3 Ways to Use a Blank Slide in Quizmaker ’09
This guest blog entry was written by Articulate VP of Community Tom Kuhlmann.
If you’ve spent any time using Quizmaker ’09, you can see that it’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use application. To see what I mean, take a quick peek at the tutorials.
Creating quiz questions is a snap. You choose from a list of standard question types…
…and then you add your question, answers, and feedback.
It’s all pretty easy.
However, sometimes you need more than a quiz question in your quiz. There are times when you need to set up the question before you can ask it. In that case, you need something like a blank slide where you can add some content prior to asking the question.
Lo and behold, Quizmaker ’09 has a blank slide feature.
The blank slide feature gives you what we in the industry call a blank slide. In essence, it is a slide that is blank. Pretty clever, heh? The blank slide works in form or slide view. So you can basically make it look anyway you want.
How Can You Use a Blank Slide?
Since the blank slide is empty, you can pretty much do what you want. Here are three ideas that work for issues common to a lot of courses. You can see all of the ideas in action in this demo that I did for the Rapid E-Learning Blog on 5 Common Question Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them).
Use the blank slide to provide information needed to answer a question.
Sometimes you have to set up your quiz question with some content. Or perhaps you want to present a case study and then jump into some questions. In either case, it’s easy to do with a blank slide. You can see how I did that with the snail question. Prior to asking the question, I had the learner review a slide on snail anatomy. I built the anatomy slide with a blank slide.
Create media-rich custom feedback.
When you create a question, you get a standard feedback box. However, what if you want to add feedback that includes video, Flash, or animation?
You can’t do that with the standard feedback which only allows audio and text. However, you can use a blank slide for feedback. To do so, set your question feedback option to branch to a blank slide and then add your media-rich feedback on the blank slide. This approach opens the doors to all sorts of creative feedback.
In the quiz above, the first question uses the default feedback box. However, the Elvis question branches to a blank slide for feedback where I was able to add an image and video.
Disguise one quiz as multiple quizzes.
A lot of people want to know how to insert more than one quiz in a course and keep a running tally of the learner’s score. An easy solution is to use one quiz. Create blank slides for your content areas. Then insert some quiz questions. Insert some more blank slides. And then some more quiz questions. The learners might think they’re taking multiple quizzes, but the reality is that it is one quiz with multiple blanks slides of information. You can insert this into your Presenter ’09 course or use the LMS compliant publishing in Quizmaker to make it a standalone module.
There are a lot more creative uses for blank slides. In future posts you’ll see some of them. For now, just know that the blank slide feature in Quizmaker ’09 gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility when creating your rapid elearning courses.
Click here to download the quiz file I used in the demo above. You’ll need Quizmaker ’09. Feel free to download a trial copy if you don’t currently have it.
23 responses to “3 Ways to Use a Blank Slide in Quizmaker ’09”
Very helpful!
Yes, I agree! Great tip. I love how Quizmaker ’09 is basically a stand-alone PowerPoint with so much flexibility.
I love getting the inspiration but it would be great if you could let us download the Quizmaker files so that we can see how the slides and questions are constructed. Sometimes it is easier to understand how to do something if you have the file infront of you. Any chance of this?
I agree with you Carina. I’ll upload the file and modify the post with a download link. BTW, I did add a .quiz in my recent Rapid E-Learning Blog post where I did a Quizmaker ’09 demo.
Awesome tip Gabe!
Inspirational, especially (for me) the idea of using multiple blank slides to seperate several questions to give the impression of different quizes.
Thanks
Using Quizmaker blank slides to make it looks like there’re multiple quizzes is a good idea, with the setback that the “Question” tab at the top gives it away. Is there a way to hide the “Question” tab in blank slides?
I tried inserting separate quizzes (with zero scores) within the presenter slides. This generates another problem, the slide went into the loading mode each time the quiz is called.
Any good advise?
@Joanne: I submitted a feature request for the blank slide to not appear in the list. You can always disable the drop down menu so that the user cannot see the list.
Loading of the quiz can be impacted by the size of the file and speed of the network.
If you look at the snail scene above, I was referring to the QUESTION tab that appears right below the title “5 Common Question mistakes”. In another blog on “virtual world demo” @
http://www.articulate.com/community/blogdemo/lively/quiz.html the QUESTION tab is not there! What difference have you made to the latter to get rid of the tab?
Regarding the loading problem, the published project was run off my computer and each quiz is < 300KB, I really don’t think it’s network speed and filesize issue.
Do you have an example that uses slides from Presenter with multiple quizzes from Quizmaker. If we can tally the scores fom these quizzes will be excellent.
[…] to highlight areas of a software window. I love the redesign of Quizmaker ’09 to allow blank slides, ability to remove the summary screen, and the full design control to make the questions memorable. […]
Hi, Tom,
This was wonderful (and needed) information.
Just examining the construction of your first slide was illuminating, though I don’t know where the flag or text in the background comes into play! Thank you.
As I spend more time evaluating Articulate, I am appreciating its incredible breadth of features. Whew!
A quick question: In a quiz, I inserted blank slides as feedback. However, they are being treated as questions that are picked randomly. (I have random question selection turned on.)
I don’t see your blank slides being picked as a quiz question in your demo quiz. After comparing my quiz construction to your, I still don’t see how your quiz distinguishes between a quiz question and a blank slide that is not a quiz question.
How did you accomplish that?
Thanks and regards,
Den DiMarco
Den,
There’s a link to the quiz file for you to download and play around with in Quizmaker’09.
You ask a good question. Let me play with some ideas. In the blank slide’s form view, you can set it to not be part of the slide count. You can also lock it to a question.
Perhaps the key is to lock the feedback blank slide to the quiz question that is randomized. Since it’s locked it will always be with that question. And since it is not part of the count, it should also appear. I need to test this out.
Tom,
Thanks for looking into this. I tried locking the feedback to the questions, but did not see success.
I downloaded your “5 mistakes” quiz and started looking at it.
I notice that you did not use random question selection and that may partly explain the difference in behavior.
Also I’m using a multiple choice questions with feedbach per answer. That may also be significant.
I look forward to what you find.
Thanks!
Den
I played around with some ideas. I think if you’re going to use the blank slide feature for feedback, I’d not randomize questions. If you do randomize, you can lock the feedback blank slide to the question slide. However, you might want to follow the same process for each questions. Then when you select a number of questions add the blank slides to that number. This only works well if you have the same number of blanks slides for each question.
I’ll also submit a feature request to not include blank slides in the question count for randomization.
Tom,
I think I can live with one of the two options. To make sure I have them right:
1. If I use the blank slide feature for mulkitple-choice, answer feedback, then don’t randomize the questions. (I’m assuming that will work!)
or
2. If I want to randomize questions in a group, then don’t use the blank slide feature for each mutilple choice answer.
I didn’t quite follow what you said about the locking, following the same process and having the same number of blank slides for each question. I tried locking to the question, but still saw blank slides being slected as questions.
I do like the feature request that would prevent blank slides from being used as questions.
Thank you.
Hi,
i was just wondering that how can we provide an End or Stop button so the quiz can be ended at any interval of time regardless of taking 1,23 or more questions?
Does the blank slide feature work in Quizmaster 2.03?
Hello,
I would like to create one quiz in my learning object (so I can track the final grade), but want to have content and interactivity between the questions. Can this be done? I noticed the blank slides do not allow for additional interactivity.
thanks,
Nicole
Hi Mike,
Quizmaker 2 doesn’t support blank slides. This is a new feature of Quizmaker ’09.
Hi Nicole,
You can use blank slides to create a lot of interactivity within the quiz. However, you won’t be able to import Engage interactions into your quiz file. If you treat the blank slides in Quizmaker like you would a blank slide in PowerPoint, I think that you’ll be able to create a quiz that fulfills your needs.
Another solution might be to just create multiple quizzes and then use the method described in the link below to track multiple quizzes:
http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=1380
Hi,
I would like to add multiple blanks to fill in the blanks questions. Or is there a different way to handle these kind of questions.
thanks
Leena
Hello Leena – Though Quizmaker doesn’t currently support multiple fill-in-the-blanks on one question, here’s a workaround you might want to check out: http://screenr.com/QkH Or, if you’d like to brainstorm some other ideas, you could describe your need in the Quizmaker forums (http://community.articulate.com/forums/26.aspx ) and we could help you with some possible solutions.
Hello Jeannette,
What will be useful is to have a way to have multiple fill in the blanks to complete differents sentences on the same slide.
Slide A
1. sentence with a blank to complete a word
2. sentence with a blank to complete a word
3. sentence with a blank to complete a word
4. sentence with a blank to complete a word
( blank at the end / in any position in the sentence)
Very useful in langage training…
Regards,
Phil.
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