My company is planning to deliver self-paced product training -- developed in Captivate 3 and Flash -- via CD or downloadable package. I'd like to find out if anyone knows of a relatively simple method for enabling basic progress tracking (not started, in progress, completed) for modules deployed in this way. Keep in mind that external communications with a database or LMS is not in-scope at this time. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and please feel free to contact me outside of this forum if you need clarification on the approach we'll be using (which is actually still somewhat up in the air at this point).
I think it depends on what you mean by "progress tracking"; the big question is: if you're tracking progress, where do you need the tracking data to go?
If you need to be able to run reports or store data regarding multiple users, you will need to have a database or LMS system.
If you'd like to simply store the progress on the user's hard drive -- not uploading to anywhere, not usable by any reporting mechanism -- you can use Flash's Shared Object (aka a Flash "cookie").
The big catch is that Shared Objects -- like cookies -- are local files that only reside on a single computer. If the user begins a course, then leaves it halfway, you can use Shared Objects to let them resume from where they left off, but ONLY if they resume from the SAME computer, and the same browser, too!