Solving technology problems, one at a time
Note: This is a repost of my blog posting from Letsi.org In training healthcare workers, there is a particular emphasis on distinguishing between individuals based on fine-grained demographic and user data: where they work, who
Continue readingWith the current training industry interest in elearning trends like informal learning, social and collaborative Web 2.0 learning technologies, it’s easy to overlook the importance of the humble search box as a learning tool.
As companies seek to increase productivity with fewer people and resources, one way to improve efficiency is to create better connections between people and the information they need to do their jobs. It’s not hard to make big improvements in the search situation companies’ internal networks: the barriers that exist between knowledge workers and and information resources within company intranets are profound and economically significant. They fall into several categories:
After years of institutionalized incompatibility in their browser software, office software, and video software, Microsoft has come out with with Silverlight, their Rich Internet application platform and supposed Flash Killer. Flash is universally accepted because
Continue readingThe SCORM Workshop held by LETSI (Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability) is over, and some clear direction emerged from the blizzard of whitepapers, informal submissions and comments over the last few months. I was very impressed by how fast they moved things forward in a few days.
The design process will be driven by use cases generated by the people who actually use SCORM applications in their work: Instructional designers, administrators, teachers, and other strategic adopters all over the world. This is significantly different from the way SCORM was originally designed, by a small community of LMS vendors and the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the BIG USERS of training and tracking.
Continue readingOne Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.
A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.
Continue readingNote: this tutorial is still very much in draft form. Additional instructions for those not familiar with javascript and more examples will be added soon.
The Jeroen Wijering Media Player is a widely used free, open-source Flash-based media player, available for download from Jeroenwijering.com.
The JW player has an extensive Javascript API which allows it to communicate with events and elements on the page it is embedded in. Using this feature, the player can execute javascript functions on the page whenever the video reaches a specific time point.
Continue readingWe use Captivate 3 quizzes sometimes with our Docent 6.5 LMS. Usually the quizzes have multiple parts or “SCOs” but occasionally we build one that has only one part.
Sometimes people launch a quiz but need to quit before they are done taking it, and in such cases we would prefer it be marked “incomplete” and allow them another chance to take the quiz. Usually we would also prefer any failed quiz to be allowed to be retaken.
But, by default, Captivate sees any failure to reach the mastery score as completions.
There is an easy fix,
suggested by Franck Buland on the Adobe Captivate forums
– simply modify the [project].htm file at lines 95, 96, 97.
Continue readingA new security setting in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 has been causing problems with requests between iframe and parent. There is a security setting in the Internet options called “Navigate sub-frames across different domains”, which in IE6 was set to “Enabled” under Medium security, but is set to “Disabled” in IE7 by default.
An example of the type of communication that is blocked is shown here:
The container page sends a message to Page 1, in Domain A: “Change your location to Page 2”. In IE6, this is not a problem. But in IE 7, it is allowed.
Continue readingIf you want to create widgets that control Captivate files with new functions, other than the standard playbar functions, you will need to develop them in flash. Here’s how to figure out what is going on in a Captivate movie file:
Create a Captivate movie, and publish it (Captivate 2) or export it to Flash (Captivate 3). To create my faster-slower widgets, I had to decompile it into an .fla (I used SWFdecompiler )
Open it in Flash, and start exploring the structure. If you are using version 3, by far the best tool you can use include the “debug movie” command.
Continue readingSeveral branching functions are included in js/branchingToolkit.js and are available to be used in your modules. Note: These haven’t been thoroughly tested!