Implementation, Part 2

Once I had a sense of how all of the exercises would work with Captivate, I went back to one of my more complicated exercises: scholarly vs. popular articles. I had three main questions that I used Captivate help and community forums to answer: 1) How can I combine two questions on one slide? 2) How can I insert links to external websites on a question slide? 3) How can I save students' answers to one question and use them in another slide?

Here's what I found out:

1. You can only have one question per question slide - no exceptions. This didn't seem to be a huge problem - I could simply have the "why" question on the next slide.
2. You can't actually put a link on a question slide! But, in Adobe's community forum, I found the following work-around: You can create a small, separate Captivate file that just contains one slide with a transparent button whose action is to open a URL. Publish this as a flash file and you can insert it as an animation in your question slide. A problem I have yet to solve with this is that the animation then shows a green Adobe Captivate loading bar which appears under the text on the question slide.
3. I read all kinds of information on user-defined variables, which seemed to be just what I needed in order to transfer students' answers into my chart. When I followed the steps described for using these variables, however, my menus didn't look the same and the options I needed to choose weren't available. Eventually, I realized that variables were a new feature in Captivate 4, and I am using Captivate 3.

So there went my plan of having a user-generated chart of criteria! I currently have these questions (and the research vs. review questions) entered as simple true/false questions. I then focused on creating slides to go after each question, showing clues that the article was scholarly or popular based on elements of the citation and abstract. I used SnagIt to take screenshots of the citation and abstract and added highlighting and call-outs as illustration. Here are a few examples:
I took both large (including the entire abstract) and small (1-2 excerpts) screenshots and ended up using all of the smaller ones because of the size of our end product. It's going to be a little smaller in order to accommodate a table of contents on the left and fit an existing template used by TIS and Library Instruction Services (so it will end up looking a little like this tutorial). Roxanne reviewed these screenshots by email and revised a few of them.