Every tool has its weak spots and I believe that for Captivate, it might just be the question slides … and especially the rendering of the questions themselves. When you compare the quizzes produced by other e-Learning tools, one quickly asserts that Captivate is light-years … behind. Don’t get me wrong, I think that there are good things about the Captivate Quizzing Framework but the end results are not that great. So, I decided that I would try to inject some life into some of the question types. Maybe we can bring Captivate up to par with the rest of the quiz tools out there.
A few days ago, I blogged about starting the creation of the Question Widget base classes in CpGears. In order to properly test these classes, I took the habit of creating a widget of the same type. So, I started to work on a new version of the Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) that is a little bit more dynamic. For example, I added some mouse over effects and tweens to the question distractors. One thing that I haven’t done yet but I will soon do is to show, on the MCQ itself the wrong and right answers during the review phase. I really hate that box showing your answer and comparing with the proper answer. Why can’t Captivate just show me directly on the question?
In order to give you a sneak peek of what the widget capabilities will be, I created this small demo. The widget is far from being complete as I just started working on it this week-end and most of the features are not working. However, you can see the distractors flying into place (reload the demo if you missed it) and see the effects when you mouse over the answers. I also added the Image Zoom Widget to complement the question.
So, let me know what you think. Do you believe it’s doing to be useful and do you like it? What additional features would you expect to see on top of those demonstrated and those described in this post? Me, I would like to be able to just create the question rendering. Because it’s a widget, I will need to create an interface to record the question answers and other parameters. This already exists in Captivate. It would be great if Captivate was in charge of collecting the information and that I would just create some skin that would render the question. Maybe one day …
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November 29th, 2010 at 03:35
Hi Yves,
Great demo! I can ask if the animated distractors optional? I am not a fan of flying text
Best regards,
Mark
November 29th, 2010 at 05:47
Hi Mark,
Are you saying that you prefer the out-of-the-box version
I intend to make the widget configurable:
- The animated distractors (on/off). Note that the animation will only be seen when you first see the question.
- The mouse over effect (on/off)
- The color and alpha of the mouse over effect
- The width and height of the MCQ
- The text format (size, type, bold, color, etc)
Anything missing?
Yves
November 29th, 2010 at 05:53
Hi Yves,
No, just that in most cases I don’t think that flying text adds anything to the learning experience
Anything missing
The ability to insert customized check marks / radio buttons rather than just the plain jane form controls would be great.
Best regards,
Mark
November 29th, 2010 at 05:57
I actually forgot to mention I but I will also try to let the user customize the check marks / radio buttons. But for that I will need to figure out something first. I don’t want to give away the code for the widget so It might be a little bit more tricky to do so It might not appear in the first release.
November 29th, 2010 at 06:01
Sure that makes sense. I know that for some of the Widgets that ship with CP5 – such as the Text Caption – you can point to a custom image so there might be a solution there.
November 29th, 2010 at 06:55
Great, Yves, having some possibilities to add pizzaz (do not like flying text either, Mark, but depends on the user) is certainly an improvement. Just a question: results are stored on the user PC? I made the mistake to answer the question correctly, and wanted to see the result when incorrect. But resuming the demo even after refreshing the browser doesn’t help, always get the first result page. Could there be a way to reset the answer for the question back to ‘not answered’?
November 30th, 2010 at 05:44
Thanks Lieve,
Hopefully, at the end, it will be a little bit more then just “pizzaz”
As for the question itself, it always return that you’ve answered correctly. I just wanted to show that it’s possible to have the same look and feel as what other Quiz tools offer. Don’t worry, at the end, the MCQ will behave just as you’re expecting it to do.
December 9th, 2010 at 18:23
Hi,
great work. I really like it, though the review did not show the false answers yet.
If you need someone testing, put me on the list.
Thanks man
Thor
December 9th, 2010 at 23:22
Hi Thor,
Thanks for the comments. Yes, it’s missing a lot of things including the review part. I was not able to progress on it because of other professional constraints but I will try to get back to it very soon. I’ll keep your name for Beta testers.
Thanks,
Yves