Summary: Use Quizmaker ’09 to make a completion quiz for tracking in your LMS
Difficulty: Easy
Branching can be effective but if you’re tracking content, you need to think carefully how you are going to set up your course. Look at this real-case scenario that Jess asked in the comments section of this Word of Mouth blog article:
Jess’s Question
I have a presentation that has some materials for all, then 2 branches for 2 separate groups. Everyone needs the first section; specific personnel need either branch 1 or branch 2 in addition to the general. I need the presentation to register the module “complete” after the slides for everyone complete–as it stands, unless someone goes through the entire presentation, the status remains “In Progress.”
Jess is using Articulate Presenter. There are no quizzes in his course. He wants his LMS to tell him if his learners have either completed branch 1 or branch 2. The scenario could look like this:
Solution
The problem that Jess is facing is that Presenter only tracks a single quiz, a single Choices Learning Game or a certain number of slides. Tracking a certain number of slides won’t work because the number of slides viewed will depend on whether the user took branch 1 or branch 2.
That leaves us with a quiz or a Learning Game. The cleanest solution would be to use a quiz.
What Jess could do is build his course as he intended, and then, at the end of each branch, he sends the users to a common “completion quiz” which tells the LMS that the user has completed his course.
So his scenario would look like this:
Creating A Completion Quiz
In Quizmaker ’09, you can create objects that don’t need to look like quizzes at all but will still report to the LMS. Just viewing a single-slide quiz can send a completed signal.
Take a look at this example of a completion quiz. You can set the Finish button to close the window or go to another URL. I have deliberately removed that function here since I don’t want you to leave this page! But I hope get the idea.
(Click on the controls below. This presentation is embedded on the page).
Step by Step
- Open Quizmaker ’09 and create a graded quiz
- Add a single blank slide
- Format your blank slide similar to the example above
- Create a new template especially for this slide.
- Still in Quizmaker ’09, go to Player Templates -> Text Labels -> Change the text label “Next” to “Finish”
- In Player Templates -> Layout -> Uncheck all the options
- Click on the Pass Results button and uncheck “Display Pass result slide” as explained in this article
- Publish to Presenter ’09
- In the Quiz Settings, decide if you want the Presentation to close or go to another URL when the user hits the Finish button.
- Check your settings so that the end of each of your branches goes to the quiz.
- Lock the branching slide and the quiz slide.
- Publish to LMS or Articulate Online. Make sure that in the Reporting settings, you are tracking the quiz.
Back To Jess’s Scenario
So let’s look at how Jess’s course might look now:
Notice how the Finish button actually closes the window in this example. Using a quiz at the end is also a cool way of exiting a presentation. (the Finish button won’t close a Firefox browser, but will work with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome).
Checking The Reports
Let’s just look at what the LMS is saying.
This is an Articulate Online report.
Notice that Articulate Online also shows how many slides the learner views and how long they take to finish. I took the course twice. The first time, I stopped before finishing. The second time, I went to the end. Notice how the second attempt is showing passed and the first Incomplete.
This is a Moodle report.
Notice how Moodle gives a score of 1 for a completion in this particular report and a zero for not completing. (I completed the course in my first attempt and left before the end in my second try.)
Let me know what you think about my suggestion to Jess. Do you have your own ideas?
[...] I took this from Dave Perso’s blog. Could come in handy if I get ‘09 http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2009/04/10/branching-scenarios/ [...]
This is helpful, but I’m looking for a way to create more flexible branching. For example, I’d like to develop a few modules in a course where the individual student can pick and choose their course of study. This post gave me some ideas, but it would be helpful to develop a future post on flexible branching, student driven learning.
Hi there, Thanks for the feedback. I particularly welcome any suggestions for future articles. The purpose of this post was to specifically show how you could track non-assessment branching courses in an LMS. I chose to have just two branches to simplify things but the same method could probably be used in a more flexible approach. Do you need your flexible course to be trackable?
Ideally, the different modules would be trackable. Let me give you some specifics to give you a better idea of what I’d like to do. I’m developing some some software tutorials that would couple a content presentation, an interactive guided practice, and an assessment on the student’s understanding of the software. I’d like for the individual to be able to “test out” at the beginning of the course or after viewing the presentation. This course would also have the flexibility to go back review the same two minute course again until the feel confident in the material to test out.
Do you have any thoughts on how to reset an Articulate course after the user fails the test? For example, say you want to ensure that the user must go back to slide 1 and complete all the learning content before re-attempting the test. It’s simple enough to lock the navigation but is it possible to re-lock it once the user has been through it already?
Interested to know your thoughts.
I want to create a branching scenario where all users take a pretest and based on the results of the pretest the user will be directed to the modules that they need to complete.
Any suggestions?
Hi Brandy, Sorry taking time to get back. Been busy. Quizmaker can only act according to whether you have got more or less than the passmark. So you could have a pretest that would determine if someone needed to take the course or not but you couldn’t have one which would direct people to a number of modules according to the score. Maybe that’s a feature we’ll see in the future. What you could do is have a kind of pretest which would essentially be a group of quizzes each testing knowledge of one module. So the user reaches quiz 1 which has two questions say, and if they pass they move straight onto quiz 2, but if they fail, they are directed to the first module. After finishing the first module, they’d be sent to the first quiz or to another quiz testing the same knowledge and only on passing the quiz would they continue to the second pretest quiz. So for people passing the pretests, they would just go from one ‘mini’ quiz to another. But for those that failed, they’d have to go through each module. It’s changing how you’d envisioned the layout of your course but it might work.
The branching that I want is similar to that which you suggested to Brandy but perhaps simpler. Within a single module, I want to parse it into topics. At the end of each topic, I want to deliver a pass/fail (score immaterial) quiz. If fail, I want to send the learner back to the beginning of that topic. If pass, I want to advance the learner to the next topic. At the end of the module… the last quiz… if fail, they would go back to the beginning of the last topic. If pass, the LMS records the module as passed. I can get this navigation – EXCEPT – I don’t want the learner to be able to re-take the quiz until going through the topic content again. I don’t want it to be so easy to employ the multiple guess technique. However, I see no way to turn off the “retake quiz” button on the quiz summary slide. Any ideas on how I can suppress the “retake quiz” function?
Hi Jack, thanks for your comments. You can turn off the “retake quiz” button by doing the following:
Open the quiz in Quizmaker.
Go to Player Template Builder -> Navigation
Uncheck “Prompt to resume on quiz restart”
Save and republish your quiz to Presenter (or Save and Return to Presenter if you opened the quiz directly from your PowerPoint)
In the Properties for the quiz in PowerPoint, have User may attempt quiz just once.
The retake button will disappear since the quiz is sent to be taken just once, but since the prompt to resume function has disappeared now, the quiz will reload as if it had never been taken.
I know it is a bit difficult to find that one! Regards
Dave… Here’s a little bit of humor to bring in the new year. My colleagues and I have been searching long and hard for a way to accomplish the branching navigation I asked you about on Dec. 17. Today, before I’d seen your response to me describing how to do it, I got a call from my colleague, Manny. He started going on about how he might have found a solution to our navigation problem on a blog belonging to some “Dave Perso” guy who responded to a guy named “Jack”. Simultaneously, we both realized that what Manny found through Google was you responding to my question! It was a truly hilarious moment! :-D
Anyhow, your technique works like a charm. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to me. We’re in the process of converting content made using that other guy’s Presenter into Articulate-authored content with all the same – or more – functionality. This was our last road block. You’ve opened the gates!!! Happy New Year!
Hi Jack, Happy New Year too! Glad the solution worked well for you and funny about you and your colleague finding the post independently.