Quizzing - as simple as 1-2-3-4

Quizzing

This week, I started to explore the Captivate's Quiz capabilities. Quizzing is the final piece of puzzle of my current project : "Telling stories on IPTV topics " using adobe Captivate. It (quizzing) allows me to assess how much my students have grasped the knowledge of my presentation. The easiest entry point to providing quizzing features is via the "Quiz > Questions Slide " menu. Selecting this option will prompt you to enter the details of

1. The type of questions you would like to have in your quiz. 
2. For each type, the total questions. 
3. For each type, if they will contribute to your assessment (i.e. if they are graded).

While you can design your questions on the fly, the procedure of creating your quiz encourages you to prepare your questions before you do your data entry on Captivate's quiz engine.

Step 1 

Let's start the design process. First, you need to understand the different question types that are available to you. Each question type address how you want to assess your students. 

Multiple choice	Allow users to select one or more correct answers
True/False	Allow users to choose either True or False
Fill-in-the-blank	Allow users to type in the answer  by filling in the blank
Show answer	Allow users to type in the answer
Matching	Allow users to match the right answer from two list
Hot spot	Allow users to select the right area (hot spot) on the slide
Sequence	Allows users to reorder a list to the right sequence

Once you have decided on the characteristics of your quiz (namely the types of questions and the total questions), you enter the details in your quiz engine. As an illustration, the diagram below will generate 10x Multiple Choice questions, 3x True/False questions, 2x Fill-in-the-blank questions, 3x Matching questions, and 2x Sequence questions.

Question Types

Referring to the example above, Captivate quiz engine will generate a total of 20 additional slides into your project.

Step 2 

The next step is input your quiz details on your quiz slides. For each slide, you execute the common steps

1. Enter your question 
2. Enter the details of each answer choice. 
3. Select the right answer 

Step 3

Depending on your question type, you may need to customize your quiz further.

More Answer choices

For the following type of questions (Multiple Choice and Matching), most likely you need to enter more answer choices. The default behavior of the quiz engine generates only two answer choices for Multiple Choice (cf 3 answer choices for Matching). You add more choices by entering the number of answers in the Quiz properties tab.

To remove the number of answers, you enter a lower number of answers.

 More than one Answers

For the following type of questions (Multiple Choice), you can change the question behavior to allow more than one answers as the correct answer. By default, the question slide generated is a single answer question. You can change this behavior to by selecting the "Multiple Answers" checkbox.

Introduce randomness

For the following type of questions (Multiple Choice, Matching), you can introduce randomness to your answer choices. By selecting the "Shuffle Answers" checkbox for Multiple Choice type of question (or "Shuffle Column 1" for Matching), the quiz engine will display the answer choices in a random order each time the quiz is being taken.

There is an easier procedure to do this. Rather than manually selecting the above checkbox on each of your slides, you can select the "Shuffle Answers" checkbox in the Quiz Preference to have this behavior to all your question slides.

 The above examples are illustrated below.

Customization on Matching type of questions

Customization on Multiple Answers type of questions

Step 4

The final step is set the scores for your quiz. By default, each question is allocated 10 points (see diagram below).

Assigning points for correct answer

For question with more than one correct answer , you need to allocate the points for each correct answer in the question.  The following procedure shows you how to perform the points allocation

1. Enable "Partial Score" for the question

2. Select the correct answer

3. In the properties tab, select the Options tab.

4. Enter the value you allocate for the selected answer.

Oops… did I say final step? The final final step before you complete your quiz is to decide whether you want to assess your user one question at a time or allow the user to submit all the questions in one shot. You set this behavior in the Quiz > Quiz Preferences by enable the "Submit All questions" checkbox.

Viola, you now have the means to create your quiz. 

Limitations

I explored further on the capabilities and found the following limitations on Captivate v8 :-

1. You can't export your quiz to an XML. The work around is to create your slides into a Question Pool or create your questions in GIFT  format (General Import Format Technology).

2. You can't categorize your questions. I thought of two ways to categorize your questions into specific topics. The first way is to assign a suitable prefix to the Interaction IDs of your questions.  You can probably write an external tool to identify the category via the prefix. The second method is to create a Question Pool per category. Either way is not ideal but I am going for the Question Pool per category method as it is much easier to insert questions of a particular topic by selecting the right Question Pool. Do share with me if you have found an alternative method.

3. You can't select the total number of random questions from the Question Pool. You must create one random question each time you want to insert question slides from the Question Pool.

4. You can't have Partial Score answers on questions created from the Question Pool.