This guest blog entry was written by Articulate VP of Community Tom Kuhlmann.
If you’ve spent any time using Quizmaker ‘09, you can see that it’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use application. To see what I mean, take a quick peek at the tutorials.
Creating quiz questions is a snap. You choose from a list of standard question types…
…and then you add your question, answers, and feedback.
It’s all pretty easy.
However, sometimes you need more than a quiz question in your quiz. There are times when you need to set up the question before you can ask it. In that case, you need something like a blank slide where you can add some content prior to asking the question.
Lo and behold, Quizmaker ‘09 has a blank slide feature.
The blank slide feature gives you what we in the industry call a blank slide. In essence, it is a slide that is blank. Pretty clever, heh? The blank slide works in form or slide view. So you can basically make it look anyway you want.
How Can You Use a Blank Slide?
Since the blank slide is empty, you can pretty much do what you want. Here are three ideas that work for issues common to a lot of courses. You can see all of the ideas in action in this demo that I did for the Rapid E-Learning Blog on 5 Common Question Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them).
Use the blank slide to provide information needed to answer a question.
Sometimes you have to set up your quiz question with some content. Or perhaps you want to present a case study and then jump into some questions. In either case, it’s easy to do with a blank slide. You can see how I did that with the snail question. Prior to asking the question, I had the learner review a slide on snail anatomy. I built the anatomy slide with a blank slide.
Create media-rich custom feedback.
When you create a question, you get a standard feedback box. However, what if you want to add feedback that includes video, Flash, or animation?
You can’t do that with the standard feedback which only allows audio and text. However, you can use a blank slide for feedback. To do so, set your question feedback option to branch to a blank slide and then add your media-rich feedback on the blank slide. This approach opens the doors to all sorts of creative feedback.
In the quiz above, the first question uses the default feedback box. However, the Elvis question branches to a blank slide for feedback where I was able to add an image and video.
Disguise one quiz as multiple quizzes.
A lot of people want to know how to insert more than one quiz in a course and keep a running tally of the learner’s score. An easy solution is to use one quiz. Create blank slides for your content areas. Then insert some quiz questions. Insert some more blank slides. And then some more quiz questions. The learners might think they’re taking multiple quizzes, but the reality is that it is one quiz with multiple blanks slides of information. You can insert this into your Presenter ‘09 course or use the LMS compliant publishing in Quizmaker to make it a standalone module.
There are a lot more creative uses for blank slides. In future posts you’ll see some of them. For now, just know that the blank slide feature in Quizmaker ‘09 gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility when creating your rapid elearning courses.
Click here to download the quiz file I used in the demo above. You’ll need Quizmaker ‘09. Feel free to download a trial copy if you don’t currently have it.
Very helpful!
Adam Little | Posted at 05:02 pm on December 8th, 2008 | #