Adobe Captivate: More Power to Quiz Feedback

by Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, COTP, founder and chief learning geek at LearninGeeks In Adobe Captivate 9, you can convert the interactive and non-interactive objects to multi-state objects and easily add additional objects to the states allowing you to quickly build interactions.  Quiz slides in Captivate are locked down, which prevent you from adding states to the question title, question stem, answer options, and feedback captions.  In spite of this limiation, you do have access to view the normal state of the feedback captions by clicking the State View button in the Properties Inspector.

The State View area will give you a lot of power to replace the boring text feedback with video, audio, or an image--pretty much any non-interactive object to make the feedback relevant and meaningful for the learner. This step is important, as the default question objects have a higher ‘z’ order, and take the topmost position on the slide, which can result in hidden or partially visible feedback objects in the published output. In this example, our goal is to create a slide that looks similar to the image below.

Insert a question slide similar to the one shown below. Add some space on the slide for a character and speech bubble by moving the question stem and answer options to the left.

Select the feedback caption and, in the Properties Inspector, click State View. You will see the feedback caption in the Object State panel.  To add a coach image like the one I used in the image above and at the end of this article, choose Media > Characters. Select a character and click the OK button. To replace the feedback shape with a speech bubble shape, right-click the feedback shape and choose Replace Smart Shape. If you are using a text caption instead of smart shape caption in your project, you can change the feedback caption type to transparent, add a speech bubble smart shape, and then place the transparent text on top of the speech bubble to get a similar effect.

In the image below, I selected the oval callout and then resized and repositioned it near the character. And that's that... I love how easily you can convert those plain text feedback captions into something more interesting and meaningful in your eLearning courses.

If you're looking to learn Adobe Captivate, check out these live, highly interactive online classes (several of the classes are taught by yours truly and I'd love to meet you in class).

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Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, COTP, the founder and chief learning geek at LearninGeeks, leads the design and delivery of eLearning and training solutions. She has created several award-winning eLearning courses and eBooks, and regularly conducts workshops and webinars on eLearning tools and techniques. In her previous roles, she worked as a teacher trainer, instructional designer, and senior Adobe eLearning evangelist. Pooja holds a master’s degree in education and economics and a doctorate in educational technology.

Comments

[Gregg J Wanciak]

I feel as if Dr Jaisingh left out some steps in this article of hers.

First she talks about feedback captions, which are the default in Question Slides. Yes, you can go into State View with them and you can add objects.

But then, suddenly, Dr Jaisingh starts talking about replacing the feedback SHAPE with a different shape.

Now, as far as I know, as I said, Question Slides have feedback CAPTIONS. I don't know of a way to set Question Slides to feedback SHAPES as a default. You can right-click the feedback captions and convert them to shapes but it's a manual process. So I think there's some kind of gap here that destroys the clarity of this article.

Also, I tried to duplicate what was taught here as best I could. First, I tried adding an image in the State View of the feedback caption on a question. I previewed and, when the feedback caption was triggered, the image appeared half-transparent, as if it had some kind of transition attached that was interrupted.

I tried converting the caption to a shape but the same thing happened.

Also, anything you've added in the State View of the caption resides behind that caption. I think the caption is the front-most object no matter what.

So, again, I feel as if I'm completely missing something in this article, and that something got left out.

[Poojajaisingh]

Thanks for your feedback, Gregg!

All the new projects you create using Captivate 9 use shapes by default for feedback captions. One of the reasons for you seeing text captions instead of feedback shapes can be if you:
* Have created the course in an older version and have upgraded it to Captivate 9
* Applied a theme created using an older version of Captivate
* Changed the default preference of the project to use text captions instead of shapes. You will find this setting on the Preferences dialog under Defaults section.

I've updated the article with alternate steps when you are using text captions instead of shapes for feedback captions.

And, you are right, all the default quiz objects have a higher 'z' order, as compared to the additional objects on the slide, so when you are adding new objects in the state view, make sure they are not covering any of the quiz objects, else they will be completely or partially hidden in the course.

Let me know if this helps! :)

Regards,

Pooja

[Gregg J Wanciak]

Dr Jaisingh,

That does offer some clarity. Now, the only thing I have to puzzle out is why the image I placed into the State View of the caption only partially loads, appearing half transparent when the caption is triggeed, as if its loading was interrupted.

[Rhonda]

I would like to bypass the LMS for an informal tutorial and send results of feedback and quizzes to email. How can I do this with Captivate 2017?