New Dragster features – transparent skin and textbox height

Two new features have been added to Dragster 3:

1. A new activity setting allows the height of draggable text boxes and labels to be optionally fixed. By default these draggable text boxes and labels automatically resize their height to fit their text content. Now by specifying a value greater than zero in the new Text box / label height setting all draggable elements will have the same fixed height. This is particularly useful for activities involving the completion of flowcharts, matrices or tables. This setting is used in this example flowchart based activity (activity courtesy of Dominic Alder – University of Bristol).
2. A new option on the Activity skin colour selection is the transparent skin option. This option hides the activity skin entirely allowing the selected activity Background colour to be displayed. This facility allows for the activity to be seamlessly integrated into other web content as illustrated in this articulate presentation example.

If you can identify other useful additions to Dragster please get in touch!

Desire2Learn win patent dispute with Blackboard

Finally the court case between Desire2Learn and Blackboard appears to have been resolved with Desire2Learn emerging as the deserving victor.  This court case has been extremely protracted with Blackboard appearing to take every opportunity to prolong and exacerbate the case even turning down an opportunity in March 2009 to end the case and donate related costs to education related charities .

We at Webducate are extremely pleased with the final outcome and wish to express our thanks to Desire2Learn for standing up to the aggressive and objectionable behaviour of Blackboard. We feel that the e-learning community both commercial and open source will benefit from a significantly more open, innovative and competitive environment as a direct result of this outcome . This has only been realised because of the courage of Desire2Learn and their enormous investment of time and money in fighting this case.

So congratulations to the team at Desire2Learn and thank you!

Dragster 3 – Basic formating tags in pop-up text feedback

Dragster 3 has been updated to allow basic HTML formatting tags to be used in pop-up feedback text. Four tags can now be used when defining this text:

1. <b>bold</b>
2. <i> italic</i>
3. ^superscript
4. _subscript

NB – you should ensure that the activity setting HTML formating in element text is checked when using these tags, particularly if using subscripts and superscripts.

Unfortunately bold and italic formatting cannot be applied to superscript or subscript text.