Trivantis takes the fight to Articulate with Snap! Empower
Its going to be an interesting year in the world of e-learning authoring tools. Trivantis has released Snap! Empower for the extremely competitive $99 and is aggressively targeting Articulate users with a very powerful set of features that go well beyond the capabilities offered by Engage at a fraction of the price. What will be more interesting is how this product will compete with the iminent Articulate Storyline which offers similar powerful functionality but seems destined to be offered at a significantly higher price.
One question all these e-learning authoring tools have yet to answer is how to move from flash based publishing to fully featured HTML5 based publishing (as required by iPad and iPhone). Snap! as with other similar tools takes the easy option of publishing to video to provide a limited form of HTML5 compatibility. This simple approach fails to include the rich interactions and opportunities for self exploration and pacing that the flash published versions can embody. We know it is these very aspects of our resources that are most valuable in promoting learning. I wonder how long it will be before we see an e-learning tool which truely tackles this thorny problem… perhaps it will be Storyline and that may just justify its greater cost?
Moodle and the mystery of the disappearing course enrolments
Its a good week for getting to the bottom of long standing mysteries. Yesterday I finally solved a problem which had plagued one of my client’s moodle installations which involved student enrolments on courses disappearing without any obvious pattern. Countless searches hadn’t turned up any reports of similar problems until I came across this moodle bug tracker entry. The comments on this report suggested the longtimenosee setting as a potential cause. This Moodle setting is labelled – “Unsubscribe users from courses after” is defined on the Site administration > Server > Cleanup page and it appears to remove enrolments if a student doesn’t visit a particular course for a set time period.
It appears that the student needs to visit that course at least once before this time limit will be applied. By default this setting is set at a value of 120 days, so I have now set this to “Never” and intend to use this setting on all Moodle installations to avoid a problem like this being encountered again.
The moral of this story… I guess its to keep googling when you encounter a problem like this because finding that one page of information really is the key, but finding it isn’t always straightforward! I’m glad I got there in the end!
Re-sizing and positioning the presentation slides in your Articulate Presenter skin
Wow what a great Articulate Users Conference at the University of Leeds! I’m still buzzing from all the ideas, conversations and enthusiasm. This has to be my favourite conference by far… and thanks to one of the other participants I have finally learned about one of the remaining mysteries of Articulate Presenter skinning (well it had been a mystery to me anyway). I really hadn’t thought it was possible to move or resize the presentation slides displayed beneath your articulate skin and so all my skin designs were based on fitting around or overlapping the slide content where necessary. But I was wrong. As detailed in this forum post you can refer to the slides (and also to the other elements added on top of slides such as Engage and Quizmaker interactions) by their levels in the root articulate movie and so amend their scaling and position properties. Hat’s off to the detective work that was necessary to work this out as it certainly isn’t mentioned in the SDK.
So for example if I want to re-size and re-position the presentation slides I need to add the following code to the actionscript in my skin (probably inside an appropriately named function):
_level22._yscale = 80; //reduce slide height to 80% of original height
_level22._xscale = 80; //reduce slide width to 80% of original width
_level22._y = 100; //reposition slide on y axis
_level22._x = 200; //reposition slide on x axis
The levels you use to refer to the other types of elements displayed on top of slides are (these are drawn from this forum post):
_level22 PPT slide loaded into in Articulate
_level33 Flash embedded in PPT slide
_level33 container for swf and flv
_level44 Side panel
_level55 Quizmaker
_level56 Engage
_level57 Toolbar items
_level58 ast_notes.swf and navicons
Knowing this opens the door to much more flexible skin design as I can now increase the space available for the skin above and below the presentation slides and not have to overlap the slide content. However if you are designing skins to be compatible with embedded Engage interactions, Quizmaker quizzes, SWF and FLV files etc you will need to ensure you are also re-sizing and re-positioning each of these elements as well, so there will probably be lots of testing involved to get this right!
Drawtivity project completed
We are very pleased to annouce that the initial phase of the Drawtivity project has been completed. The system is now ready for you to use to create your own activities and the source files are available for those wishing to install and run their own authoring systems:
- A related project has been set up within SourceForge where the latest source files are now available (go to the Drawtivity SourceForge project).
- Documentation including help for activity authors, system administrators and details on installing your own Drawtivity authoring system (go to the Drawtivity documentation page).
- More example activities are now available illustrating the possibilities of activities authored with the Drawtivity system (view the example Drawtivity activities)
Drawtivity article published in Talis Panlibus magazine
Heads up on an article on Drawtivity that has just been published in the Talis Panlibis Magazine – issue 19 (view magazine).
