Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

My last post mentioned the way to set up an owned server, for getting the Captivate quiz results. This blog highlights the new Results analysis tool, which can be used to view the results stored on your servers.

Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer is a results analyzer tool which comes with Adobe Captivate 5. This tool enables CP users to analyze the CP course results in a better and an organized manner.

Earlier, in the days of CP4, there were very few options available for storing and analyzing the quiz results from CP courses. The authors had to use some LMS (SumTotal, NetDimensions, Moodle, etc) OR the Email reporting feature of Adobe Captivate.

LMS is though, always a better option, but along with its so many advantages, it comes with a heavy cost also. Some LMS are difficult to setup and require a lot of training.

Email Reporting feature is used by most of the authors, who want the results to be stored and readily available with them anywhere, anytime. This feature allows the authors to get the results of every student in a well-formatted email. But it proved to be very clumsy, when the no. of students went higher. Few disadvantages of Email reporting are as follows:

• Results are stored in a poorly formatted way.
• Fills the author’s mailbox by lot of emails (= no. of students taking the course).
• Extraction and storing of results from so many emails, is a very tedious task.
• Author has to store these results from emails to some other data-store to further analyze the data, which again is a difficult and time-consuming job.

Adobe Captivate Quiz Results Analyzer is a free tool, which provides a solution to the difficulties which authors faced in using LMS or Email reporting. Listed below are the top features of this tool. I’ll take you through these features, in detail, in my further blog posts.

Features :

• Integration with Acrobat.com account :
  • View the results even when the course is live.
  • View and analyze the results without downloading them.
  • Download the results from Acrobat.com to local drives.
  • Delete the unused course results from Acrobat.com account.
• Integration with any server location, to directly view and analyze the results.
  • View the results even when the course is live.
  • View and analyze the results without downloading them.
  • View and analyze the results.
  • Add any no. of server locations to view the results.
• Viewing the results in the form of tables and charts both.
• Exporting the results to commonly used CSV format.
• Printing reports directly while analyzing the results.

Note: This tool is just a results analyzer tool and does not provide any reporting (storing the results when student takes a course) functionality. For getting the results stored, Adobe Captivate 5 comes with a new feature – Alternate Reporting, which allows authors to get the course results directly stored on their Acrobat.com accounts or their own server locations. To learn more about reporting, check this link – Reporting the Quiz Results to a Local Server.

Snapshots:

One of the most requested features in Adobe Captivate was the ability to store the course results on the local servers or database. Adobe Captivate 5 comes with an all new reporting workflow, being highlighted as Alternate Reporting, which enables its users to store and track their course results using their own servers and database.

Alternate Reporting allows the users to integrate their content with their own webservers. Let us see how…in a very few steps…

Step I: Set-up the Web server

For integrating the course with a web server, first the user needs to setup a web server. Here, I will take an example of integrating the Captivate course with WAMP server (PHP-enabled server).

WAMP server is an open source project and a free to use web server. It can be downloaded from www.wampserver.com/en/downloads.php.

Tutorials for installing WAMP server can be found at: http://www.tagbytag.org/tutorials/getting-started/web-design-software/wamp-guide

Step II: Create a Reporting Script

Since some of the users want the results to be stored on their local servers and some want to be stored on some database, Adobe Captivate 5 provides a template script file – InternalServerReporting.php, which is available at the following location – [InstallDirectory]/Adobe Captivate 5/Templates/Publish/. Users can use this script file and modify it accordingly to solve their purpose. Also, there is no restriction on the scripting language used for the reporting script. Users can use any scripting language like PHP or ASP.

Once the script file is ready, you just need to place this file in the root folder of the web server. To check whether the script is correct and accessible or not, please try accessing it using the web browser.

For eg : If the server is on local machine, you can try the following link in your web browser : http://localhost/InternalServerReporting.php.

No error should be displayed in the browser.

Step III: Set the Quiz Reporting Preferences in Adobe Captivate 5

After the server is up and running, and the script file is in place, you need to set the preferences in Adobe Captivate 5, so that the results get reported to the web server.

Adobe Captivate 5 comes with two new reporting options available in the Reporting preferences of Quiz.

For tracking the results using the web server, you need to select and configure Internal Server as the reporting option.

Step IV: Configure the Internal Server

Now, user needs to configure the internal server to his own web server. For this, you should provide the link to the script file in the Server text area of the Alternate Reporting dialog. Also, you should provide the names of the Institute, Department and Course name in the respective fields. All these fields are mandatory and are used to store the course results in a formal structure.

And now, your course is integrated with your web server.

Whenever a student will take this course he will see a Post Results button on the result slide. Once the student uses this button to post the results, the results get posted on your web server.

How can you store the results on a database?

You can anytime modify your script file to connect to a database. Now whenever the results are passed to this script, the code in the script would directly store the results onto the database.

Hence, you can see how easy it is to store the course results on your own web servers/database using Alternate Reporting feature of Adobe Captivate 5.

I’ll give some more highlights on the code in the script in my further blog posts. So keep tuned.