Summary: You can embed Articulate Engage and Quizmaker in other tools such as Captivate 4.
Difficulty: Medium

Many E-learning designers like to keep two or three tools up their sleeves. I don’t use Captivate but I know there are people who use Captivate with Articulate. We have already looked at adding Captivate content to Articulate Presenter and also how to add Captivate to Engage. Today we take the other direction and see how to embed Engage or Quizmaker into Captivate.

First let’s take a look at what we are trying to achieve.

View demo

There are a couple of Engages in there plus a single question quiz.

How do you do it?

The principle of embedding Engage or Quizmaker is nearly always the same, be it in Captivate or indeed within another Engage or Quizmaker quiz. You ignore the HTML launch file and place the engage.swf or the quiz.swf. You copy over the related content folder (engage_content or quiz_content) to the same location as the SWF. Finally you respect naming conventions.

Note that it is not possible to embed Articulate Presenter into Captivate. There is no web object feature in Captivate and the Articulate Presenter player.html launch file is essential for the correct display of the presentation.

1. Open Captivate and open a slide where you want to import Articulate.
2. In Captivate go to Insert -> Animation.
3. Browse to the engage.swf or the quiz.swf of your Articulate presentation and open in Captivate.
4. In the New Animation dialog box, go to the Options tab.
5. Change the Timing parameters for specific time to 999,0 seconds effectively keeping the slide open until the user has finished viewing. (choosing the other display options does not seem to work).

6. Leave or remove the Fade In transition as you please (also in the Options tab)
7. Click OK.
8. When you are ready to publish your Captivate, go to File -> Publish.
9. Under the Flash (SWF) output tab, select the Preferences button for the Project Information.


10. From the Category on the left, select Publish Settings.
11. For Externalize resources, check Animations and click OK.

12. Click on the Publish button
13. Open your published Captivate published files and notice the engage.swf or the quiz.swf within those files.
14. Go back to your original Engage or Quizmaker published files and copy and paste the engage_content or quiz_content folder into the Captivate published files folder.


15. Now launch your Captivate movie and the embedded Articulate presentation will play

I have done a quick (and rough :)) screencast of the process with Screenr. I had a slight problem at the end when reloading my browser (Google Chrome) but that was apparently because the Captivate files needed to recognize that the missing engage_content folder was now around. I Relaunched the published files from the HTML launcher (Timeline.htm in this example) and had no problems.

Notes

If you want to add more than one Engage file in your Captivate presentation, you will need to rename the extra engage.swf and engage_content folders to something unique ie. engage2.swf, engage2_content or engage3.swf , engage3_content . Notice how the engage_content folder name is dependent on the name of the engage.swf file.

Adding more than one quiz is more complex.

Not all the functionality is respected when embedding quizzes or Engage interactions. Most notably, all zoom functions will be lost so you will want to remove those from your originals.

When embedding a quiz, your results will not be tracked, nor will you be able to print the results or send the results by mail.

These guidelines are for Captivate 4 only. Other versions of Captivate may not support the integration of Articulate content.

It is not possible to embed Articulate Presenter to Captivate in this way. The Presenter HTML launch page is intrinsic to the presentation and cannot be omitted like with Engage or Quizmaker.

Embedding Engage or Quizmaker in the manner described above is not supported by Articulate. Please write a comment on this blog if you have a question.

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