Our support portals are even more expandable and faster than ever before! Keep checking back for more exciting news to come.

We would like to welcome our new Director of Helpdesk Services, Thomas Dawson to the aelearn team! Tom is a graduate of Spring Arbor University and holds a Masters degree in Organization Management. He brings over 15 years of management and customer service experience to our team. Tom also enjoys sharing his delicious home-made chocolate chip cookies (which is obviously an added bonus for us.) So yeah, he’s pretty awesome!

Share the love and help us welcome Tom to our aelearn family!

The cause of the issue has been identified as a defect in the Course Enrollment feature accessed from the System Admin page causing leaked connections, causing the primary database connection pool to be exhausted.

The bug appeared with the release of 9.1 SP 6. We have identified it in issue LRNSI-3362 (AS-162462)

A patch has been developed to work around the issue until it can be included in a future service pack. You can access the full information in the KB article linked here. Blackboard has automatically applied this patch to Blackboard-hosted clients. Self-hosted clients will need to manually apply this patch.

Enter Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 6 with the new Rustici SCORM player.

Rustici is largely responsible for many of the successful SCORM tools and API’s on the market today. Their API for SCORM is now an industry standard. Blackboard has truly made a much better product for SCORM delivery by sliding in the Rustici player into their latest SP6. This will allow for a more consistent standard across the board. Oh, did we mention the player implementation is 10 times faster than the old Open Standards Player? You can also customize over 100 settings for things like sequencing, roll-ups, and launch behaviors.

Here is an example of the new options that come with the Rustici SCORM player’s interface in Blackboard.

For more information about this awesome update, read here:

• http://scorm.com/blog/2010/11/blackboard-is-a-big-deal/
• http://www.johnfontaine.com/?p=531

As of July 21, 2011 our team has tested the code and noted a few issues. While the core items of the certificate seem to work fine, we noted the following issues:

• Activity Reports throw an error at the certificate listing
• Participation Reports throw an error at the certificate listing
• GLOBAL variable for certificate overwrites class values
• When the Print Date setting is set to take a date from a graded activity (new functionality), viewing the certificate throws a fatal error for the user

Check out our core services:

• Technical Solutions
• Helpdesk and Support
• LMS Solutions

Take a look around and see what you think!

We’d love to hear your feedback.

Since the client serves year-round enrollments for licensing and continuing education, extended downtime was not an option. They would literally lose money for every hour that their Learning Environment is offline. The major issues we were faced with in this project were:

1. All courses have a selective release requirement that must be present when a student enters a course, so a live upgrade from Moodle 1.6 to 2.0 was not an option.
2. The client desired to switch from the add-on Book module to the core Lesson module to serve content. This need was crucial. Improved tracking of a user’s time spent in course content was a must! The Lesson does just that.
3. Update all Course Completion Certificates from Moodle 1.6 certificate module format to 2.0 certificate module format.
4. The website calls for course purchasing and Ecommerce for Moodle 1.6 account creation and enrollment needed to be updated to Moodle 2.0 webservices.
5. User accounts, course enrollments, and grade-data-in-progress for active users and recently active users needed to be carried over at launch time.

Our Solutions:

We broke this migration down into stages and developed some innovative tools to mass convert users, enrollments, grades, and Books to Moodle 2.0.

1. We upgraded Moodle 1.6 through its upgrade path (1.6 -> 1.8 -> 1.9 -> 2.0.3) ahead of time and removed all Book content and user data. The client was then given access to the upgraded instance so that they could setup conditional release requirements ahead of time in the Moodle 2.0 interface.
2. We wrote an awesome conversion utility to convert over 9,500 content pages from the Book to Lesson format. There was no copy/pasting! The new Lessons were merged into the new 2.0 staging instance for the client to review and edit as desired.
3. Our team installed the latest Certificate module that is compatible with Moodle 2.0 and converted the old certificate types to the new required format. Along the way, we also fixed some bugs found in the current version of the Certificate to alleviate some Moodle errors. We were also able to give our client the ability to dynamically update parts of the PDF certificate without having us create a new type for each Certificate. The client can now change fields right in the Moodle interface.
4. We updated the website calls from Moodle 1.6 to Moodle 2.0 webservices. We ended up writing some custom webservices with the new interface so that we could pass custom fields like a Registration Date straight to the grade book during registration. Our custom webservice also allows enrollment into more than 1 course at a time.
5. We saved the best for last! We needed a way to migrate active users, enrollments into 40 courses, and grades in a relatively short window of time on launch day. We wrote a custom migration script to do the work. The script pulled user data for those users last active within 1 year. More than 4,800 users, their usernames, passwords, and time-start/time-end for each course were migrated over along with 9,000+ course enrollments. The best part–their grades on Moodle 1.6 quizzes were also carried over to the course gradebooks. Returning users could return and carry on with their course right were they left off on the selectively released activity in Moodle 1.6.

You might be asking, “did you guys have fun?” — YES!!! Oh, did we mention that all of this occurred in 3 months? That’s right! On migration day, we planned for 24-48 hours outage. We completed the total migration for all live users in less than 5 hours. The groundwork and our custom automation utilities played an intricate part on migration day.

If your company is planning a migration or if you need automation of your E-Learning processes, let us help!

• Project planning and techniques for Proof of Concept
• Technical support for project team
• Blackboard 9.1 course consulting and course setup
• Graphic creation for Blackboard course and facilitator guide
• Content population and management of XML assets on repository
• SCORM consulting and implementation of JavaScript API interface between Flash and Blackboard
• Quality Assurance for Flash components and content review
• Army Acceptance Criteria testing (manifest, resources , metadata, and package validation) for SCORM packaging
• Final delivery SCORM packaging and deployment in Blackboard

This project was no small feat. We wanted to build something that was totally innovative but also seamless in terms of user interface. A key aspect of the project was to implement the interface between Flash and Blackboard. We implemented calls to the SCORM API in Blackboard to allow the user to return to any module and continue where they left off. In addition to bookmarking, the object remembers scores, links clicked, and other user experience data. When a module is completed the total time spent in the module and the final grade is reported to the Blackboard gradebook. Another area of focus was to setup the object in such a way that users can interact with other Blackboard activities like the Wiki, Discussion forums, and the Journal without exiting the Flash module. Since it is unconventional to link outside of a SCORM package, these links are able to be changed in the content XML for easy re-location.

About the Project Design

The overall project goal was to deliver several competencies engaging learners in methods of Experiential Learning while experiencing Experiential Learning. The hope is to train trainers by demonstrating how exploration while learning with expand the possibilites and retention for a learner. The main areas of focus for this set of Competencies are:

• Competency 1: Use Experiential Learning Methods (Active Learning)
• Competency 2: Conduct One on One Coaching / Mentoring
• Competency 3: Use Student Collaboration Techniques
• Competency 4: Facilitation Workshop: Facilitate a Blended Learning Class
• Competency 5: Facilitation Workshop: Facilitate a Distance Learning Training Session
• Competency 6: Facilitation Workshop: Facilitate Self-Paced Instruction

The learner begins the journey by setting off on an adventure as a marathon runner in the famous Marathon des Sables. The Marathon des Sables is a brutal 153 mile race that takes a runner through traitorous terrain, dunes, salt flats, and rock gardens. Every year hundreds of the most conditioned runners in the world travel to the south Morrocan dessert to face 120 degree temperatures as they are faced with dehydration, malnourishement, and blistering feet. Above is an example of the map navigation that the learner explores in a single Lesson.

In Competency 2, our team even interviewed the real-life USA representatives for the race–Dreamcatchers: Jay Batchen and Lisa Smith! They guide the learner through the various challenges and share painstaking stories about the race.

Along the map are the various Challenges of each stage of the race. The learner’s overall performance is tracked and as they complete each task and reach the ending checkpoint, their health within the marathon is established. Each checkpoint assesses both the learner’s progress in the race and development of the learner’s new learning skills. Success with the learning will bring success in the race.

The learner must complete the challenges in order, but they have the option of returning to a given challenge once it has been unlocked. To unlock the subsequent challenges, the learner must view all of the pages of the given challenge they enter. A better score is given if they complete all aspects of each challenge. In the final challenge, the learner checks in with the Doctor and can review their progress from each checkpoint and then have the opportunity to return back to a checkpoint to increase their overall score.

The learner is shown content and asked to explore various websites, videos, and Blackboard interactions with other learners (e.g. wiki, discussion, and journals). Throughout the journey various challenges are given to the learner to make them think (learn through experience). For example, in the Backpack checkpoint a learner must decide which items to pack to advance them through a later challenge. But they must BE CAREFUL not to pack too much or they might get weighted down!

A Special Thank You!

Advanced E-Learning Solutions feels incredibly blessed to have the opportunity to work with this project team for Flash development, Instructional Design, and all other phases of the project. We have had a lot of fun and look forward to doing it again!

Major new features in this release:

• Community hubs for publishing courses to a community
• Repository support (e.g. Alfresco, Amazon S3, Box.net, File system on Server, Flickr, Google Docs, MERLOT, Picasa, Recent Files, WebDAV servers, Wikimedia, Youtube)
• Portfolio support (e.g. Box.net, Flickr, Google Docs, Mahara and Picasa)
• Course completion and prerequisites
• Conditional activities (release one or more activities based on grade conditions or dates)
• Cohorts (site-level groups)
• Web services support (XML-RPX, AMF, REST, SOAP)
• New blocks (Comments, Private files, Community Courses, Course Completion Status)
• Plagiarism prevention tool support
• Moodle supports integration with plagiarism prevention tools such as Turnitin
• Major improvements to existing core features
• Improved Backup and restore (large course backups now work)
• Blocks can now vary per page and can also be “docked”
• Enrolment plugin improvements and support for similtaneous enrollment plugins in a single course
• File handling with new file picker and better storage of large files
• Filters 2.0 can now be specific to a course
• HTML editor based on TinyMCE
• Messaging block now supports external plugins
• My Moodle page is more customizable
• Navigation block provides a more consistant user navigation experience
• Roles and permissions are simplified and easier to track
• RSS feeds are more secure and timely
• New Themes and more efficent theme server-side caching for speed
• New Language file translation system
• User profile pages

Major improvements to activity modules:

• Quiz module and question bank improvements
• Resource types have been re-factored
• New SCORM module settings, reporting and player UI with better navigation
• Updated Wiki based on NWiki
• Workshop has been re-factored with improved management

Moodle actually requires all generated markup to be valid XHTML Strict 1.0. Moodle even has features put in place to allow for simple validation using the W3C validators. Here is the steps from Moodle’s documentation on how set it up:

1. Set your theme to “standard” or “standardwhite”.
2. Add a user with the username “w3cvalidator”.
3. Give that user all the roles and permissions that you want the validator to have. Easiest is just to make it an admin.
4. (Optional) Turn debugging up a little in Administration > Server > Debugging. This will give you handy validation links in the footer.
5. Click on the links to validate that page (or paste URLs directly). They should work now, because Moodle automatically detects the validator and treats it as the “w3cvalidator” user.

Here are some things to keep in mind to help keep your markup valid:

• Properly nest your tags.
• Tags and attributes must be in all lowercase letters.
• All attributes must be enclosed in double quotes.
• All special characters should be encoded with an HTML entity or wrapped in a CDATA section (including Javascript). Here is an example on how to wrap Javascript code in a CDATA section:

  <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ // Your JavaScript code goes here. //]]> </script>