Perception quizzes don’t export to Qpack
If you get errors when you try to export a Questionmark Perception quiz to Qpack, check to see if the template contains any images with %SYSTEM% in their paths. I had put some global button
Continue readingCategory: Questionmark Perception
Getting Questionmark Perception to work with Docent 6.5
Making Questionmark Perception quizzes SCORM-compliant, AND compatible with Docent 6.5 LMS was a big piece of our recent Docent implementation project, since we had many legacy quizzes.
Here are the steps involved:
- Install QMWise (available from Questionmark.com) on the Perception server.
- Install Content packager (available from Questionmark.com) on your workstation
( tip, do NOT have SSL enabled on the server – it blocks QMWise communication if the certificate is slightly misnamed). - Read the Knowledgebase article “How can I call Perception from a SCORM-compliant Learning Management System?”
- Get the files scorm.pip and perceptionSCO.htm from Questionmark.com. Continue reading
Preventing Printing on web pages
A tip I picked up from various sites, including This One Very useful for preventing printing of Perception quizzes, when you cannot use Questionmark’s secure browser. Stick this in the template for the quiz: HTML_HEADER=
Continue readingTroubleshooting Questionmark Perception database connections
We’ve had just about every sort of database connection issue with our two Questionmark Perception servers, so in the interest of saving someone else the kind of struggles we’ve gone through, here are some things to look for.
- tnsnames.ora issues:
There is a file that lives in a subdirectory of the Oracle folder – this directory may be called Oracle_Home, Oracle9 etc, and is often but not always in the root directory of the server.A typical path to the tnsnames.ora file on a server is
E:\Oracle_HomenetworkAdmintnsnames.oraThere are a variety of things that could be incorrect in this file.
- Hidden control characters brought in during copy and paste:
If you copy and paste the settings from some email programs into this file, you may be adding hidden control characters to the tnsnames.ora file. You won’t be able to see them but they’re there, and they’re screwing things up. Continue reading
- Hidden control characters brought in during copy and paste:
A Trivia Game built with Questionmark Perception Part I
I. JCAHO Trivia – Background, objectives, and game play
Jump to Part II – Construction of Choose-A-Team and Login Pages.=>
Jump to Part III – Building the Game.=>
Jump to Part III – Building the Game.=>
(click to enlarge image)
In June, as a small part of a larger hospital staff training project, I built an educational online game for the nursing department. There were several requirements that helped determine the shape of the final result.
Synchronous game play vs. Asynchronous: When considering what kind of game might be best for our purposes, we first considered one based on Jeopardy, since that format is so popular.
However, Jeopardy is not an asynchronous system. In other words, each Jeopardy round is a timed competition against several other players, all of whom must be playing simultaneously or “synchronously” as the elearning people call it.
Continue readingPassing a variable to any page by clicking a link
I am working on a game which requires people to log in by selecting whichever team they are on. Each team is made up of several departmental units.
People probably won’t know what team they belong to the first time they play. There is no list of all the potential players, so it isn’t possible to automatically associate users with teams.
So we constructed an entry page which lists all the departments and which teams they belong to. People find their department, and are automatically associated with a team.
It required creating a little script to pass the name of the team along to the game login page.
Presumably people WILL know what department they are in, and will be able to select their team in that manner.
The problem was, the team name has to be passed to Questionmark Perception’s login page, since it requires the team name to send whatever points are earned to the appropriate team.
I used the following javascript to set a hidden field “GROUP” on Questionmark’s login page, when a player clicks the team link on the Entry page.
Continue readingScroll wheel changes selection in drop-down menus
In some of the Questionmark quizzes I’ve made there are “selection” questions, which are simply pull down menus with several possible answers to a question. I started getting emails from scroll wheel users complaining that Questionmark was changing their answers.
It turned out users would make a selection, then immediately start scrolling the wheel without deselecting the menu, so the scroll wheel would scroll within the menu. I didn’t want to disable the scroll wheel or something like that, so I looked for a way to jump the cursor out of the menu when something is selected.
Continue readingDoctype again – and color names
When editing Questionmark Perception’s quiz templates, you will quickly find that you must not use the # symbol in hex color names, since Perception recognizes it as a comment. In redoing a complicated quiz template
Continue readingMistakes I make when editing Questionmark Templates
The single biggest mistake I make REPEATEDLY in editing Questionmark’s templates is: ::drumroll:: adding in the # symbol in color specifications. Questionmark interprets the # symbol as a comment, and omits everything after the #
Continue readingImporting Quizzes directly into Questionmark Perception using list styles
Since we have no Questionmark Perception manuals at my office, most of my knowledge of Questionmark comes from trying out things in the application itself or digging around in the questionably organized Questionmark support site. (Any altruistic Info-Architects need a project?)
While so engaged one day, looking for an answer to something else, I found out I could have been importing multiple choice quizzes using Microsoft Word documents! Fortunately I haven’t done too many so far. Here are the directions:
The document must be formatted as a list.
Each question is a level 1 line, each choice is a level 2 (indent once). There should be no excess copy in the document, just
1. Question
a. choice 1
b. choice 2
c. choice 3
d. choice 42. Question
a. choice 1
b. choice 2
c. choice 3
d. choice 4
etc.
Continue reading