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Video tutorial: Advanced conditional action for customized feedback

Startfile + Video tutorial

Goal

Introduction to conditional actions in Captivate 5 and the use of the new interface. You'll create one advanced action to show customized feedback based on the score of a quiz. The workflow will be illustrated by a Captivate-SWF.

Sample SWF

Play this SWF to see the result. You'll see a Quiz with 5 question slides, each with a score of 10 points. Based on the resulting total score (maximum = 50 points) a feedback will appear before the score slide.

Feedback slide: objects

I included a zip file with a Startfile and the Video in PDF-format. In the Startfile, after 5 regular Question slides, you'll find the Feedback slide. This slide has 4 invisble Text Captions, each correponding with a score range: 

• Text Caption Excellent conttains feedback for a score of at least 40/50 points
• Text Caption Good conttains feedback for a score between 30 and 40 pointgs
• Text Caption Fair conttains feedback for a score between 25 and 30 points
• Text Caption Failed conttains feedback for a score below 25 points

Analysis conditional action

A conditional action has by default 3 parts:

1. a decision: contains the question(s) to be evaluated, that can result in a TRUE (Yes) or a FALSE (No) result
   Examples: for an Excellent score  is the decision 'Is the score at least 40?' (1 question)
   for a Good score is the decision 'Is the score at least 30 and less than 40' (2  questions)
2. THEN actions: actions to be executed when the decision results in TRUE
   Example:if the Excellent decision is TRUE, then the Text Caption Excellent should become visible
3. ELSE actions: actions to be executed when the decision results in FALSE

You do not always need the ELSE actions. They are fine when only two situations are possible, and leads to the simplest form of Conditional action. 
Example: if we only need feedback for Pass and Fail (2 situations) we could show the Feedback Pass as a THEN aciton and the Feedback Fail as an ELSE action.

But we have 4 situations corresponding with the 4 feedback text captions, and only one of the 4 is possible whatever the score. In that case I do recommend to create 4 decisions, and each decision will only have THEN actions, no ELSE actions. The conditional action has then 4 items, each having a decision and THEN actions.

A summary of the 4 decisions for this usecase:

For each advanced action you also have to decide which event will trigger the action. In this case the advanced action will be attached to the slide 'Feedback' when this slide is entered.
    

Video tutorial

In this Captivate-movie you'll create the advanced conditional action TestScore as described. Since I'm not a native English speaker, I want to apologize for my strange accent. It is a demonstration, not a training simulation, totally captured in the Advanced Actions dialog box. Due to the restrictions of this Publishing application the video has been downscaled. If you want to see it in the original resolution, please download the PDF-file. You'll need Acrobat Reader 9.

The video was captured using Captivate 4. I'm very thankful to RJ Jacquez who published this great idea by Tweetdeck.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License