Summary: Create an account at Dokeos Campus for a free and basic online LMS.
Difficulty: Easy to medium

One of the most frequent questions I seem to get is

“How can I track x number of users on my course and get the scores of my quiz?”

And the answer is:

Use an LMS or VLE.  

Quizmaker works best if you integrate it online with a  learning management system (LMS) or a virtual learning environment (VLE) – different names for the same thing. That way you and your users can log in and see scores, tracking info and much more besides.

Articulate Online

The best tracking system for Articulate products is Articulate Online.  It is a system that has been especially designed to get the most information from your users. It tracks the questions and the answers given by students in their entirety.  You can publish direct from each of the Articute products direct to the system without needing to go through the motions of uploading zip files and logging onto the system. It requires no effort to set up and is very accessible for your users. However, like most good things, it does come at a cost and is sometimes beyond the budget of many Articulate enthusiasts.

SCORM and AICC compatible LMS

Articulate Studio ‘09 is fully SCORM and AICC compatible meaning that you can publish the content to any SCORM or AICC compatible Learning Management System or Virtual Learning Environment and that system will also track information about your users. What information it tracks depends on the LMS you go for. You won’t get the full tracking and reporting you get with Articulate Online but you may get enough to suit your needs.

This series of articles looks at some of the most common open source Learning Management Systems and complements information that can found in other Articulate blogs and support articles. It is designed to help the novice get up and running.

Running Your Course Off An Existing Online LMS

By far the easiest way of getting your course or quiz tracked is to load into an online system. This is the principle of Articulate Online which is hosted on the very best quality servers.  If your course is small (less than 20 Mb) and you are not too concerned about branding, then you might want to consider hosting on the free Dokeos campus site. 

You’ll need to register as a course creator and once you’ve done that, you are free to import courses and quizzes and get your users to follow.

The first step is to import your content to Dokeos. Dave Mozealous recently prepared a Screenr screencast showing us in detail how this should be done. I suggest you begin by watching that. (Note that he is not using Dokeos Campus but his own installed version of the portal. However the procedure for importing content is the same.)

You’ll then need to get your users enrolled on your course. Unlike Articulate Online, where you can do bulk importing of users, Dokeos requires the user to register themselves to the portal. Once the user is registered, they can either subscribe to your course or you can subscribe them directly.

User Subscribes

You subscribe your users

If that sounds a little complicated, or you want to make sure that only your users can subscribe and not anyone else, you can also do this yourself at an administrator level. 

Clicking on the Users List will incidentally take you to the same Users menu above where you search and register your students.

You can even enter a registration password which in principle would allow the content to stay open for users registered on the platform but would only allow those users with a password to go ahead with the registration.

Notes:

• Rather than use Dokeos Campus, you could install Dokeos on your own server.  Unless you are familiar with setting up systems on your IT network, you may find this daunting and overly complicated. I personally find this latest edition of Dokeos more difficult to set up than its predecessors and the support is somewhat lacking. However, this is the downside of Open Source software. You don’t get the same level of support.
• Once you have your own LMS, there is nothing stopping you from using Articulate software to track all your users. Dokeos Campus is great for schools. If you are a teacher wanting to give some basic tests to your pupils, then create your quiz on your computer in Quizmaker, upload it to Dokeos Campus and get your pupils to register online. You’ll be able to track the results of all your class quickly and efficiently and your pupils will love you for giving them some online assignments.
  
• Quizmaker is not the only application you can track on an LMS. Both Presenter ‘09 and Engage ‘09 also have tracking properties. In Presenter, you can track the number of slides a user has viewed, the answers to a Choice Learning Game and the results of an embedded quiz from Quizmaker or an embedded Engage interaction. You can track Engage ‘09 as a standalone too to check that the interaction has been viewed.

• Dokeos is a European inspired system and was created as an offshoot to the Belgian Claroline open source LMS.
  

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