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.
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.
- Open Captivate and open a slide where you want to import Articulate.
- In Captivate go to Insert -> Animation.
- Browse to the engage.swf or the quiz.swf of your Articulate presentation and open in Captivate.
- In the New Animation dialog box, go to the Options tab.
- 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).
- Leave or remove the Fade In transition as you please (also in the Options tab)
- Click OK.
- When you are ready to publish your Captivate, go to File -> Publish.
- Under the Flash (SWF) output tab, select the Preferences button for the Project Information.
- From the Category on the left, select Publish Settings.
- For Externalize resources, check Animations and click OK.
- Click on the Publish button
- Open your published Captivate published files and notice the engage.swf or the quiz.swf within those files.
- 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.
- 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.
Oh have I been waiting for this one, but it doesn’t work for me :-(
I’ve followed your steps to the letter and all I get is the Captive player with the Articulate loading circle. Im using the Tab interaction. I am on Captivate 4 and Engage 09.
Hi Jeanette,
I was getting the same thing. I tried changing the Action Script in Captivate to AS3 and it seemed to work. On the Articulate forums, this didn’t seem to matter though.
Want to know it won’t work in AS2 but until then I have a work around.
***Thanks Dave!
Hi Jeanette and Steve,
I have done a quick Screenr to show you what I did (see at the end of the post above). Maybe it will help you to figure out why things are acting differently for you.
[...] Publishing Articulate to Captivate [...]
@Dave – Although your screencast did not play all the way through for me (stops at 1:16 for me), I decided to try again using the steps you originally posted in the blog. Voila – it worked!
The only thing I can think of that I did differently was today, I checked for Cap 4 updates and there were some patches there…so maybe that was it!
Again, been waiting for this a long, long time. Thanks for sharing your genius!
Another question Dave. Im using the Process Interaction and for some reason, my images are not showing up. I do not have the “Zoom Image” selected. :-( I looked at your demo again, and you definitely have pics.
Dave this is brilliant. thanks!!
One question… do you know if its possible to publish Engage interactions in AS3?
thanks
Hi Gav, It is not possible to publish Engage to AS3. I am guessing you are asking that since the new version of Captivate no longer allows you to publish to AS2. So yep, there is a problem with Captivate 5 and for the moment no solution other than to use Captivate 4 or wait for an upgrade to Engage but I don’t think that is around the corner. Maybe Adobe will release an update to allow publishing in Captivate to AS2 and AS3 as before.
I was successfully able to insert Engage animations into Captivate 4 by following the steps above. I have five different Engage interactions inserted into one Captivate project. But now that I have added audio I am experiencing another issue. When I launch my published captivate file, the audio in the first part of each of the Engage interactions begins playing on my first captivate slide.
I am using Captivate 4 and I have Presenter 5.4.
I know there have been some updates for Presenter 09 but does anyone have any ideas when using an older version of Presenter?
Thanks for any suggestions!
hi Dave, thanks for response and will stick to AS2 for now.
Next problem – same issue Wendal reports. Ive added 3 engage interactions to a captivate project and the audio from all 3 plays on the first slide of the published project.
Any ideas?
thanks
Gav
I have not been successful inserting an engage interation into a captivate project. Perhaps I am missing something. I followed the steps exactly, but when a insert and publish the file the engage project only appears with a swirling circle in the middle. This is all that it does. Any suggestions?
Hi Charlene, What version of Captivate are you using?
I’m using Captivate 4.
I did notice that my SWF files didn’t have the same logos attached. How are your .swf files associated?
Hi Charlene, My SWF files were associated with Swiff Player but that will not matter. The method should work with Captivate 4 but you might want to check you have all the latest updates for that version. You will want to check the naming convention too or the engage.swf file will not find the associated content folder.
Hey dave,
Thanks for this info, it’s great!
I have an issue.. everything works, even the flash file inside the publish folder of the captivate… however, when I open the html file to lunch it, I get a white screen with the captivate controls at the bottom. I have articulate 09 and captivate 4… any ideas on what’s going on?
Does anyone know how to reset the quiz once its embedded so that each time the page loads the quiz refreshes? Right now, everytime the page loads with the quiz, it asks ‘Would you like to begin where you left off?’
How can I get the Articulate Engage output to work with Captivate 5 (which requires AS3)? Great solution to a good marriage!
Hi Scott,
I stumbled across this blog looking for the same answer.
There may be a way to make Engage play nicely with Captivate 5, but after trawling around the web without luck, I just decided to go with an Empower by Snap interaction which seems to work in Captivate 5.5. I know it doesn’t answer your question, but it delivers the outcome my current client wants to see.