One of the things I love about the Articulate tools is that they’re flexible enough to do some out-of-the-box things. For example, most people think of Quizmaker '09 as just a quizzing & assessment tool. But in a recent forum discussion, Quizmaker popped up as a solution for giving learners a chance to reflect on & print their key takeaways from an e-learning course.

If you’re looking for a way to do this, check out the following quick example of an end-of-course reflection question:

View demo of an end-of course reflection question

Basically, the Quizmaker portion of the sample is just a simple one-slide “quiz” that contains an Essay question. The result slide at the end of the quiz is used as a thank-you message and as a place to provide a Print button, so learners can print out what they wrote.

How to build it

It’s pretty easy to build something like this. If you’d like to use the sample above as a starting point, you can download the Articulate package right here. Or, if you’d like to build something similar from scratch, here’s how you can do it:

  1. Launch Quizmaker, click Create a new quiz, and choose Survey. This creates a new file that contains just one result slide (rather than a separate result slide for passing and failing) and no scoring info on the result slide or the quiz player.
  2. Add a Survey Question and choose the Essay question type.
  3. For the Survey Result, make sure to mark Allow user to review quiz and Allow user to print results.
  4. Now customize the question and the result slide to look however you want. It’s a great idea to switch to Slide View for this step, because that gives you a lot of control over the visual design of your slide.
  5. You can also customize your quiz player to suit your fancy. In the published sample I posted above, I changed some of the text labels because I wanted the Submit button to say “Save my answer” instead. I also changed the text of the Review, Print, and Finish button, and I removed the question navigation panel because it really wasn’t necessary. As a final step, I made my quiz player transparent because I wanted my PowerPoint slide master to show through behind it when I added it to my course. 
  6. Now add your quiz to your course, and you’re all set!

When learners get to the quiz you designed, they'll be able to type their reflections in the Essay question. On the result slide, they can click the Print button to open an HTML page containing the text they wrote. From there, they can use their browser's Print option to print the output.

Modifying the look of the report

An optional step is to customize the way the printable report looks. By default, Quizmaker's Print Results feature (which relies on a file in your published output called report.html) includes a lot of details, some of them related to scoring and whether the learner's answers are “correct” or “incorrect.” In my demo above, though, I didn’t need or want all that — I really only wanted to show the text of the question and the answer that the learner entered. So, I followed Dave Moxon’s instructions for modifying the report.html file. I only made a few simple modifications, and you can download my customized report.html here if you'd like to use it. If you know some HTML, you could certainly customize the look of the file even further.

Note:  If you modify your report.html, keep in mind that you’ll need to copy it into your published output each time you publish, since previous files get overwritten whenever you republish your course. You’ll want to save a copy of your modified report.html somewhere along with your other source files, so that you can easily copy it over to your published output if you publish your course again.

49 Comments
Roger Corpas
Jeanette Brooks
Jeanette Brooks

Hey Mary! Yes, you could do something similar in Storyline. If you just wanted them tol be able to view & print their reflections (but not submit for tracking), it would probably be easier to do that with a simple text variable, like David describes here: https://community.articulate.com/series/articulate-storyline/articles/adding-text-variables If you decide that you DO need tracking, you would need to set that up as a regular question slide and modify the report.html (just like you would in Quizmaker). The only thing with that is, if you had multiple result slides in your course (which Storyline does allow) and you needed learners to be able to print results from each of them, that would get sticky because I believe they all draw from the same report.html... so in that case you prob... Expand

Vijay Singh
Jeanette Brooks
Jeanette Brooks