AICC Tracking Options

AICC tracking with Captivate is quite simple. Just create your content, publish for AICC and upload/import your Captivate published files to your AICC-compliant LMS. The AICC tracking has been updated to support two-way tracking between Captivate and the LMS. This allows users to maintain both location and “state” data when opening content from an LMS. When a student opens a Captivate SWF file with tracking, Captivate sends LMS data about where students stopped and additional data or information about how they answered specific questions. This allows students to open Captivate files across multiple sessions, track their overall progress, and remember how they answered questions in a quiz.

General AICC experience

When successfully opening and tracking a captivate file through an AICC-compliant LMS, there are several steps that occur (including a number of hidden steps that aren’t exposed to the students). The typical process is:

1. You create the AICC-Compliant content using Macromedia Captivate.

   Note: This is not exposed to the student.

2. The student launches the LMS
3. The student logs in to the LMS.
4. The student navigates through the course structure to find an assignable unit (AU). In this case, you can assume its content that was created using Captivate.
5. The student opens the Captivate content.
6. The content is located on a web server (for example, http://myserver/captivatecontent.htm).

   Note: Previous versions of RoboDemo content required that the published files were wrapped in a frameset. Captivate content does not need to be located in a frameset, in most cases, though Captivate provides additional information below when you may need to provide/open a tracking frameset.

7. The LMS creates two parameters to the end of the URL; AICC_URL and AICC_SID. When the content opens, the URL looks like the following:

   http://myserver/captivatecontent.htm?AICC_URL=http://myserver/trackingurl.asp&AICC_SID=12345.

   Note: This is not exposed to the student.

   
8. The student proceeds through the Captivate content.
9. The Captivate content sends tracking data to the LMS (through properly formatted AICC commands) when the student answers a question and/or proceeds through a Captivate quiz.

   Note: This is not exposed to the student.

The Captivate publishing process

To develop for the AICC standard:

1. Create your Captivate project.
2. Add interactivity, such as questions, click boxes, push buttons, or text entry fields (See the Output Options in Captivate – Part 1: An Overview of Tracking Options article, for a simple explanation of using interactivity in Captivate; or check out the example files provided with this article.).
3. Select Movie > Quiz Manager… from the menu.
4. Select the option: Enable output options in the Quiz Manager dialog box.
5. Select the AICC option.
6. Click OK to close the Quiz Manager dialog box.
7. Select File > Publish from the menu (or use the shortcut key Shift+Ctrl+P or click the Publish button in the Captivate menu bar).
8. In the Publish dialog, make sure to select Export HTML; all other settings are optional.
9. Click the Publish button.
10. After you publish the file, Captivate creates three files (unless you selected the ZIP option):
• Content HTM file: A file used to open the content from your LMS
• Content SWF file: A file generated from your Captivate project that represents your content
• Exit.swf file: A file used to facilitate the ExitAU command (terminate relationship) with the LMS

In most cases, you can copy these files to your content server. You could also compress or provide a ZIP file (from the publish process) to your LMS Administrator to import into your LMS system. Captivate does not generate the AICC Course Structure files, which your LMS or LMS Administrator may use to upload and import the content into your LMS. Find more information about these Course Structure Files in the Issues section, below.