The Logical Blog by IconLogic

Adobe Presenter 9: Beginning Training

Have you created a PowerPoint presentation and need to convert it into an eLearning course? Perhaps you need to add a quiz to the presentation and be able to track learner success?

Adobe Presenter 9 allows you to transform your existing PowerPoint deck into eLearning complete with voiceover recordings, interactive objects, screen characters and videos.

During this full-day, online instructor-led class, you will learn how to create an eLearning lesson from scratch using both Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Presenter. Among other things, you will add characters and scenes to add personality to your presentation.

You will learn how to set up PowerPoint with slide notes that double as your voiceover script. Then you will learn how to record and edit voiceover audio.

As you move through this totally interactive class, you will learn how to add a quiz to the presentation and how to set up the lesson so that it will work with SCORM and AICC-compliant LMSs.

Finally, you will also learn how to publish the finished eLearning content as both SWF and PDF.

More information.

Adobe Captivate: Pretest Actions

by Lori Smith

We recently introduced you to Captivate's Pretest feature. In this article, I'm going to follow-up with Pretests and teach you how to control a Pretest Advanced Action. Here's the scenario: your client or boss wants to ensure that all the learners know the material by passing a quiz. The boss doesn't care if the learner spends the time watching the individual slides that make up the lesson, only that learners are given a fair opportunity to pass the quiz.

You move forward and design an eLearning lesson that contains an introductory slide (slide 1), some pretest questions (slides 2 through 5), eLearning content slides (slides 6 through 50) and a final quiz (beginning on slide 51). If the learner is able to pass the Pretest right out of the gate, then you will not require the learner to review the course content. Instead, you will allow the learner to jump straight to the final quiz. However, if the learner fails the Pretest, the learner will be required to move through the course content before taking the final quiz.

While the scenario above sounds complicated to implement within Captivate, there is an action built within the Pretest that will get you started. Select any Pretest slide on the Filmstrip and take a look at the Action group on the Quiz Properties panel. Just below the Failure Levels drop-down menu you'll see an Edit Pretest Action button.

Clicking the Edit Pretest Action button will open the Advanced Action window containing a basic advanced action.

Let's take a look at what the action does. In the IF area, a System Variable named cpInfoQuizPretestScorePercentageis being checked to see if the learner's score is greater than 50. This means that if the learner gets over half of the points allocated in the pretest, he or she passes the pretest.

Take a look in the success and failure areas. Both are sending the learner to the very next slide (using the Go to Next Slideoption).

In the images below, I have edited the Action so that it will use the Jump to Slide option. Should the learner score higher than 50, the Action will jump the learner directly to slide 51 (the quiz). Should the learner score 50 or lower, the ELSE segment of the Action sends the learner to the first content slide for the lesson (slide 6).

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Looking for training on Adobe Captivate? IconLogic offers multiple live, online Adobe Captivate classes each month including Introduction to Adobe Captivate and Advanced Adobe Captivate.

Quiz Design: Recognizing Types of Learning

by Jennie Ruby 

Many of us start writing a quiz when we are sitting in front of our quiz-making software, and the software asks us whether we want a multiple-choice question or a true/false. We then go on instinct to make up a question that we feel relates to the topic just covered in the training. But this method, although it will arrive at a functional quiz that our learner can click through, may not be accurately doing what a quiz should do.

And what should a quiz do? Well, measure the learning, of course. But in order to measure the learning, we need to have a clear idea of what the learning should have been. And to have that clear idea, and then to make sure the quiz is actually measuring it, we need to have started preparing to write the quiz quite a while ago: when we were writing the objectives for the training.

What's that you say? You didn't write objectives? And now the training is in production? You will still end up needing to figure out the learning objectives in order to create successful quizzes. So let's take a look at some learning objectives for which you may need to create quizzes or other evaluations.

Learning objectives come in four kinds: things the learner must know, things the learner must be able to do, ways the learner must be able to interact with others, and things that affect the learner's emotional state or attitude. Let's focus first on the first two: things the learner must know, and things the learner must be able to do.

Let's start with things the learner will be required to know. For example, a training objective might be that after training, the learner should be able to name all 23 flavors of frozen yogurt our company offers-in order of popularity. Or it might be to list five ways to ship a package from their worksite. Or it might be to be able to spell the names of the members of our board of directors without any typos. These are straight-up knowledge objectives, and are fairly straightforward to create a quiz about.

But acquiring knowledge is typically only part of our learning objectives. Another type of objective is a skill--being able to do a particular task. It could be the ability to take our company's coffee machine out of the box and set it up and get it working at a client site. It might be the ability to correctly fill in an online form and submit the results to our server. It might be the ability to take an accurate pulse from a patient. These job skills require a different kind of assessment. Measuring learning with a multiple-choice quiz for these is not going to be a complete assessment.

Note that knowledge objectives may also encompass problem-solving. For example, the ability to decide to which department you should forward a call from a customer with a certain kind of question involves not just knowing the names of all our departments, but also being able to categorize the customer's problem and match it to the correct department. Solving that problem requires both knowledge and problem-solving. The ability to use our telephone switching software to actually forward the call?--that is a skill.

Challenge: Which of these objectives are primarily about knowledge, and which ones are about skills? Label each as Knowledge or Skill.

1. The ability to list all of the counties in Maryland and name their county seat.
2. The ability to create a formula in Excel to take the square root of a value.
3. The ability to recognize the flavor names of ice cream that our company offers versus flavors that are not offered.
4. The ability to play five major chords on a ukulele.
5. The ability to list the notes of the pentatonic minor scale in A minor.
6. The ability to activate the Track Changes command in Microsoft Word.
7. The ability to spell out ten common acronyms used in our industry.
8. The ability to calculate the interest due over the course of a 5-year car loan.
9. The ability to set up a client's cell phone to directly access our database.
10. The ability to locate a print booklet in our library on the seventh floor of our building.

When ready, please send your answers to me.

 

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If you would like to learn how to create effective quizzes and surveys, attend Jennie's live online class. Jennie also teaches Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts and eLearning: Writing Effective Scripts.