Best practices for creating Trakstar Learn modules with Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate is a great, robust tool that you can use to create interactive courses. There is an extensive number of options when creating your content and some Captivate rules and functions are not things Learn can override.

This article has helpful hints and guidelines for you to take into consideration when you are creating your content.

Quizzes:

Captivate files can have quizzes. Each file will send Learn 1 score. This score is averaged along with any other quizzes that might exist in the course, to determine if the course is passed or failed (the Trainer needs to set a course passing score on the Customize tab of the course in Learn). If the Captivate has it's own passing score, that is fine, but it will not effect whether or not the Trainee passes or fails the course. Be sure that the course passing score is set to the correct percentage.

Captivate will send one score per project to Learn. The answers Trainees give will not be passed to Learn. You will not know which particular answers each Trainee got right/wrong.

You can use both Captivate quizzes and Learn quizzes in a course. Remember you are limited to 10 Learn quizzes per course. You are not limited to a specific number of Captivate files per course, however if you exceed a mixture of 10 quizzes, whether they are all Captivate files with quizzes or a mix of both Captivate and Learn quizzes, only the first 10 quiz grades will show up on the Track tab. To see full reporting data you will need to visit Advanced reports. We advise you limit your quizzes to 10 per course.

When you create a Captivate file it is best if the quiz is at the end of the project. This will insure that the content isn't considered complete before it is all viewed. If you have multiple quizzes within one project that is fine, but ending the project with one of those quizzes is best practice.

Hiding the playbar when Trainees are taking quizzes is a good practice. This will insure they are unable to skip the quiz and inadvertently fail the quiz. This setting is found in the Skin Editor and in the Quiz publishing settings:

Skin Editor:

When creating quiz questions you have many settings available to you. 2 of the most important ones are highlighted below:

All quiz questions should be set to "Graded". If you add a survey to a Captivate file you will not see any of the answers Trainees give. They will be able to answer the survey, but the data will not be something the Trainer can see. If you want to have a survey add a Learn survey from the Arrange tab in your course on Learn.
Un-check the Next box. This will take the Next button off the quiz. Including it will cause trainees to think they don't need to submit their question, and will cause them to fail the question.
If you want to give multiple attempts on a question do that here. Do not set this option in the publishing settings as it will not work. You can set a specific number of attempts or allow them to keep retrying it until they get it right (Unlimited). Check the "Retry Message" to make sure the Trainee knows they can try again. If you don't check this it will seem that the quiz is broken and isn't advancing when it should.

Captivate projects without quizzes:

If your project just has slides and videos, and does not have any quizzes you may want to think about removing the Playbar. This will insure Trainees cannot skip to the end of the project without viewing all the slides. If the Trainee does skip to the end, the file will not be considered complete and it could cause them confusion, because they will not be able to progress in the course.

Remove the Playbar in the Skin Editor

Once in the Skin Editor, to insure people don't skip your content, uncheck the following boxes

To get help with your Captivate files contact their support team or visit their support forums.