Lesson Learned: Adobe Captivate Short Answer Questions in an LMS

First, I would like to say that I love eLearning development, EVEN the troubleshooting, which can be extremely annoying and frustrating when you're on a timeline and you just want everything to work....

...So here's what I do to help me change my perspective:

• Accept that you don't know everything and troubleshooting is part of the process. 
• Think of troubleshooting as helping you  learn the software and the systems so that you can be a more effective and efficient developer. 
• Don't automatically blame the software.
• Accept help!

Okay, it also helps when it is a really awesome course. This particular course is for a Veterinary school at a large University, and I'm passionate about both higher education and animals.

I am writing this post because it took me about 3 days to troubleshoot this issue. Hopefully, I'll help you avoid losing 3 days in troubleshooting, and also I don't want to forget what I learned! I know what you're thinking: how can you forget something after 3 days of troubleshooting, and yes, I agree, you'd think I'd remember! But time moves on quickly (and so does my brain) and there are so many other things to learn and discover, so before you know it, it's 3 years later and the same issue comes up again and believe me, I can't remember the solution. So I figure if I write it down in a blog post, maybe I have something to refer back to, that is, if I can remember that I wrote the blog post :-)

Okay, I know, I know, let's get to the point. 

The scenario: 

1. The course was built in Captivate 9, responsive project 
2. The teacher is 'grading' the student by their answer input in 'short' answer quiz questions. But the student is not graded by captivate or the LMS, the quiz questions were changed from GRADED into SURVEY questions, so anything the student types in the box is marked correct (In graded short answer quiz questions, you have to validate user input). 
3. The student can enter as much text as they want, so it's not really 'short' answer, but that's what they are called in captivate. 
4. The University is publishing to an LMS (Moodle) and wants the teacher to be able to view the reporting from the LMS and read the 'short' answers and that's how then the teacher will determine the grade.
5. The University did not want to publish the answers to an external source like Google forms/docs.
6. The University wanted the students to be able to go back in and review their answers after they exit out.
7. The LMS they are using is Moodle, SCORM 1.2

The result/problem: 

Although the student could type in a seemingly unlimited amount of characters in the

published captivate file. I typed in over 6,000 characters in each 'short' answer quiz question. I'm still not sure if there is a limit that can be typed in. I stopped at 6,000 characters, which, by the way, is about 2.5 pages in a word doc of 12 font and single space. If a teacher wants a student to write an essay, they'd probably go about it in a different format.

However, the problem is that LMS was only reporting about 250 characters (about 45 words) of the short answer quiz questions.

The Solution: 

BTW: After several days of testing various alternatives and work-a-rounds such as: using Text Entry Boxes instead of quiz questions. That didn't work because first, you have to validate user input in order for it report, which means the LMS would always report the answer wrong, and second, I could never find where the LMS reported the answers, maybe I'm missing something, but regardless TEB wasn't going to work. Another option is using a Web Server and inserting a Web Object into Captivate. Then have the student upload a word doc to the Web Server, this is a viable option, but the University really wanted the LMS to record the answers. 

I consulted with two of my favorite experts in the field: Jim Leichliter (CaptivateDev) and Rod Ward (Infosemantics). So a huge THANK YOU to the two of them for their suggestions and recommendations in this issue. 

And here is the solution I found: If you want the LMS to report a lot of characters: Ensure you get an LMS that uses SCORM 2004 here's why:

There is a limit of text recorded through suspend data within the LMS.  

• SCORM 1.2:  limited to 4,096 characters
• SCORM 2004 2nd Edition:  limited to 4,000 characters
• SCORM 2004 3rd Edition:  limited to 64,000 characters

Source: Jim's blog article

I tested in SCORM Cloud because it has the ability to publish both Scorm 1.2 and 2004.

1. Scorm 1.2: I published Captivate using Scorm 1.2 and uploaded to SCORM Cloud. Previewed the course and typed in each 'short' answer over 6,000 characters (which is about 2.5 pages of typed text using 12 font, single space in a word doc.) in the 5 short answer questions (so over 35,000 characters total). The reportage showed 250 characters for each short answer. 
2. Scorm 2004: I published the same course in Captivate using Scorm 2004 and uploaded to SCORM Cloud. I typed in the same number of characters and then reviewed the reporting. I saw all 6,000 characters in every short answer question.

Caution: I tested 35,000 characters remember that SCORM 2004 does have a 64,000 character limit. 

But for now, until we can get the upgrade, we removed the short answer quiz questions and put the short answers on an external server (URL), then we are inserting a Web Object into a Captivate slide that allows the student to fill in the text directly on the server from within the course. 

As always, feel free to leave comments.