that local path to load the actual content. As long as the content passes it's tracking information to the index file, which in turn is passing the values to the LMS API via JS....that might work. However, I'm sure there's some security issue trying to load local SWF files into a web-delivered HTML file...? Otherwise, you could try to build a custom application that runs locally (i.e. AIR) to which users login, which then grabs their To Do list from the LMS and finds the related local SCOs, allows them to launch, track the results locally, then at some point synch those results with the LMS... ...but I can't imagine that's an easy task. HTH Erik
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‎Apr 12, 2010
01:35 PM
What version of SCORM are you trying? How long is the lesson? SCORM 1.2-compliant LMS fields (like the one for suspend_data) are pretty small for long lessons. CP stores a LOT of info in the suspend_data model, especially the longer the lesson is. So I could see where if the lesson is trying to send back a huge amount of data at the end, the LMS may not like that very much... Does your LMS have any sort of log or debugger where you can see what a lesson is sending and what the LMS response, if any, was? So one thing to try is using SCORM 2004, which may allow your LMS to store data in larger fields (depending how it's setup) which may help negate the problem...if that's part of the problem. Otherwise, if you keep the options the same but do not select 'Track Interactions and Score', do you see this problem occur? That Interaction and Score data is a large part of what makes the suspend_data field so large... Is there any higher occurrence on Macs vs. PCs? The Mac Flash Player is known to be inefficient, so large amount of data shuttling back and forth could explain a higher incidence of Mac issues... Curious to know what you find, Erik
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‎Mar 17, 2010
12:56 PM
1 Upvote
It's likely possible but would require fancy actionscripting...or maybe not fancy actionscripting...maybe plain actionscripting....but some sort of AS skill. However, you wouldn't be able to read from a local .txt file - I don't believe the Flash Player security will allow that. You could likely read from a web location - via XML most likely. You could also read from the local sharedObject, but you'd have to devise a way to write to it for editing first (like another Flash app for creating the text in the sharedObject, then your CP app for reading from it). Flash with AIR would likely be a better approach? Erik
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‎Mar 03, 2010
08:08 AM
Only thing I can suggest, is Captivate is a very video-intensive program. Back with the good old Authorware product, such crashes were also often due to video card settings or capabilities (not enough RAM, which is rare these days - or a Windows Update that required and updated video card driver - or reducing 'hardware acceleration'). Some of those fixes seem to help with Captivate too. I wouldn't focus on the HD so much as the video card and settings. It's almost surely a CP issue at the root so a shame to focus on the hardware, but may be helpful... I do understand Adobe is working hard on the next version of CP, perhaps even a complete rebuild in order to provide Mac support as well, so perhaps the lack of attention to current issues is Adobe praying that all will be well with the next release...which I realize doesn't help folks with current problems too much. Good luck! Erik
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‎Mar 03, 2010
07:54 AM
Are you recording in 'Full Motion' mode? If so, try not to? I've seen these backgrounds that suddenly change...but in previous versions of CP, not the latest. My fix for that was similar - copy the background, but then paste into Photoshop (or your preferred photo editor) to 'flatten' it, then copy out and paste as background. Between CP's motion capture...issues and video card driver differences, I think that's the best fix. Oh, CP also has an option somewhere to turn off video acceleration, I think it is (or something like that). Try changing that setting, if off, turn it on, and vice-versa. Or could try doing it yourself in the display control panel (not sure where in Vista). Also ensuring you have the latest driver for your system's video card can't hurt... HTH Erik
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‎Mar 03, 2010
07:49 AM
Crummy. Is it worth trying to break up the lesson into two shorter lessons? Anything 'crazy' or otherwise intensive going on in this lesson? Cause these screenshots kinda look like memory issues... Any idea of the general spec of the end-user's machine? Actually, two of those look like eraser edits made in Photoshop...but I trust those don't appear in the source file... What are the image formats? Can you try copying out a couple that seem to always show the problem, save as a JPEG in Photoshop (or whatever) and paste back in (as background?)? But these all worked fine as CP3, eh? Very odd. Wish I had a better set of answers or suggestions! Erik
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‎Mar 03, 2010
07:37 AM
Ah, another issue with bookmarking may be... ...technically, per SCORM, a lesson should set the cmi.exit value to 'suspend' if the LMS is to send back the resume_data on next launch. If the cmi.exit value is NOT set, then some LMS product - such as Inquisiq R3 - will NOT send back the resume_data...which CP needs in order to resume properly. CP does not set that cmi.exit value at all. In Inquisiq, however, since this is a common issue with tools not working properly, there is an option to set 'always send resume data' in the Lesson properties... When that is set, the resume_data is sent back to the lesson, which should allow it to resume as it needs. I bet that's the cause of at least shawn's, if not both, issues. Erik
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