I hope you would have started using the Course Companion for Adobe Captivate by now. We had many queries regarding the new concept of Progress Index. In this blog, I will try to answer some of those queries.

Progress Index

Progress Index is a score (out of 16) calculated based on many aspects of an Adobe Captivate   e-learning course. This index gives you an indication of how the course is being accepted by the learners and how effective the course is. Some of the aspects used to calculate this index are – how many learners are actively taking the course on any given day, how learners are doing in the quiz etc.

Figure 1

Interpreting Progress Index

As shown in Figure 1, the index has a color code associated with it. When the index arrow points to:
• Green — The course is well accepted by the learners
• Black — The course is on neutral ground; probably it was just published
• Red — The course is not being accepted well by the learners

The status and recommended actions

The Adobe Captivate course companion also provides hints to aid you in finding the bottlenecks in the course and recommends actions to get rid of these bottlenecks. The “Status” text gives a summary of the present state of different aspects of the course such as learner’s activity level, quiz performance etc. The “Recommended actions” suggests the aspects of the course that you need to work on to improve the progress.
The recommendations are based on the research that the Adobe team has conducted by interacting closely with the power users of Adobe Captivate and Adobe eLearning Suite. If these recommendations do not work for you, we would like to know about the actions you took to improve your course. Click “send us your feedback” and type in your feedback in the popup dialog.

Quick look at key reports

Figure 2

The UI elements associated with the progress index guide you to the relevant reports based on the progress index value. Click on the link “See XXX/YYY/ZZZ” (See Figure 2) link to have a quick look at the relevant reports. This link would vary depending on the progress index. For example, if your progress index hints that the activity level of the learners is low, then this link will include a reference to “Activity repot”. If the progress index hints that the quiz performance of the learners is poor, then this link will include a reference to “Quiz report” and so on. On clicking this link, all the important reports indicating the status of the course will appear right below.
Click “Details” to view a graphical representation of the other relevant data/reports.

Settings

For Progress Index to work effectively, you have to set the expected number of learners for your course in the course companion preferences. Click on the preferences button , located at the top-right corner of the Dashboard, and enter the expected number of learners for your course in “Learner Count” field.

You can download and read more about the Course companion for Adobe Captivate at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_course/