Solving technology problems, one at a time
My department has been using a custom-built SCORM Learning Module template for developing our corporate training. The template permits a variety of page widths and flexible height throughout, and has features such as branching, dynamic pdf
Continue readingAlthough Captivate has its own SCORM interface, its reliability in our LMS over the last few years has become increasingly problematic. Data gets lost, quizzes score incorrectly, or do not complete at all, and there is a lot of frustration.
At the same time, there has been increasing demand from subject matter experts and educators for inexpensive, easy to learn tools like Captivate that leverage their Powerpoint skills but have plenty of flexibility and options for interactivity. So something had to be done to make Captivate useful again.
What I decided to do was to turn over all the SCORM communication for Captivate activities to our HTML template, which doesn’t have the communication issues of the Adobe products. Using the SCORM template as a wrapper does not add a lot of work to a project, in fact, it requires only one line of code to add a scored Captivate or Presenter quiz to a template-based learning module.
Any type of scored Captivate file will work – both question slides and interactive slides. The module can handle one or more Captivate quizzes, either by themselves, or in combination with other types of content and quizzes, such as Questionmark Perception or the template-based interaction quizlets.
Continue readingScenario-based learning can teach decision-making and thinking processes. Here is an example of the “Labyrinth” scenario-based learning system created in a Scottish medical school which features low fidelity simulations created with just text and pictures – but with great effect.
Each page describes what’s going on and gives a choice of action.
Here you are a doctor doing rounds and a nurse comes in with news about a patient who is increasingly breathless. Your choice here is “Stick with the rounds” or “Ask to see the patient”
If you stick with the rounds, you start wondering if you are doing the right thing, and are soon brought back to the right track -going to see the patient.
Continue readingThis is a talk I gave recently to a group of educator/trainers within the U of M Health System. Although it contains many UMHS-specific references, the concepts outlined in it can be applied to other training environments as well. There’s nothing particularly original here, just some suggestions for how to select among different technologies commonly available. This was the first part of a two-part presentation. The second part featured tips for creating engagement and improving digital photography.
Our team has lots of tools you can use to create online training. There are so many choices, in fact, that it can be difficult to decide which to select when you’re starting a new project.
To help you sort through all the options, I’m going to give you some typical instructional situations and suggest tools that might best support them, without breaking the budget in the process. These are all things you can use – they don’t require a computer science degree to get a good result!
Continue readingThe HTML SCORM template works with Moodle, but it needs a few modifications to work perfectly.
I’ve made these changes and created a “Moodleized” version of the template for you to download:
DOWNLOAD MOODLE VERSION OF TEMPLATE
This template is an unscored activity and should just mark itself complete. I will soon be posting one that will allow scored interactions on each page as well.
Continue readingTo create a nicer looking Flickr badge, use Flickr’s badge creation tool to get the right user code and content codes for your badge.
Go to:
Create your own Flickr badge and make the selections as specified:
One important element that is often left out of beginner Dreamweaver courses is how to make your photos web-ready. Today’s cameras turn out multi-megapixel images that are several feet wide when dropped into a web page at web resolution. Here’s how to take a folder of high-resolution images and turn them into smaller files that will display at about 5-6″ wide at 72dpi using Photoshop.
When building web applications I often use display styles to show or hide divs or table rows as needed. On one project, I found that the “colspan” property did not seem to work in Firefox or Safari. This was because I had incorrectly used display:block to style the TR element, instead of display:table-row. A demo is below, and the code follows.
Continue reading
The best browser to use to check javascript errors is Firefox, hands down. Other browsers have some error reporting, but none give you anywhere near the detailed information as Firebug, an addon to Firefox. The extensions available allow you to snoop into every aspect of your page, and into the communication between page and server.
You will need to get several Firefox extensions:
Firebug
Firebug is the one extension I can’t live without. It shows errors in javascript, css, allows you to inspect the HTML source, computed style, events, etc.