Hello, everyone! With the holiday’s officially upon us, and the countdown to Christmas underway (at least in my house!), I thought now would be the perfect time to talk about a special little surprise found in Captivate.

And quite fittingly enough, it’s called GIFT, or General Import Format Technology to be precise. But me? I’m sticking with GIFT. That said, let’s take a quick look at the words that define the acronym to get a better understanding for what it can do for your eLearning project.

GENERAL – Think of this word as ‘Universal’, meaning it is generally recognizable by most programs.
IMPORT – A great techie word that means I can bring something pre-existing into my project.
FORMAT – Like formatting you’ve done in Microsoft Word, except less alignment and more symbols.
TECHNOLOGY – Electronic. Hmm, maybe they just needed another word because GIF was taken?

In a nutshell, GIFT formatting allows for the incredibly simple addition of quiz questions into your project. Yes, simpler than what you may be thinking! (NOTE: While this blog pairs GIFT formatting to Captivate, it is by no means the only program with which GIFT can be used; some learning management systems allow the use of the GIFT formatting as well.)

So, how does it differ from the typical quiz layout you’ve likely seen hundreds of times? To answer that, let’s take a look at what some GIFT-formatted questions look like.

MULTIPLE CHOICE EXAMPLE
What is the largest planet in our Solar System?{
~Earth#Sorry, Earth is not the largest plant in our Solar System
=Jupiter#Correct! Jupiter is truly massive!
~Pluto#Sorry, Pluto is incorrect. In fact, Pluto is no longer even recognized as a planet.
~The Sun#Sorry, that’s incorrect. While the sun is in fact the largest celestial body in the Solar System, our Sun is a star, not a planet.}

TRUE/FALSE EXAMPLE
Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System.{TRUE#Wrong, that’s incorrect.#Right, well done!}

MULTIPLE ANSWER
What are the two largest planets in our Solar System?
~Earth#Sorry, Earth is not one of the two largest planets in our Solar System.
%50%Jupiter#Good job! Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System.
~Mars#Sorry, Mars is not one of the two largest planets in our solar System.
%50%Saturn#Good job! Saturn is the second largest planet in our Solar System.}

As you can see, GIFT-formatted quizzes rely on symbols, like the equal sign (=) to identify correct answers, the tilde (~) to mark incorrect answers, the percent sign (%) to note partial credit, and the pound sign (# …yes, that is a pound sign folks) that precedes unique feedback for each answer choice.

What you don’t see, are question numbers, lettered answer choices, and feedback appearing on a different lines than the answer choice.

So now that we know what GIFT Formatting is, let’s see what Captivate can do with a file formatted in this fashion.

• Open a Captivate project
• When you are ready to add your quiz to the project, click the ‘Quiz’ tab at the top and scroll down to ‘Import GIFT Format File’, like you can see in the image below.

• Then, all you need to do is browse for your file.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

• Presto-chango, your quiz has been imported into Captivate!

Allow me to point out that the correct answer is selected, and all unique feedback has also imported over – appropriately paired with each answer choice (NOTE: True/False answer feedback does not import into Captivate, likely because learners will know without a doubt what the correct answer is if they get it wrong initially).

From personal experience in the pain-staking process of writing quizzes over and over multiple times, the GIFT Import feature will certainly save you time, and most likely frustration to boot.

To learn more about GIFT formatting, click HERE.

Until next time folks, go BE the YOND!

Source – http://www.elearningprose.com/blog/tis-the-season-for-the-gift-of-captivate4562737