Friday, November 22, 2013

My Two Loves…Articulate Storyline and Captivate (SCORM Document Acknowledgement Box)


I hope my title didn’t alarm my wife and family.  Obviously they are my true loves, but with that said I do have two loves when it comes to eLearning software.  Articulate is a bit more intuitive and user friendly, however I still have loyalty to my original love Captivate.  There are some limitations of Articulate, but not many…it is a great product.

Recently I was presented with a problem.  How to make a PDF SCORM compliant, so that a user could review the document and acknowledge that they reviewed it?  My solution first came to me while playing in my Articulate sand box.  I simply created a True/False question slide, modified the words True to say “I acknowledge” and the word false to say “I do NOT acknowledge” (however this can be placed off the slide to make it hidden).  Then I inserted a Web Object, which displayed a PDF that was located on a “hidden” webpage.  Once published as a SCORM enabled project the LMS system will report Acknowledgements (True) as a PASS and the latter (False) as a FAIL.

After words I was left wonder if the same was possible in Captivate.  And sure enough it was.  It wasn’t as easy or intuitive, but it can be done.  With Captivate it is necessary to create the quiz True/False slide, modify the wording (but have to use Adobe’s side quiz properties panel for some parts), insert widget (Web Object widget, if you don’t have it is a free download, just Google it), then adjust the timeline a bit, and then publish with SCORM enabled.

I then felt the need to share my discovery to anyone who may be interested.  Largely due to the fact I wasn’t able to find this discovery already published on the worldwide web.

I can see this setup being a HUGE benefit for many departments (especially HR) where there are a lot of PDFs (or any type of document) that require reviewing and then acknowledging.  Much better this way because it is all packaged neatly and will generate easily into LMS reporting.
Below are some images from my Articulate and Captivate Test files (the most famous troubleshooting filename of all time, lol):