Yes, your Captivate Sim can drive your Lectora Course

Autoadvance Lectora when the Learner finishes a Captivate Simulation

By Jay Lambert


Frequently, we embed Adobe Captivate simulations within a Lectora eLearning course. The two authoring tools actually work together really well.

But note that if you simply insert the Captivate simulation as a Flash swf file into Lectora without doing anything to limit the course navigation, then the learner can easily click right on through to the next page in the title. That's a bad thing if your simulation contains vital content (and if it doesn't, why is it there?). Since we typically use this technique for software training, if the learners skip out of the simulation, then they have missed the instruction.

Luckily you can use JavaScript to prevent this from happening.

Our most common scenario for including a Captivate simulation is as a demonstration. In that case, we just want to ensure that the learners finish watching the simulation. When they do, they're free to advance in the course.

To set this up is a 2-step process. You'll do one simple step in Captivate and the other in Lectora.

In Captivate

1. With your Captivate file open, go to the Edit menu and click Preferences.

2. Under the Project category, click Start and End.

3. Now locate the Project end options on the bottom right side of the Preferences box.

4. Click the Action drop-down and select Execute JavaScript.

5. Then click the three dots to enable the JavaScript entry box and type trivNextPage().

6. Click OK and Save the file. Now after you've published and inserted the file into your Lectora course, the Captivate sim will instruct Lectora to go to the next page when the learner reaches the end of the sim.

You could use this same approach for a guided practice.

Note that if your course includes a Captivate test, then you can also have Captivate set a variable upon the test being passed. And then Lectora could read the variable. Once you start using Captivate to set JavaScript, there are quite a few possibilities.

In Lectora

Once you've inserted the Captivate swf file into your Lectora title, disable the forward navigation for that page. Publish the course and launch the resulting HTML pages. When the learner takes the course, it will automatically advance at the end of the simulation, but not before.

That's all there is to it.

Note: The JavaScript command will not work in Lectora's preview mode. You must publish the course.