Tracking Adobe Captivate activities in Moodle™

The SCORM activity in Moodle™ allows users to upload content that follows the SCORM 1.2 specification. SCORM packages extend the functionality of Moodle™ by integrating content created with a variety of authoring tools. In addition using SCORM allows for cross platform integration by importing content from another system for reuse.

One authoring tool I am often asked about is Adobe Captivate. It allows teachers to create content with interactive exercises quizzes simulations and branching activities. For this reason I’ve decided to focus this week’s blog post on how to integrate Adobe Captivate files into your courses as a scored activity so that it will push a grade into your Moodle™ gradebook. I am currently using Captivate 5.5 so my screenshots will be specific to this version. I will only cover grading aspects of the system as there are many features and settings to configure based on your e-learning needs.

Reporting

When you create the Captivate project you’ll first want to set up the reporting settings. These can be found by navigating to File > Project Info. Once the Preferences dialog opens go to Quiz > Reporting. (You can also access this by navigating to Quiz > Quiz Preferences.) Here you will need to enable reporting for the project and configure its settings based on how you wish to score the object and push grades to the LMS. Configure these settings:

1. Check the “Enable reporting for this project” check box.
2. Select “Standard” as the Learning Management System.
3. Select “SCORM”.
4. Click the “Manifest” button and select “1.2”. On this screen you can also set the identifiers and titles as well as a version.
5. Set the “Report Status”. I typically set this to “Complete/Incomplete”. (If you set this to Pass/Fail you’ll also want to set the passing score with the Quiz Pass or Fail settings.)
6. Check to report to the LMS as a “Score”.
7. Select your preference for reporting data.
8. Save your changes.
9. Here is an example of configured preferences:

Scoring

When you are building the project within Captivate you’ll need to decide which items within the project will be scored. For each clickable area on the screen you will specify its reporting. To do this select the click box for the object and specify if it should be included in the quiz how many points it is worth and if it counts toward the total value of the activity. If you forget to do this (which I’ve seen many people do!) then you can quickly apply the settings to all click boxes by selecting the arrow in the upper right-hand corner of the Reporting window after configuring the settings.

You can view the total number of points in the file by viewing the Advanced Interaction interface which is accessible by clicking F9 or by navigating to Project > Advanced Interaction. This information is critical as you will need to input it as the Grade value within Moodle™.

Publishing

Once you are finished creating the project navigate to File > Publish. Configure these settings as noted below:

1. Enter a name for the project into the “Project title” field.
2. Browse and select where the package should be outputted.
3. Then select the checkbox for “Zip Files” and select the version of the Flash Player plugin your students will need to view the activity.
4. Verify that the project information is correct. If your project information does not identify SCORM 1.2 as the output click the “Preferences" button and update it to the preferences noted above.
5. When you are ready click “Publish” to publish the file as a SCORM package. This will create a .zip file. Do not modify this file or unzip it.

Loading into Moodle™

To add the SCORM package into Moodle™ choose the SCORM activity. This activity has many settings most of which I will not cover here. You’ll need to complete the following at a minimum:

1. Give the activity a title within “Name”.
2. Provide instructions to your students within the “Description” text area.
3. Click “Choose a file” from the Package file settings and upload the SCORM 1.2 package that you have already published from Adobe Captivate. This is a .zip file. Upload the entire package.
4. Set the “Maximum grade” value to be equal to the total number points available in the published file (e.g. if the Captivate project had 30 point then you would set this to a Maximum grade of 30).
5. If you want to allow for multiple attempts select the aggregation method from the “Grading method” menu and configure the attempts management options for the activity.
6. Configure the other settings as desired. For additional information about configuring SCORM activities in Moodle™ view my previous post titled “10 Tips and Tricks for Adding SCORM into Moodle™ and Joule 2”.
7. Click “Save and display”.

SCORM and other great Moodle™ features such as Lesson Workshop and Database are all covered in our “Moodle™/Joule Course Building for Advanced Users” online course. If you have yet to enroll you can do so at the Open LMS Learning Solutions Training Center.

Thanks for reading!

~Rebecca DeSantis, Senior Instructional Designer