Final week! (and problems with reporting)

I spent most of Monday adding closed captions to each module. This was relatively straightforward, since the script was already typed up, but somewhat time-consuming because I wanted to synchronize the audio and closed captions at the sentence level. The default size for the closed captions was two small and allowed for too many lines, so I changed them to two lines of 12-point font.

Thus far, I hadn't gotten any question responses emailed to me (although I had run through them several times), but I assumed this was because I was running the modules from my desktop and they weren't yet on a web server. On Monday night, therefore, I put some of the modules up on my iSchool webspace. I answered the questions again, but still received no emails. On Tuesday, I looked around on Captivate's support site, and found out that I needed to include a review slide at the end of the quiz (which has a "Send Email" button on it), in order to actually send the email. When I added the review slide, previewed the module, and clicked "Send Email" I did get a message from the web browser telling me that the application was trying to communicate with my email, but nothing happened when I clicked "OK." Reading more extensively in Captivate support, I found many references to the fact that the email results function simply does not work, either in Captivate 3 or Captivate 4. I will do a little more testing on Friday, but am not hopeful about its results. Given the fact that Matt had already told me that he'd had trouble using SCORM to report out through Blackboard, I have no immediate solution as to how to report the students' responses from these modules to Roxanne. This is something I should have been testing earlier in the implementation process.

Since I was at something of a standstill on quiz reporting, I took the rest of Tuesday to make some final changes to the modules, in preparation for the capstone poster session on Wednesday. Quite a while before I actually ended up recording the audio, I had printed the script for each module on a separate page. Throughout the editing process it was helpful to make note of changes to be made to each module on their script page, so that I had one location to check when making changes. Here were the final changes I made on Tuesday:

• Scholary vs Popular Articles: Correcting the response to one of the questions and making sure that the final chart appeared immediately on its slide.


• Research vs. Review Articles: Adding slides that highlighted different areas of the diagram as they were discussed and re-doing the audio and closed captioning to match this. Correcting the timing of elements on one of the question slides.


• Keywords & Controlled Vocabulary: Re-recording the "keyword vs. subject" search. (The previous recording had been a little too short to fit the audio, so I'd extended one of the frames. When I did this, however, there was a flash at the beginning and end of the extended frame. I assumed this was because the original recording was zoomed in, but when I added the exact same level of zoom in the exact same position to the extended frame, the flashing still occurred.)


• Boolean operators & Search Stragies: Making sure the slide with Venn diagrams didn't fade in. Adding slides that highlighted each Boolean operator as it was discussed and re-doing the audio and closed captions to match this. Adding slides during the portion on creating a search strategy based on a particular article of interest to highlight AND and OR when they were mentioned.

And here is the result: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~hnorton/capstone/intro.htm