SWOT Analysis

Oct 14, 2012

Hi guys

I am working may way through a set of written assessment materials to see if I can convert them for delivery in Presenter, Engage or Quizmaker.  The one I am currently reviewing is a SWOT analysis.  Has anyone cleverly bent Studio/Quizmaker to deliver something like a quadrant grid with the responses sent to an LMS? 

22 Replies
Jeanette Brooks

Hey Christine,

If you'd like to capture learners' responses in your LMS, and you're currently using the Articulate Studio suite, then Quizmaker would be the way to go. It sounds like a good approach would be to build your course in Presenter, possibly add some Engage interactions to make specific slides explorable so that learners can easily consume & learn your content, and then embed a Quizmaker quiz as your assessment. Depending on the length of your course, you might even want to use multiple quizzes throughout the course as periodic brief knowledge-checks, and then use a final quiz at the end for the assessment that you track in your LMS.

Regarding the assessment: what skills/knowledge are you wanting to build and measure in your learners? 

If you want learners to be able to identify what the letters in SWOT stand for, I could see doing that with maybe a series of fill-in-the-blank questions. You could also build a series of hotspot questions where you show a graphic of the 4 quadrants and display a fact or statement, and then have learners mark the quadrant in which it belongs. 

Another possibility might be using a matching drag-and-drop question, which learners match 4 different situations with the correct label (strength, weakness, opportunity, thread). If you don't like the style of the matching drag-and-drop, a matching dropdown might be better suited.

Does that help give you some ideas? If you have some specific learning objectives or exercises in mind for your course, feel free to share a bit more detail about those and we can help you keep brainstorming.

Dan Winter

Hi Christine!

Jeanette has an awesome suggestion - fill-in-the-blank answers would be great for SWOT analysis assessment. I've had previous success using the matching drop-down menu, or perhaps even a fill in the blank, with several blanks. This gives students a bit of freedom, and should easily send up to an LMS for you to review.

Have you though of maybe using the "Survey" option on Quizmaker? The "Ranking" question option, while not providing you with a grade up front (would of course take a bit of manual work) I can see being very successful! Please do share more - I'm quite interested in the route you'll take...

christine kent

Jeanette, I have pretty much sorted out the basic quizmaker and engage options and they work nicely for low level courses where the student is not being asked to perform high level functions.

However, now I am trying to use Articulate to build training and assessments for fairly high level courses where students are expected to demonstrate analytical and problem solving abilities. I am trying to see if there is any way we can do something a bit more intelligent. 

A SWOT analysis is where they have to assess some business process or idea according to 4 parameters, Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Traditionally this is always laid out in a quadrant and there is no single correct answer.

This means the text they enter has to be sent back to the instructor for assessment.  I have used the Survey/Essay option for other qualitative responses but for this one I want to collect 4 essays on a single page - i'ts a layout issue more than anything else.

Essentially i am wanting 4 freeform essay responses on a single page, so that students can fill their responses into the quadrant on a single page.  

Of course, it would be possible to have them fill out 4 separate essay questions, but that would lose the point of the quadrant layout. and would be definitely a workaround rather than a good option.

Jon DeGroot

Hey Christine,

I see what you're trying to do and entirely agree that the ideal would be to have all of the essay responses on a single page. Unfortunately Quizmaker can only handle one short answer (or essay) input per screen. Storyline on the other hand may  do the trick. Articulate just sent out an email recently demonstrating how to use text variables to capture student responses.

http://learn.articulate.com/text-variables/

You could easily customize this to your needs and display 4 free form essay responses on one page. I realize this would involve getting Storyline and becoming familiar with that tool but I wanted to mention it in case you were interested.

christine kent

Yes  I am.  I am testing these products for the organisation I work for.  They are letting me do it, but not buying the products (yet) so I am starting with Studio and when that free month runs out, moving on to Storyline - thereby maximising how much I can learn/review/test and so get enough evidence to encourage the organisation to buy one or both products.

But I saw that email as well, and I am thinking I may need to get Storyline before my month on Studio is up.  That was pretty nice stuff.

Question - Does anyone know if this kind of text variable entry can be sent to an LMS? 

Jeanette Brooks

Hi again Chrstine! Below is a quick mockup of an idea that might come close to what you have in mind for your SWOT activity. This was done in Storyline. It mimics (I think!) your idea of showing four different text variables on a single page. (In reality, it's actually created on four separate screens, so that each text entry can be captured and transmitted to an LMS as a separate item)

And yes, you can definitely send the text-entry data to an LMS. I uploaded the interaction to Articulate Online, completed the activity with some practice text, and then created a printout of the resulting data (see attached pdf at the bottom of this post). Although every LMS handles data and reporting differently, I just wanted to show you that yes, the data does get transmitted.

I hope this helps give you an idea of what's possible with Storyline! I'm also attaching the source file in case you've downloaded the free Storyline trial and would like to take a look under the hood at how the file was put together.

Published output

Storyline source file

Brenda Lane

Hi Jeanette,

I always appreciate when you provide the source files. It is usually pretty easy to deconstruct them and figure out how you built a particular module.  In this case, I got a little lost.  Can you explain the trigger that ends with "..equal to the typed value when the control loses focus?"  I am not sure what the "loses focus" means.

Thanks!

Josh Yavelberg

I know this is an old thread, but I thought I would share a SWOT interaction that I created.

You can customize the focus of the SWOT and I had a notes feature that I carried over as well, so there is a lot of interactions to play around with here. There is also a print feature that has a basic layout using java, so that will only work on the output. Finally, in order to print correctly, the java references a logo.png that needs to be copied into the root of the output folder to include in the print.

There was a lot of java headaches to get this right, especially trying to preserve any line breaks added by the user in the print. It is working fine on my machine, but I have not yet tested it on an LMS.

Enjoy!

Josh Yavelberg

I am a java novice, so it works, but I think that it can still be improved. I find that the difficulty with extending the articulate system using Java is that you are developing between a ton of different languages and much of the interaction (code) is hidden behind the GUI of Articulate.

Essentially, I was trying to pull a variable (PHP), put it into HTML/CSS using a Java script. The main problem that I am not sure I have fixed here is the translation of any user-added line breaks within a long-text response. I did get that to work from my local machine by translating the PHP line break code (\n) and replacing it with HTML (<br>), but it has not tested favorably when uploaded to an LMS.

So I am happy to hear if anyone else in the community has more Java experience and knowledge with how articulate actually writes long-text variables. As there is no WYSIWYG editor when building in these responses (perhaps a suggestion for later Articulate upgrades?), I am not sure what the output for text variables actually looks like in raw form. This is also an area that if someone has knowledge as to what is actually written in long-text, I would appreciate the assistance. 

Chad Evangelista

It seems as though Jeannette Brooks Source File download is not working. Is there another like it? I could really use the SWOT example she presented- I realize it's 6 years old, but it's exactly what I need. I want to look at the source file so I can build a custom one for my project. Any help with this would be great- Thanks!

Jeanette Brooks

Hi again Chad - attached is a re-do of that original source file. It was kind of a fun challenge to rebuild it, since it's been so many years since I've looked at it! This version doesn't have a character in it like the original one, but you could easily add one in or customize  in other ways however you wish. Also, I like this one better than the original, because it allows the user to switch among the quadrants more directly from each one, rather than forcing them to click the checkmark each time. Anyway, I hope it's helpful! 

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