Tips for Making Awesome eLearning Quizzes with Articulate Quizmaker

I really like Quizmaker ’09 from Articulate. It allows me to do some pretty powerful things quickly. Here’s a list of how to make your quizzes awesome in Quizmaker.

Grouping of questions

There are times when you need to group questions to ensure they flow in a certain order. (Especially if you want to randomize the order of some and not others.) I also found this useful if I want to present a scenario and then have specific questions.

Here are the steps:

1. Create your questions

2. Click Question Pool

3. Drag the questions to that group

random order of questions

Many times you want to randomize the sequence of questions. In Quizmaker you add randomization to groups of questions. So you could have 10 random questions and then have the next 10 in order. As you group the questions (previous steps), think about which ones might be random.

Steps:

1. Select in a group of questions
2. Click Randomize Group

Use a question bank

Sometimes you create a pool of 50 questions, but you only want 30 to come up at random.

Steps:

1. Select the question group
2. Click Randomize Group
3. Click the Include dropdown
4. Select the number of questions you would like to include

random answers

Do you want to randomize not only the order of the questions but also the possible answers?

Steps:

1. open test properties
2. Select Question Defaults
3. Check random answers

Passing Branch Users vs. fail

Many times I would like to send the participants who pass the test to a congratulations page. However, I would like to send failing participants to a review page.

Steps:

1. Embed the quiz in PowerPoint (made with Articulate Presenter)
2. The Questionnaires and Interactions window appears
3. In the Quiz Properties area, where a user goes when they pass and fail

add flash videos

There may be a time when you want the user to see an animation or video bullet before answering a question. You can embed a flash movie on the question page.

Steps:

1. Open the question you are editing.
2. Click Media/Flash Movie
3. Browse to find your flash file

Send questions all at once

There are two ways to get a user to submit questions: all at once or one at a time. If a user submits questions one at a time, it’s good because they know right away if they did it correctly. However, it also takes longer to submit each question individually.

Steps:

1. Click Player Templates
2. Choose the Send All at Once template (or you can create your own template… continue to the next step)
3. Click New and give your template a name.
4. On the Navigation tab, select Send all at once

Use a timeline

You may want the slide content to appear in stages. Maybe you are preparing for the question. (an animation construct)

Steps:

1. Open the question you are editing.
2. Click Slide View
3. Open the timeline at the bottom of the window
4. Move your text/image boxes to different time markers on the timeline
5. Grab and move the red playbar left and right to see the content fade in/out

Hope these tips help. Are there more things you would like to see?