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Weblearning 9.6 - More Previews

Weblearning 9.6 Photo Gallery

Weblearning 9.6 Sneak Peek

Weblearning 9.6 Teaser

Introducing SCORM Quiz Maker

Printing a Certificate from the Quiz Management Service

Adding Audio Narrations to Questions and Slides

Creating a Custom Design Template for PowerPoint Quiz Maker

Importing Questions using the Import Utility

Convert PowerPoint Slides into Weblearining Slides

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Feb 10 2010

Weblearning 9.6 - More Previews

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 12:31 pm

Well, its been a rough week up here in the northeast. The office is closed because we are getting hammered for the 2nd time in 4 days with 20+ inches of snow, so some of us (including yours truly) are working from home.

Given the circumstance, I decided to write about some more things you can look forward to in Weblearning 9.6.

Again, these are all added since my last article, and are my 10 favorites since the.

1. 100-module Limit is gone! Configurable # modules
If you have faced this limitation, you know how huge this is. All previous versions of Weblearning had a hard cap limit of 100 total modules (quizzes/presentations) per course admin account. Weblearning 9.6 changes that.While lite and basic plans will get less than 100 (thinking maybe 10 and 30 or something like that), Pro will start at 100 (and then you will be able to scale it up (for a small fee) to as many as you need (well, actually the limit is now 9,998).

2. Improved Question Preview
The existing question preview does an OK job, but fails when your layout is complex. The new preview fixes that. In addition, the question preview is now available from the slides tab from within a quiz or presentation (so you can see the questions inside of a particular quiz), and even lets you compare the question in the quiz against the one in the databank if the two are not the same version#. Lastly, the preview now includes the choices section for questions!

3. Question and Slide Sharing
Weblearning currently has an on/off config for sharing questions and slides across multiple course admins. Unfortunately, its an all-or-nothing proposition (either all admims can view/edit/delete/use all other admins’ items, or they can’t). Weblearning 9.6 adds quite a bit of granularity. First, you can set the sharing on or off. Then, you can set parameters for whether or not the shared items can be MODIFIED or DELETED by others (or just viewed). Also, you can share/unshare items on an item-by-item basis, so you can have both private and shared items in your bank. So if you are using multiple course admins, this new system of sharing content should scale to any scenario you have.

4. Optional HTML styled Emails
All of the emails that get sent from Weblearning (like score report emails, and course invitations) are sent in plain-text format by default (which are the least likely to be flagged as spam). However, many of you were asking for HTML email abilities. To accommodate both scenarios, you can now simply enter in the tag <html> into the template sections for each email, and they will be treated/sent as HTML.

5. Print Quiz Function
You will now be able to print off a quiz from inside the quiz properties.The print function even reformats matching and picklist questions so they print properly.

6. Massive overhaul of the Files section
This is a huge one - and after using this new version, will wonder how you ever got by before. If you incorporate a lot of content into your online courses (like images, videos, pdfs, etc), you will love the new files area. There are quite honestly too many things to mention here, but here are some highlights. Full file sharing abilities across admins, create your own folders and nested folders, perform searches for files, upload multiple files at once, and check the usage of any file. Also, when adding content into your courses, quizzes and questions/slides, you can add right from your computer (instead of having to upload first), so in one click you can browse for a file from your computer and insert it into your course quiz or slide!

7. Add Questions into your Presentations + Instant Feedback
Currently, when you make a presentation in Weblearning 9.5, you are limited to just ’slides’ — no question types can be used. This has changed in 9.6, where now you are able to add multiple-option, true/false and yes/no style questions into presentations. When these questions exist in a presentation, they operate a bit differently than in a quiz. When inside a presentation, when a question is delivered, the navigation is locked (so user cannot advance), and then they are forced to pick a choice. When they pick one, they are instantly notified if they were correct or not (along with feedback you can enter for each individual choice if you want). It is only when they answer correctly that the navigation is re-enabled.

8. Per-Slide/Question Animations and Slide Navigation Settings
Slides get two new settings - entrance animation (fly-in from top/bottom/left/right slow/medium/fast), and navigation settings (lock navigation for 5 seconds to 10 minutes (to force users to spend a certain amount of time per slide/per presentation), and and auto-advance to next slide setting so you can auto-advance them from slide to slide without them having to click anything). Questions get the same entrance animation options, but the question text and choices section can each have its own animation setting (so for example, you can have the question text fly in from the right, and the choices section fly in from the bottom).

9. Per Slide/Question JavaScript Code
A bit of a more advanced piece of functionality, but for those of you who can write Javascript, you can now write code that will execute upon a slide/question being delivered. Of course, the entire Javascript language is supported, and in addition, you have full access to the Prototype and Scriptaculous framework, and well as the jQuery framework!

10. Quiz-Level Plugins
I have talked about the plugin architecture in the other articles, but we just recently implemented this into Quizzes and Presentations. What it means is that you can incorporate plugins (code) into presentations and quizzes too, making them much more scalable.

If you are a current user of Weblearning 9.5, and are interested in a demo account on the beta server, email me at anthony @ atrixware.com and I will get you set up.

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Feb 06 2010

Weblearning 9.6 Photo Gallery

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 12:54 pm

As I sit snowed in to my home office on a Saturday, I figured I would post some screen shots of the new Weblearning 9.6 interface. Note that these are screen captures of the in-development build of Weblearning 9.6, so some minor things may change, but if you are using 9.5 now, you will notice major changes (and improvements) to the interface, while still maintaining the same ‘feel’ of 9.5.

So this will be a photo-only article (no captions, no comments), but I made sure to put a few screens in here that show new features that I have not yet posted about - hope you like it!

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Jan 27 2010

Weblearning 9.6 Sneak Peek

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 10:41 am

It has been about a month since I last posted the first sneak peek on Weblearning 9.6. As promised, I wanted to tell you about some more things that will make it into the 9.6 release.

As before, there’s quite a bit, so I have to be somewhat selective to keep this article short.

Here are my favorite new features since last post:

1. 10-category-rule limit removed for question and slide picking

Currently (in version 9.5), you can create up to 10 ‘rules’ to pick questions, something like “Pick 5 questions from category 1“, and then “Pick 3 questions from category 2“, etc. Once you hit 10, that’s it. Now, there is no limit, thanks to the new wizard block functionality.

2. You can now also include individually selected questions

That’s right. You can pick individual questions one-by-one and place them into your quiz or presentation. Looking to create a quiz with 10 specific questions? Not a problem anymore.

3. Your quizzes and presentations can be a mixture of BOTH individually-selected and randomly-selected questions and slides.

For example, you can set your quiz up to pick 3 specific questions, and also 10 random questions from category 1, and 3 questions in sequence from category 2, and then 5 more specific questions!

4. You can easily drag & drop each question and selection block into the exact order you want in the quiz

For example, it is now possible to do this: Show a section introduction slide, followed by 5 learning slides on a topic, followed by 3 random questions about that topic, followed by a text passage, followed by 5 random questions about that text passage. The question and quiz building abilities of Weblearning 9.6 are far superior to what you are using in 9.5. Watch the short video clip to see it in action:

5. True republishing functionality

One of the big feature requests - the ability to republish a quiz or presentation without losing any settings. Its here. Here is how it works. You update some questions in your question bank - and then you want the updates to propagate into your quiz. So you simply click the CREATE OR REPUBLISH A QUIZ, then pick the quiz you want to republish, and then click PUBLISH! Thats it! Questions/question rules are remembered, and all settings as well. Of course, you can also swap out a few questions, change the order around, etc before republishing if you choose.

6. Auto-link Modules to Courses

When you are in COURSE DESIGN view, and adding placeholders for individual modules that do not yet exist in the course, Weblearning 9.6 will detect it, and ask you if you want to automatically link those modules to the course, saving you the extra steps of manually adding them.

7. Question Editors Revamped

All question editors have been re hauled for easier use, and a few of them (like multiple-choice and matching) get a few new usability features.

8. User Groups

A lot of work has gone into making user (formerly named student) management easy. One new feature is the ability to create user groups, and then place users into them. Then its as easy as 1-2-3 to do things like enrolling/dis-enrolling groups of users, changing user information across all users in a group (like start/expire dates, or custom field values for example), and more.

9. User Data Placeholders available just about everywhere now

Previously, you had access to a user’s login id in all places that use placeholders. Now, wherever you have access to the user id placeholder, you also have access to every other data field for that user (like name, address, company, etc, and even including the now 15 custom fields).

10. Multi-User functions

The new search functionality for users (where you can, for example, list all students from COMPANY:Microsoft or that have an @aol.com email, or live in NJ, and dozens of others) also lets you APPLY functions to the resultant list of users. For example, if you wanted to CHANGE all users from COMPANY:Microsoft to be COMPANY:Apple, no problem. Or how about DELETING all users from COMPANY:Microsoft, or maybe putting all users from COMPANY:Microsoft into a user group named MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES or enrolling all of them into the WINDOWS 101 Course. No problem!

11. Automated Tasks

The new plugin architecture (mentioned in my previous article) will work with another new feature - tasks. A task is a script that runs automatically 1x per day (or you can initiate it manually from your course admin panel). The script can do anything you want (by default it does nothing, but it is designed to run plugin-scripts). What does it all mean? Well, for example, lets say you wanted to have a report run 1x per day that tells you which users were active? Or you wanted to automate the emailing of a score report to a particular person. As long as you can write the plugin to do the work (or have us write it for you), the tasks function will run the script!

There are a few more MAJOR items that are planned for the release that I can’t comment on yet (because they are not fully finished), but I can assure you, there’s some other cool new stuff to be part of version 9.6 that you will love!

I will try to get in another post in about a month with another list.

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Dec 22 2009

Weblearning 9.6 Teaser

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 4:30 pm

We have been hard at work on the next update to Weblearning - version 9.6.

We are still a few months or more away from release (it’s scheduled for a Q1 2010 release), but there are so many new and cool things that will wind up in this new update, I thought I would mention a few.

There are actually around 100 new features and changes planned for version 9.6 (many based on your suggestions and requests since 9.5 was released in January 2009), but I will only cover the ones that are almost guaranteed to be in the final release (meaning they are done already and working), and from those, I will only mention a few (just my favorite ten ~ although almost 50 new features and changes are done so far).

#1. Auto-Save Progress
This is a big one ~ and what it means is that when your students are inside online quizzes and presentations, their progress is auto-saved (at pre-determined intervals which you can specify). If they lose connection, or have a power failure, this feature will be a lifesaver!

#2. Timezone and Display Settings
You can now assign a timezone override to the server time so reports will have the time and date based on your time zone. This also includes the ability to customize time/date output (so for example, you can display dates like this: 12/25/2009 or like this 12-25-09 or like this December 25, 2009 or like this Friday, December 25, 2009 (or really any way you want).

#3: Copy Courses / Rename Courses
Two seemingly simple features, missing until now - but will be available in 9.6

#4. Course Templates
Do you use the same Course layout and configuration for every course you create, but are tired of having to edit each new courses with your same desired content? Course Templates will enable you to set up a course template so each course you create will use it by default!

#5. Placeholders can now be Dragged & Dropped
When inserting placeholder text into your emails, page layouts, etc, all of the placeholders can now be dragged & dropped into place, making it a snap!

#6. Intellectual Property Protection
Lock down your content and apply preventative measures to deter users from stealing your content ~ it’s as simple as selecting YES to enable the protection!

#7: Multiple Admin Passwords
Do you want to assign someone to do just authoring of questions, and someone else to pull reports? Version 9.6 enables you to assign up to 4 additional passwords to your account, and specify which areas of your account they can access!

#8. Course Invitations Get Major Improvements
Re-use previous invitation body texts and subjects (they are automatically saved), track who was already invited and who wasn’t, and even pull up the exact email invitation that was sent to each person, along with time and date.

#9. Student Search Functions
Finding students couldn’t be easier. Search by any field (including up to 15 custom fields now in version 9.6), or ALL fields, or by UserGroup (new in 9.6), or course they are enrolled in. Exporting and deleting can be applied to the results.

#10. User Master Login
Want to send your students to a single login to access all of their courses (instead of having them log into each course individually)? Version 9.6 offers the master login page.

#11. Expandable Plug-in Architecture
Ok - I cheated, and added an 11th one to the list (couldn’t resist). The new plug-in system is a huge addition to Weblearning. It has a plug-in system for the course admin interface (shown in image below ~ see the PLUGIN tab), as well as the course portal interface , and is the gateway to dozens of add-on components in the years to come, in addition to making it easy for us to add in customized functionality to your server without having to modify core files. It also makes it possible to incorporate other web components and applications into your courses that are not designed specifically for Weblearning.

As you may have realized, this new update is a massive release, not to mention a rehaul of the visual interface (we are constantly cleaning it up and trying to make it more usable). Of course as a Weblearning user, you get it FREE!

I will be back in a month or two with another list of my next favorite 10 things as we approach the release date. Thanks!

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Nov 12 2009

Introducing SCORM Quiz Maker

Filed Under: Atrixware 101, Chris, ELearning 101, SCORM Quiz Maker — chris @ 12:14 pm

SCORM Quiz Maker is an application that lets you easily create quizzes that can be uploaded into your SCORM compatible LMS. It also allows you to make Microsoft Word compatible printed quizzes and answer keys as well.

It shares the same authoring interface as our other quiz maker products (like Easy Quiz Maker and PowerPoint Quiz Maker) and shares a common import/export format for multiple-choice questions (so you can, for example, use your questions across all products).

As a preview of what can be published using SCORM Quiz Maker, I’ve published an example SCORM compatible quiz and a sample printed quiz.

Example 1:

To preview this SCORM compatible quiz example, click here.

Note that not all features will be available when you run the quiz locally as opposed to on your LMS. If you are using Internet Explorer, you may need to click the top bar on the browser, and then choose ‘allow blocked content’ — note that this will not appear when the quiz is delivered from your LMS.

Example 2:

This is an example of a printed quiz created with SCORM Quiz Maker. I’ve printed the quiz to a PDF document so that you can download and open the example locally and see how SCORM Quiz Maker can also be used to deliver your questions in a classroom setting. To view the printed example click here.

For more information on SCORM Quiz Maker and it’s features, please visit the SCORM Quiz Maker page located under the Products section of this website.

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Jul 24 2009

Printing a Certificate from the Quiz Management Service

Filed Under: Atrixware 101, Chris, Quiz Management Service — chris @ 2:36 pm

It’s easy to create, send, and print certificates for your students using the Quiz Management Service. By just entering a little bit of information about a student, you can easily generate a certificate that can be printed directly from your web browser or emailed to yourself, the student, the student’s parents, or anyone else with a valid email address. Using the Quiz Management Service’s certificate feature, you’re not limited to sending certificates to only students who have completed quizzes in the QMS - you can send certificates to any of your students by just entering their data.

In this article I’m going to walk your through how to create, print, and email your first certificate. To get started, log into your QMS account and click on the Create Certificate button located on the home page.

Clicking on the Create Certificate button will open up the Create a Certificate screen. On this screen, you will be prompted to enter the name of the student (as you would like it to appear on the certificate), the email address where you would like the certificate sent, the name of the Quiz / Test (as you would like it to appear on the certificate), and the date of completion (as you would like it to appear on the certificate). By default, the current date will automatically be filled in for the date of completion. Once you have entered each of the required pieces of information, click the Create Certificate button to generate the certificate.

After clicking the Create Certificate button, your student’s certificate will automatically be generated and displayed for you in the browser window.

To print the certificate, click the Print this Certificate link located above the certificate. This will open the certificate in a new window (or tab, depending on the browser and settings you are using) with no other content than the certificate itself. To print the certificate, select the Print option for your browser.

To email the certificate to the email address specified in the previous step, click the Email to Student link above the certificate. The certificate will then be automatically be sent and a message will be displayed indicating that the certificate has been sent.

The student (or whomever owns the email address you entered to receive the certificate) will receive the certificate as an email, which they can then print out and/or save for their records.

To send another certificate or to return to the QMS Home Page, click the Home link from the menu bar at the top.

The Quiz Management Service is compatible with PowerPoint Quiz Maker, Easy Quiz Maker, Flash Quiz Maker, Online Quiz Maker, and Test Pro Developer.

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Jul 16 2009

Adding Audio Narrations to Questions and Slides

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 9:58 am

In the latest patch to the Weblearning 9.5 LMS, we added (among other things) the ability to add audio narrations to your quiz questions and/or presentation slides as part of the new Text Editor Plugins Toolbar.

To begin, first record and then upload your audio narrations into the FILES tab (note: make sure the narrations are in MP3 format). Once the mp3 files are uploaded into your account, you will easily be able to attach them to your questions or slides (as I will describe next).

For this example, I am adding a new Presentation Slide, and have entered some basic text (as shown):

Next, click the TEXT EDITOR PLUGINS button:

From the Plugins window, choose INSERT AUDIO:

The audio plugin will appear. Simply choose the mp3 file to insert, and check/uncheck the AUTOPLAY checkbox, and choose the color of the player (keep it at auto-color for maximum compatibility with all the different skins you may apply to your quiz or presentation).

Once you click the INSERT button, an identifying region will appear on the slide (or question) along the top:

Go ahead and SAVE the slide, and then publish a presentation that includes this slide (and add to a course, etc). Once you view the presentation (as a student would), here is what it will look like:

Note the audio play bar along the bottom left of the presentation. It contains a Play/Pause button, and a moving bar indicating how far along the audio is from the end. If you have set it to auto-play (as I did in this example), the audio will begin playing when the slide is in view. Otherwise, the user can start the audio by clicking the PLAY button (which turns into a PAUSE button when the audio is playing).

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Jul 10 2009

Creating a Custom Design Template for PowerPoint Quiz Maker

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, PowerPoint Quiz Maker — anthony @ 3:13 pm

The newest version of Atrixware PowerPoint Quiz Maker uses design templates for the resultant presentation. For the most part, the included templates are usable, but with just a bit of work, you can create your own, and add in your own logo, graphics, font sizes, and transition FX (as a small example).

To start, browse to the templates folder:

In Windows XP, its usually here:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\atrixware\PowerPoint Quiz Maker 9\shared\ppt templates\

In Windows Vista, it’s usually here:
C:\ProgramData\Atrixware\PowerPoint Quiz Maker 9\shared\ppt templates\

You should see the following folders (or something similar):

Now, COPY a folder (I will use PLAIN in this example), and then PASTE it so there is a new folder ..

Rename the new folder to CUSTOM1 (or whatever you would like):

Now, double-click on the folder to open it, and you will see the following files:

The preview.gif file is what you see in PowerPoint Quiz Maker when you choose the design template. If you have a graphic editor, you can change this to whatever you desire. For this example, we will use the default preview.

The other 5 files are used by PowerPoint Quiz Maker when it creates the PowerPoint quizzes. You can modify one, or all of these files inside of PowerPoint. The important thing is to NOT remove any elements already there, or the quiz may not work properly (but you can certainly ADD elements and MOVE elements around).

For this article, I will modify the q_slide1.ppt, which represents the slide that contains the question text, and choices for questions that do not have an image (for questions with an image, the q_slide1_image.ppt is the template). So, double-click on the q_slide1.ppt file, and it will open in PowerPoint.

Once open, you can do whatever you normally do in PowerPoint (change locations of text objects, change font sizes, colors, and styles, add some graphics and perhaps a background, assign transition FX, etc). Shown below is a before and after of the q_slide1.ppt file I did:

I also added an entrance effect to the question text and choices by selecting each one (6 total fields) and then right-clicking and choosing CUSTOM ANIMATION ..

.. and then choosing ADD EFFECT > ENTRANCE > FLY IN ..

Once you have the slide the way you like it, SAVE it, and if necessary, perform edits on the other files as well. Once complete, you will see your template as an available option from the PowerPoint Publish Dialog from inside of PowerPoint Quiz Maker:

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May 25 2009

Importing Questions using the Import Utility

Filed Under: Atrixware 101, ELearning 101, Easy Quiz Maker, Flash Quiz Maker, Online Quiz Maker, Test Pro Developer, Weblearning — chris @ 12:18 pm

One of the most frequently addressed questions we come across is on the topic of importing questions into our Quiz/Test software and Weblearning application. More often than not, the trouble lies within the formatting for the text file itself. In this article, I’m going to show you how to properly format your questions and load them into the Import Utility so that they can easily be imported into our software.

Before we get started, it’s important to note that the Import Utility only allows you to import Multiple Choice/Response style questions. Any other types of questions (Fill-in-the-Blank, Essay, Pick List, etc.) will need to be added in manually.

The first step is to launch the Import Utility itself. Depending on the type/version of the software your using the process for doing this may vary. In most cases, you can launch the Import Utility by going to the Questions area of the quiz/test you are currently working on and locating the Import link, bringing up the Import Wizard. On the first step of the Import Wizard, where you would normally select the .txt file you would like to import questions from, there is a link that reads Launch the Import Utility (click here). In some cases, you can launch the Import Utility by going to the Tools menu at the top and selecting Question Import Utility. In Weblearning, you can launch the import utility by following the instructions in the Import section of the Questions & Slides tab.

This will launch the Import Utlity, which allows you to open the text file containing the questions you would like to import, and format the text file into the proper format for importing.

Each question that you import should follow the 11-line import format. The first line must contain the question text, followed by a Hard Return, then a blank line (if your question or answer text contains line feeds/carriage returns, replace then with the following markup prior to importing: [br] ). The next 5 lines are answers A-B-C-D-E, each followed by a Hard Return. If a question has less that 5 answers, enter a blank line (Hard Return) for each missing answer. After the 5 answers, another blank line should follow. Next, the explanation should follow, then followed by a hard return, and then 2 blank lines.

Each question immediately follows the previous question. Here is the format (the prefixed numbers are there for example only):

01: QUESTION 1 TEXT
02:
03: ANSWER A
04: ANSWER B
05: ANSWER C
06: ANSWER D
07: ANSWER E
08:
09: EXPLANATION
10:
11:
12: QUESTION 2 TEXT
13:
14: ANSWER A
15: ANSWER B
16: ANSWER C
17: ANSWER D
18: ANSWER E
19:
20: EXPLANATION
21:
22:

So let’s assume I already have a text file with a few of my questions, answers, and explanations already saved and I would like to import those questions. My text file will more than likely look something like this:

First, I’ll need to open my file using the Import Utilty. To do this, select File > Open Existing Text File from the top menu and then browse your hard drive until you find the .txt file you would like to import. When I open my text file in the Import Utility for the first time, it’s going to look like this:

As you can see, the questions from my text file do not match the 11-line import format. To verify that the lines are off or to view what types of errors I may have in my text file, I can click the Preview tab at the top to get a question by question analysis of exactly what (and more importantly how) questions will be imported.

As you can see I have multiple errors in the layout of my .txt file, but just in case if I couldn’t tell immediately, the Import Utility will notify me with a popup alerting me to any glaring errors it might detect. In my case. here are the errors:

First and foremost, both of my questions are using more than one line, when they should only be using one line. In my second question, the explanation is also using more than one line when it should be only using one line. Also in the second question, I only have four answers (which is OK) but I have not left a blank line where the 5th answer would normally be. In fact, I’m missing a second blank line after both explanations as well. All of these things together are causing my question errrors.

For instance, the importer is looking for the first choice on my first question on line 5. However, it’s finding the last word of my question instead. After I go back and correct the formatting (moving all question text to one line, making sure I have the proper number of blank lines including blank lines for items I won’t be using, and making sure my explanations are only on one line) my format will look like this:

As you can see I have corrected all my errors, and now the data on the right (in white) lines up correctly with a blue rows to the left. From this view it looks as though I’ve managed to remove all the errors in formatting. However, just to make certain I’ll click on the Preview tab again to see what errors might be found:

This time around, I did not recieve any popups notifying me of any errors, and I only see one warning sign. In this case, the warning sign is alerting me that I have not entered any text for the 5th answer of my second question - which I did intentionally so it appears all is well.

The last thing I’ll need to do is denote which answer is actually the correct answer. To mark an answer as correct, I’m going to prefix it with [*]. Once I return to the software and actually import my formatted text file, that’s the prefix I will use to denote the correct answer in the Import Wizard. If my question has more than one correct answer (in the case of a Multiple Response style question), I only need to prefix all of the correct answers with [*]. Once I’ve prefixed my answers, my Import Utility screen will look like this:

Note: This step can be skipped, however if no prefix is found the Import Wizard will automatically use the first answer as the correct answer.

Now that my text file is in the correct format, it’s time to save my text file again so that it may be used by the Import Wizard. To do this, select File > Save This File to Disk from the menu at the top and select the location and filename where you would like to save your formatted text file.

Once my .txt file is saved, I’m ready to return to the software and follow the steps of the Import Wizard, using my newly formatted text file to easily import questions, answers, and explanations directly into the software.

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Apr 18 2009

Convert PowerPoint Slides into Weblearining Slides

Filed Under: Anthony, Atrixware 101, Weblearning — anthony @ 3:46 pm

If you are using the PRO or ENTERPRISE editions of our Weblearning System (9.5 or better), we have a desktop software toolkit you can download called Weblearning Tools (at version 1.1 at the time this article was written).

Here is the link: http://www.atrixware.com/site/subsites/weblearning/pages/addons.php

This tool currently consists of three utilities. The one I will discuss here is the PowerPoint to Weblearning Converter ~ an easy-to-use tool that will convert your PowerPoint slides into slides compatible with Weblearning!

When you first run the PowerPoint Convertver, the following screen will appear:

The top section is where you fill out your server and account info ~ once you enter it, you wont need to do it again (unless you have multiple servers and/or accounts).

Next, drag a PowerPoint presentation (file) into the red area indicated below:

Once you have dropped a valid PowerPoint presentation there, it will look like this:

Next, enter in a slide category in the space provided ~ this will be the category (question grouping) the slides wind up in when they are listed in your Weblearning account. You can always change the category later, but, the image filenames use the category as well, so it’s important to not re-use a category name if you are uploading multiple presentations since the file names may be the same, thereby overwriting previously uploaded presentations.

Now click the CONVERT button. Depending on the size of the PowerPoint presentation, it can take a few seconds, to many minutes, to complete the conversion:

Once done, you will be able to preview the slides, upload them to your account, or start again. For this article, click the UPLOAD button, and then click the BROWSE button:

.. Locate then double-click on the export.zip file, then click the CONTINUE button to complete the upload.

Once the process is complete, you will have a series of slides in your online question/slide bank. Make sure you go to the QUIZZES & MODULES tab (inside your Weblearning account), then CREATE A NEW LEARNING PRESENTATION, and from there you will be able to select the slides you just converted and place them into the new presentation.

I want to mention a few things. First, the converted slides will not contain fly-ins, animations, etc. Also, while the converted slides will look very close to the PowerPoint slides in most cases, they are not an identical match due to the difference between PowerPoint rendering, and Online Browser/HTML rendering.

The benefits however are huge. By doing the conversion, your users will not need to have PowerPoint or the PowerPoint player, nor a Flash plug-in (they will simply need a modern web browser). Also, once in Weblearning format, the presentation can now be paused/resumed, and also tracked in the Weblearning system.

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