Friday, February 5, 2010

Internal or Offline Learner Tracking for Articulate Quizmaker

Based on a discussion at the eGuild, it seems there is a demand to setup Quizmaker for tracking users without using a LMS or any online solution.

The following is the beginning steps into creating your own custom tracking, this will show you how to extract users interactions from Quizmaker, from here you will need to use whatever technology (asp, php etc) to save the information.

I think that this solution is perfect for those who have no other option than to develop their own internal solution, and can not use third party web apps. For those who do not have this restriction, I highly recommend that you use Articulate Online. You can go swimming in JS and Server Side Languages all you want but you're not going to get as complete and detailed reports as Articulate Online can offer you.

Anyways, the solution:

1. Publish a Quiz for a LMS

2. In the main quiz folder remove everything except quiz.html, quiz.swf and the quiz_content folder.

3. Create a new javascript file named tracking.js

4. In that javascript write the following function:

function lms_DoFSCommand(command, args)
{
alert("command" + command);
alert("args" + args);
}


5. In quiz.html add this to the header:

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.2" SRC="tracking.js" TYPE="text/javascript"></script>


You should now get Popups while you use the quiz, this shows you all the quiz interactions. From here you can parse and send this information to a flat file.

4 comments:

  1. Can I get a "Step 6"?

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Always willing to help! I have stopped here because further steps will depend on a variety of things such as technology being used on the server side, and what variables you are interested in tracking.

    Please feel free to contact me should you have a serious need for a solution!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi JD,
    I too am interested in trapping the Quizmaker results on the CLIENT via Javascript so that I can store them locally. Can you provide a litte more info to be able to generate that flat file on the client?

    ReplyDelete
  4. You're not going to be able to write to a file on a users machine using javascript. You can save to a flat file on the server side but you will need to use something like php or asp to accomplish this.

    ReplyDelete