e-Learning,Captivate,Advanced Actions,Variables,Learning

You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.

How will you do it?? Well, Advanced Actions can help you.

Adobe Captivate allows to execute actions i.e. “Execute advanced action” on various events that happen within a captivate movie while the movie is playing. These events include On slide enter/exit, On interactive object’s success/failure condition, When a text entry box loses focus, when user rollovers/clicks the rollover area of rollover slidelet object, question slide’s success/failure condition etc.

This post intends to teach you create an advanced action and add statements to it. So without wasting any time let’s get down to the business...

How to create an Advanced Action:

• Goto  ‘Project’ menu and select ‘Actions’ menu-item.
• Actions Dialog comes up.
• Select the ‘Advanced Actions’ tab.

So now you know how to create an Advanced Action. Pretty easy!  Right??

Now we would learn how to actually add statements to this Advanced Action. When I say statements to the advanced action it means the various activities this advanced action is supposed to do. But before that a small pill of basics about Advanced Action:

Using Advanced Actions you can use the following options to define actions in Captivate:

• Condition - provide if...else conditions with and/or operators.
• Assignment - can assign value/variable to both Captivate exposed and user created variables.
• Standard action - you could use a single advanced action to run multiple actions in a sequence.

Now in order to understand how to add statements to your actions, let us first define a problem:

Say in your e-learning project, upon a button click the following should happen:

• A value is assigned to a user created variable (say var 1). This post explains how to create variables.
• http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate should open.

Solution:

• Insert a button.

So your advanced action is ready. This advanced action gets executed when a user clicks on the button. In my next post I would explain how to use conditional statements in advanced actions. Till then I would advise you all to get your hands dirty with advanced actions.