Embedding a Dragster activity in a CourseLab course

UPDATE – see instructions on using Embed activity option

CourseLab is a powerful free e-learning content authoring package which uses a familiar authoring interface modeled on Powerpoint. Here are a set of instructions for integrating a Dragster drag and drop activity within a CourseLab course:

1. Author and publish your dragster activity.
2. Unzip the published dragster activity to view all the activity files.
3. Now go to your courselab course. On the slide use the menus to select Insert > Object and expand the Media section and drag a Flash object on to the slide.
4. Resize this flash object to make it as large as possible.
5. Right click on the Flash object and select properties.
6. For the file option, select the dragndrop.swf file in your published Dragster activity.
7. Publish your completed Courselab course on to your PC.
8. You now need to copy some additional dragster activity files into your CourseLab course to make the dragster activity work. These files are dragndrop.xml and any image files within the published dragster activity folder. So select all these files and copy them (Ctrl-C).
9. Now unzip your published courselab course.
10. Open the unzipped course folder
    paste the dragster activity files into the folder called 1 (you should see a file called start.html within this folder).

    

    

11. Now test the course by opening start.html inside the folder called 1.
12. Re-zip the course for upload in your VLE.

Any problems encountered are most likely to be due to copying the extra dragster files into the incorrect folder in the published CourseLab course.
(Note – the dragster activity will not work when using the View module preview in rthe CourseLab authoring system unless you also copy these extra dragster activity files into the folder called 1 inside the folder used to save the course during its development)

There is an alternative simpler integration method that uses Insert > Object > External and the Iframe option. This requires that the dragster activity already be available on the Internet and also that it scales with the browser size (a setting only available in Dragster 3). This approach doesn’t require you to copy the extra activity files as the working dragster activity is being imported “live” from the web using the iframe rather than running inside the courselab course.

View an example created using these 2 approaches

Note - CourseLab itself incorporates drag and drop functionality which allows simple drag and drop activities to be authored within courses without using Dragster. However in Webducate’s opinion creating an activity as rich as an average Dragster drag and drop activity within CourseLab would be extremely difficult  if not impossible (but feel free to give it a go!).

Related posts:

1. Dragster – Using the embed activity publish option with Wimba Create, eXe and CourseLab
2. Embedding Dragster 3 drag and drop activities into Adobe Captivate 5
3. Using Dragster with the eXe eLearning XHTML editor
4. Embedding Dragster activities in Lectora projects
5. How to create a video based Dragster activity using an FLV file