Intro

Another Quiz tweak blog, answering a question in the Adobe forums found under this ‘link‘.

None of my previous blogs about tweaking quiz slides (like Custom feedback) or using Random question slides (Do’s and Don’ts) could answer this question directly.

Goal: show a custom review message for random question slides. Follow this step-by-step workflow. Of course I used a shared action since it is a repetitive process. You’ll see a short example project.

Example project

Watch this quiz. It has 3 random slides which will be selected from a question pool with 9 question slides.

Beware: I didn’t add a slide after the score slide (which is good practice), which means the Continue button has no functionality in this example.

Problems

To find a workaround, I listed up the problems:

• In the default Review design of Captivate the Review area is only used for questions which have not been answered.  The default messages which you can still define under  Quiz Preferences, Settings, button ‘Question Review messages’ do not appear anymore since the design with checkmarks has been introduced. You will need to create custom text messages.
• Although you can add custom objects to question pool slides, you cannot address those objects using an action.  It is possible to use an Advanced or Shared action for the On Enter event, but you cannot hide/show custom objects.
• A random question cannot have any triggered action in a Captivate project.

Conclusion: the custom text container cannot be in the question pool slides nor in the random question slides. It needs to be outside of them. But  since the message text needs to be different for each quiz slide, somehow it needs to be in the question pool slides.

Summary of the workflow:

• I used one shape timed for the rest of the project on a normal content slide immediately before the first random question slide. That ‘dummy’ slide can be very short (I used 0.1 secs) and even set to fade so that it will barely be visible to the learner. The shape will be the custom text container and it is outside of the question slides. It has an extra advantage: it will be on top of the embedded objects of the quiz slides.
• The shape is not filled with a text feedback message but with a user variable set up to show sufficient characters (I used 250). Text style and size of the shape are edited so that those characters can be displayed.
• The value of the variable (feedback) is assigned with a Shared action On Enter for each quiz slide in the question pool(s).

Step-by-step workflow

Step 1 in question pool

Use the scratch area for each quiz slide to add the feedback message.  You’ll need to copy/paste it in the shared action, this is a lot more comfortable than having to type it in the small parameter field. Here is a screenshot to show one quiz slide:

Step 2: import the Shared action

You can download the Shared action here:

EnterPoolReviewAct

Import this shared action to your project library.  I will explain the action later, but importing this action results automatically in the creation of the user variable v_review which you’ll need in the next step.

Step 3: Dummy slide

Create a short slide immediately before the first random slide. On that slide you insert a shape (labeled Tx_Review), which you time for the rest of the project. Go into Text Edit mode (F2 or double-click) and use the X button in the Character part to insert the user variable v_review. Be sure to increase the default duration. I used 250 characters which was sufficient for the feedback messages. Here is a screenshot of that slide and its Timeline. You see the double arrow at the end of Tx_Review timeline, indicating it is timed for the rest of the project, and the very short duration.

Because you don’t want to show the text container Tx_Review from the start, use the On Enter event of this dummy slide to ‘Hide Tx_Review’.

Shared action On Enter in Question pool

In the question pool on each slide add the Shared action which you downloaded.  The preview of this action is visible in this screenshot, with indication of the two parameters:

The second parameter is always Tx_Review.  The first parameter can be filled by using the Copy/paste workflow from the feedback message in the scratch area.

Hiding Tx_Review

If you have a score slide and/or content slides after the random slides, you’ll need to hide the text container On Enter for that slide. In the example project that was done on the Score slide.

Ready for testing….