Quiz questions results email

Sep 16, 2014

Hello

Is there a way to produce a course on Articulate Storyline containing quiz questions, and at the end of the course it will automatically create an email containing the results? So the user only has to click send and it will send the results email through to an email of our choice?

My company has produced something before using Camtasia Studio 6 and I was wondering if Articulate Storyline can do the same thing?

Thanks in advance for your help

10 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Alice and welcome to Heroes! 

Unfortunately, there’s no way to email quiz results easily, accurately, and consistently. For example, if you use Gmail or your computer’s security settings are high, you can’t email results. Also, you run the risk of learners tampering with results since they can access the email before it’s sent. Given these limitations, we decided not to include the email results feature in new products.

You could include a "print results" feature at the end on a results slide which would allow the user to generate an HTML page - which they would need to take action in terms of printing, saving, email, etc. 

Brian Gavin

Hi,

First, know that I love Articulate.  I use the latest & greatest versions of both Studio & Storyline.  That said, Articulate's answer to this request is disingenuous at best.

Emailing quiz results is not rocket science, but instead of taking the time to figure this out, you pulled the feature completely.   That is plain lazy.

There are many less-expensive quizzing solutions out there that can email results gracefully, in a nicely-formatted email.  I've attached a screenshot from one of your competitors.of the email received after taking a quiz on the web with no LMS.  

No jumping through hoops, configuring PHP or ASP files--it just works.  So if you don't want to support this feature fine.  But don't insult our intelligence by saying it's not possible--because it is.

Cheers,

Brian

Justin Grenier

I'm sorry for the frustration Brian, and I apologize if we've come across as disingenuous.

The phrasing within the screen capture you supplied makes me feel as though your authoring tool and your hosting platform might be one and the same, and there are a number of vendors in the marketplace who offer a cloud-based authoring tool that is integrated with their own proprietary hosting platform.  I also expect that your vendor recognizes that using client-side email software (Outlook, Gmail, and so on) to send the email message is unreliable at best, and is instead sending the message via the servers that are part of their hosted offering.

Please let me know if I've misunderstood, but you're certainly correct that it would be possible to offer the Email Results feature if we could guarantee that all of our customers' content could only be launched from one hosting platform (in our case, Articulate Online).  Since our customers expect the ability to run courses from their own Learning Management Systems (and since Email Results isn't part of the AICC, SCORM, or Tin Can API specifications), it would be next to impossible to achieve a server-based Email Results feature that would work in all of the thousands of LMSes that our customers use.

As for the "don't want to support this feature" notion, I suppose there might be some truth to that as well.  Both Storyline and Studio are designed primarily as elearning development tools to be used in conjunction with Articulate Online or your own Learning Management System (some of which are open-source and free), and we hope that our customers don't have to resort to collecting course results via email and aggregating them in a spreadsheet, which just doesn't seem scalable.

Good luck with your project!

Brian Gavin

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the reply--I really appreciate it.  =)    I think you are misunderstanding.   I'm not talking about sending an email from within an LMS--there would be no need for that, since the LMS handles sending out email results.  I'm talking about being able to receive nicely-formatted emails from a stand-alone web course, uploaded to any standard web-server.

Your assumption about the authoring tool and the hosting platform I used being one and the same couldn't be any more incorrect.  Here is what I did:

  1. Quiz was created using a stand-alone authoring tool similar to QuizMaker 
  2. I published the files locally, then uploaded to one of my standard hosting accounts
  3. Opened a browser and took the quiz.  
  4. The (nicely-formatted) quiz results were then emailed to me as the test-taker, with a copy sent to me as the admin as well 

Unfortunately, I think Articulate has a bit of tunnel vision.  Your comments give  the impression you're thinking only about the end users who can afford an LMS.  There are a ton of small-businesses who might be able to justify the purchase of Studio, but not the ongoing expense of an LMS (or the design/maintenance of one of the free solutions).

For those folks (and I was one of them), a nicely-designed course using Studio, paired with inexpensive hosting scales just fine.  I managed training for a couple hundred people in just such a manner when I first started several years ago.   The only problem was the unusable emails generated from QuizMaker, which made my job harder.

Even Studio users who have access to an LMS may have need to build a stand-alone course that lives outside of an LMS.  In those cases, it would be awesome to have QuizMaker send a nice email to the trainee & admin upon completion.

The option to publish stand-alone courses has been available in Articulate for years.  That tells me you know that many of your users publish courses outside of an LMS.  Therefore, QuizMaker should offer an easy method to gather those results in this scenario. Period.  

Unfortunately, you guys have essentially ignored this for years, despite numerous requests from your loyal customers.   If a lesser software than Articulate can magically send a nice quiz-results email, then there really is no excuse for QuizMaker not to as well.

Thanks again for listening--I love Articulate.  You guys do tremendous work, and your software is indispensable.  

Cheers,

Brian

Justin Grenier

Good Morning, Brian.

Thanks for correcting the false assumptions I made surrounding your authoring tool.  I'm glad you enjoy our products, and I'm sorry that the functionality you need isn't part of our long-term strategy (although our Feature Request box is always open here).

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help, and have a great day!

Brian Gavin

Hi Justin,

Thanks for your reply.   See..this is the type of frustrating  response I'm referring to.  Why would you provide the link to submit a feature request, when it's clear this feature has already been requested?  That's just plain silly.

Not only that, I've provided clear examples that show this feature can be implemented (since your competitors have done it already), and yet I feel I'm being pretty much blown off.  Adding a feature that should already be in the software has nothing to do with a long-term strategy.   It's simply adding functionality that your loyal customers have requested for quite awhile (and that was essentially in place, previously).

I'm sorry for the sour grapes, but it's pretty obvious your "long-term strategies" don't include considering a reasonable request from a loyal customer who has spent thousands and thousands of dollars on your software--and has referred other colleagues from other firms who have done the same. 

You really should be careful about how you approach serving your loyal customers.   I've been in the software business for years and years, and it's really important that a company be responsive, and do more than pay lip service to customer requests.  There will always be another company just over your shoulder, looking to do what you do...but do it better, faster and with better service.

Have a great day,

Brian

Jörg Probst

I totally agree with Brian. I too love Articulate Storyline, but the lack of this feature has been frustrating for me too. Though the firm I work for is getting an LMS soon I'm sure there are many users for whom this isn't a feasible option. I really think it should be left up to the user to decide whether they want to take the risk that results emails might be manipulated before being sent.

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