Adding and scoring knowledge checks

- Many Captivate developers want to add little knowledge checks amongst the content in a project. Knowledge checks can help a user's attention as well as provide them a chance to test what they learned. These checks can be something as small as a simple slide or something larger like mini quizzes interspersed throughout a project. In this lesson, we'll take a look at some of the knowledge checks that you can add. You may or may not want to keep score of how a user does on these checks as well. So, we'll also look at how to score or not score them. So the types of knowledge checks we'll talk about include quiz questions, pre-built Captivate items such as the drag and drop interaction or the other pre-built interactions.

And then, your own custom interactions that you might build on your own. We'll start with quiz questions. In our file here, we have a number of slides. And then a big quiz at the end that's made up of eight questions. Well, we've got quite a bit of content before that quiz, there's really about eighteen slides. So maybe we could break that up by adding in a little quiz question about halfway through, after slide 8. So I'll go to slide 8, and then go to the Quiz menu, and choose Question Slide.

And now we'll just add a quick little true or false question. And I'll type in my question here. And that will be, "A cat should get the FVRCP vaccine "4 times in their first year of life." And I'll just adjust my question, here. And the answer to this question is True. So, even though this question is separated from the other questions that make up the big quiz later on, it's still considered part of the same quiz.

And there's a couple ways that we can tell that right away. The first is to see this progress indicator here on the upper right, it shows that this is Question 1 of 9. Another crystal clear way to tell what's included in a quiz or not is to go to the Project menu and then Advanced Interaction. This interface shows all scorable objects in your Captivate file. Your slides are listed down the left. And then notice here in the columns across the top, the points column, and you can open this up a little more. If you need to.

So you can see the quiz question that we just added as slide 9, it's worth 10 points. The other eight questions of the quiz, later on in the project, are here and they're also worth 10 points each. And you can see that the total for all of these quiz questions is 90 points. So even though the true or false slide that we just added is not part of the big bank of 8 questions at the end, it's still considered part of the quiz because its points contribute to the final score. So here's a spot that you'll want to see.

Here on my true false question, I'm gonna open up the quiz panel. I'm gonna scroll to the bottom. And you'll see this Report Answers check box. And I'll scroll up and, of course, here's where we can set how many points this question is worth. So I'm gonna scroll back down to Report Answers. Now I'm gonna open up the Advanced Interaction dialog again. So if you don't want the question to be included as part of the quiz score at the end, you can just go to that quiz panel and deselect that Report Answers.

You'll see here in the Advanced Interaction window that our quiz total points has now dropped down to 80. So, this way, our little true false question can still act as a knowledge check but it doesn't affect the results from the quiz at the end, that's acting as more of an assessment. Hey, one other cool little thing about this Advanced Interaction box is that you can click on any row and it will take you to that slide in the quiz. So it's a really fast way to navigate around your project.

So I'm gonna go to slide 9. So, the way that we've set up our scenario, we have a check for understanding question, we don't necessarily want it to contribute to the scores at the end of the quiz. So, we might also want to turn off this little message right here that says this is Question 1 of 9, we want this to be kind of treated as a separate question in the user's mind. So to turn that off, I can go to the Quiz menu and then Quiz Preferences. Then I'll go to Settings and what I'm looking for is this Show Progress check box.

There's two types of progress. There's relative and absolute. So we have relative right now and that's where it says Question 1 of 9. If it's absolute, then this would just say Question 1. Well we don't want either of those. I'm just gonna deselect this Show Progress. I'm gonna click OK. And Captivate thinks about it for just a moment. And you can see that that message has been deleted from the slide. So back to the Advanced Interaction box one more time. This shows us all of our quiz questions but it also shows all our scorable objects.

And what those are is listed here across the top. We can have click boxes, text entry boxes, buttons, those can be regular buttons or shape buttons, interactive widgets, questions, hidden slides, hyperlinks, and drag and drop interactions. So, cool! We can use interactive elements, like click boxes and buttons, to create our own custom knowledge checks and then make them scorable and trackable as part of the quiz. So here's an example. I'm gonna open the file called ExpandedFeedbackQuestion in the Start folder, in the Exercise Files.

Now, similar to the previous file that we were just working in, there's a bunch of content and then at the end of the presentation there's a quiz that's made up of eight questions. What is different is that if we scroll up to about slide 8, and starting on the next slide, we have this custom interaction that I built. And this was built just using images, like this is a background image. This girl is an image. This is just a regular shape that has some text in it. And this is just a button.

So this is a little knowledge check. So I'll take you through it really quick. So after the introduction, you are presented a question. And this is essentially a multiple choice question. So there are three different answers. And there's also the chance to get a hint from the doctor. So if you're not sure what the answer should be, if I click Ask the Doctor, if I go in Properties and look in the Actions, you can see that this will jump us to slide 14, so if you jump to slide 14, here's the doctor, she kind of gives you a hint as to what the answer should be.

And when you click back, you go back to slide 10. So the bottom answer is an incorrect answer. When you click that, you go to slide 13. You get there, our vet tech here looks a little bit concerned and kind of asks you to try again, so we go back to slide 10. You can see where this is going. The middle answer is not correct either. That will take you to slide 12. And you get some feedback here. When I click Try again!, I will be taken back to slide 10. Finally, the correct answer is the first one.

When you click this item, you go to the next slide which is slide 11. Here, our vet tech looks very happy. She says that's correct, and then you click Continue. And you go on to slide 15, which basically then takes you into the rest of the project. Well when going through this little interaction, the ending place the user is ultimately gonna end up at is slide 11 and they basically have to click this Continue button to go on with the presentation.

So I'm gonna include this button in my quiz. I"m just gonna click it. Over in the properties, I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom, I'm in the Actions area here, I'm gonna scroll down and check Include in Quiz. By default, this is assigned one point. I'm gonna open up my Advanced Interactions again. And you can see that the total points for our whole project now is 81 points. And there is our button on slide 11 that's worth 1 point. So this is useful when you want to add in custom knowledge checks throughout your project and have them count towards the user's score.

You could inform your user right upfront that they'll be graded not only on the quiz at the end but on their interactions with the other parts of the project. For example, you could have a world map with invisible click boxes over parts of it. And then ask your user to click on South America. When the user clicks the click box over that continent, they earn their points in the quiz. Or maybe users need to do some kind of calculations and enter a series of answers into a series of text entry boxes. And each one of those is worth a certain number of points that contribute to the users overall score.

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. Now you may have noticed these other options that have appeared as well, of Add to Total and Report Answers. Report Answers means that if you pass your user's score to a learning management system, an LMS, the answers that they actually gave are submitted. For, for instance, for a multiple choice question, instead of just saying, "The user got this question right or wrong," the actual answer that they chose will be passed through to the LMS. That's useful, maybe, if someone gets the question wrong then the professor can see what answer they gave and suggest what they might need to study next.

For a button, like our little Continue button right here, really all that can be passed through is "Did they click it or not?" So Report Answers isn't really a big deal for a button like this. How about Add to Total? Well you can see that if I deselect Include in Quiz, our points goes down to 80, right here in our Advanced Interaction. So if I check Include in Quiz again, we went back up to 81 points. I'm gonna scroll down a little bit and I'm gonna deselect Add to Total.

And now, we're back down to 80 points. So this means that this knowledge check, this little button, doesn't contribute to the user's score, like how they do on this is not lumped in with the number of points they earn on the big quiz at the end. However, this is still considered part of the quiz. That affects what's known as the quiz scope. We'll talk about the quiz scope in another lesson. So, for now, I'm gonna turn back on Add to Total and I'm gonna close that Advanced Interaction box.

Let's talk about the third and final type of thing that you can use as a knowledge check. So I'm gonna quickly add a blank slide to my project, really any place is fine. I'll just add it after slide 6. Now I'm gonna go to the Interactions drop down. And here you'll see buttons and clip boxes but you'll also see Drag and Drop and Learning Interactions. The Learning Interactions are pre-built little widgets that you can use in your project. And there's kind of two flavors.

The first is things like this, Process Circle or Pyramid Stack or Timeline, and these are really ways to present information to your user. You customize them with your content and they're just kind of slick little ways to present information. But there's also these games. There's a word search, there's Catch Alphanums that's where you kind of move the little bucket around and catch numbers or letters that fall from the sky. There's Hangman, Jeopardy, there's also a Millionaire game, and so on.

So I'm gonna click Jeopardy and I'm gonna hit Insert. And I'm not actually gonna add in any questions to my Jeopardy game. I'm just gonna have it be added to my slide. So you can actually include these in with your quizzes. And you can see right here in the Properties panel I can check Include in Quiz, and I can specify however many points I want and I can have those added to the total. This is also true for the Drag and Drop interactions. I don't have any drag and drop questions in this project. They're really popular, they're a fun way to mix it up in terms of how you can get your user to interact with your project.

I'm not gonna go into them in detail at all because there's this really great course called Captivate Projects: Drag-and-Drop Interactions by Dr. Pooja Jaisingh that goes into them in great detail. The point is, once added into your project, the drag-and-drop interactions and the other games interactions are great options for knowledge checks in a course, they're also able to be included as part of the quiz and have points assigned to them. So we've seen several examples of items that can be added to your project as a knowledge check.

We looked at quiz questions, we looked at pre-built interactions that come with Captivate like drag and drop, and we also looked at things you can build out yourself that include interactive items like buttons or text entry boxes that can be scored. We saw also how these items can be included and scored as part of the quiz, and we saw how you can use the Advanced Interaction box to tell, at a glance, what is and isn't included in your quiz.