Our newest Weblearning plugin release (available for PRO and ENTERPISE systems) allows you to integrate a live chat room directly into your Weblearning courses where you, the Course Admin, can chat in real-time with your users.  The chat room itself can be utilized in multile ways - simply chatting with users, answering question in real time, administering online oral exams, or enhancing the overall distance-learning experience.

In this article I’m going to show you how to integrate the most basic form of the chat room plugin into one of your courses (there are multiple ways to integrate the chat room, for more information on the different methods you can use with this plugin please refer to the plugin documentation).

To get started let’s take a look at how you can access the chat plugin in your account that will allow you to chat with your users, configure the chat settings, and view the plugin documentation. You can find the Chat Room Plugin by going to the Courses tab, and then clicking on the Plugins subtab.

Although I’ll be touching on some of the basics of the chat room in this article, before you start heavily using the Chat Plugin, I would recommend reviewing the plugin documentation to get a better idea of how the chat room interface itself works. To view the plugin documentation click the Help icon located in the plugin toolbar.

Now let’s add the chat room to one of our courses. Adding a chat room to one of your courses is as easy as dragging a placeholder into the Course Designer. To begin, click on the Courses tab and then the List All subtab.

This will bring up a listing of all the courses you’ve created in the Weblearning system.  Now click the Pencil icon to the right of the course you would like to place the chat room into.

This will bring that course into a more detailed view where you can edit the course design, control user access, rename the course, and more.  In this case we want to go into the Course Designer so that we may add our placeholders for the chat room, so click on the Design option.

In this case, I’m going to insert the chat room so that it appears directly in the course pages under the fourth tab of my course.  The first thing I’m going to do is, in the Course Designer, click on the tab that says “Page 4″ and edit the name of that tab to read “Chat”.

Next I’m going to take the placeholder for the inline chat (inline meaning that the chat will appear directly on the course page itself, instead of opening up in a new window) and drag-and-drop it into the content for that course page.  In this case the placeholder I’m looking for is [[[CHAT_ROOM_INLINE_ALL]]].

Once I’ve dragged the placeholder for my chat room into the content area for that course, I’m going to scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Submit Changes button to save my changes.

Now when one of my users logs into my course they’ll see a fourth tab named “Chat”.  When they click on that tab, they’ll be brought directly into the chat room for that course where they’ll see a list of any other users who are also in that course chat room (plus me as the Proctor if I also happen to be in chat) along with the chat itself.

Since both myself, the Proctor, and a user are in chat we can start to actually chat with one another.  Let’s say the user types this into the message box and presses Send.

On the admin side of things I would see this in my chat room.  Not only do I see the message that the user typed into the chat room, but I also see a listing of all students who are currently in a chat room (in this case there is only one user with me in chat).

I can reply back to the user in the same fashion, by typing in a message in the message box and clicking the Send button.  You can even dress up your messages by adding bold, italic, and underline fonts, inserting links, or using emoticons.

As I previously mentioned, this is just a very basic example of how to integrate and use the Chat Room.  You can also set up the chat room to invite users who may be logged into a course but have yet to enter chat, have private conversations with users, integrate custom avatars to give your courses a sense of “community” and more.

If you would like to see it in action, you can sign up for a demo Weblearning account

Those of you who have Weblearning Pro or Enterprise systems, and have used the previous PowerPoint Converter tool, you may be interested to know about the new PowerPoint Converter Plug-in.

Complete information on the PowerPoint Converter Plugin (and all Weblearning plug-ins for that matter) is available here.

This plug-in is used to convert PowerPoint Presentation Slides into native Weblearning Slides. Minimally, this lets you get your PowerPoint presentations online without requiring your users to use the PowerPoint viewer application, and in this case, they don’t even need flash (as many PowerPoint converters turn the presentation into a flash video).

This means that devices that do not support Flash (like iPhone, iPod, iPad, and many other mobile devices) will be able to view your presentations!

This new version of the PowerPoint Converter has many improvements over the old one.

For starters, it is now a plug-in to your Weblearning system (although it still does have a desktop component to it).

It now also converts some basic PowerPoint Animation Effects (fly-in from top, bottom, left, and right, fade-in). In addition, you can also override effects (and add some of your own) during the conversion (changing effect type and speed, and configuring items to fade out or roll-up after the core effect has completed). There is a local preview of your converted slides (along with all animations) as well.

The conversion accuracy is also vastly improved, so things like stylized and non-standard-font text, multiple text colors, bullet items, and more are nearly a 100% conversion.

If you would like to see it in action, you can sign up for a demo Weblearning account - then you will find the plug-in under the slides -> plugins tab.

Dynamic Scripting is a new feature in Weblearning 9.6. It is quite powerful, and as you may have guessed based on the feature name, it involves ’scripting’ (coding).

However, there is a way to use the Dynamic Scripting feature without writing any code, and although you wont be able to get the full advantage by doing so, it is still quite useful.

Firstly, for those of you interested in learning more details on the Dynamic Scripting feature, swing over to the Weblearning Support Page’s Product Documentation section and download the Dynamic Scripting Reference.

Now for an example scenario that Dynamic Scripting would be useful. Lets say you have a 5-day course that is a combination of live training and after-class assignments. Each day, after 5pm, you would like to provide your class with access to some additional learning materials that are related to that day.

You could, of course, after each class, go into the course design area of your online course, and add/remove content. However, using Dynamic Scripting will automate the process for you, as I will explain next.

First, access the Design area of your course:

This will open up the course designer. So our basic strategy is to set up 2 basic states of view (what to show if it is 5PM or later, and what to show otherwise). Then, in the section that is after 5PM, show different content for each day.

First, each block you insert will be inserted by clicking the EXTRAS drop-down menu and choosing Dynamic Block (Wizard):

So, lets set up our 2 basic sections. Position your cursor at the top of the main section of the design editor (perhaps remove everything already there),  then click the EXTRAS > DYNAMIC BLOCK (WIZARD) option, and the Dynamic Block Wizard will appear. Fill in the wizard with the following (see screenshot below):

After clicking INSERT DYNAMIC BLOCK, reposition your cursor below that section in  the editor area, and insert another dynamic block the same way using the following values (see screenshot below):

If you have done those steps correctly, your design editor contents should look like this:

So lets take care of the easy one first - the section that gets displayed if its not yet 5PM. For this example, I will just put a generic message:

In the section that gets displayed after 5PM, we will actually have 5 different things that may get displayed (one for each weekday). So, to accomplish this, for each weekday, position your cursor inside the gray area of that section, and then click the EXTRAS > DYNAMIC BLOCK (WIZARD) option, and fill in the wizard with the following (but alter the day each time):

After doing this for all 5 weekdays, your design editor contents should look like this:

Now we can enter content for each area (for this example, I just entered text passages, but you could of course place specific learning modules, quizzes, videos and anything else inside each section to be displayed):

Your Weblearning System (as of version 9.6) enables you to create three kinds of learning modules: Graded Quizzes, Practice Quizzes, and Learning Presentations.

Learning Presentations (the subject of this article) can contain both slides (you know - like PowerPoint) as well as quiz questions (just like quizzes can), but where a quiz is designed more for evaluation and scoring, a learning presentation is designed more for training and verification that the learner understands the concepts you are training them on.

So, when you create a learning presentation, you use the same drag-and-drop interface as you do on quizzes, where you can either drag-and-drop individual slides or questions into the ‘to-use’ column, and/or create ‘rule blocks’ that pick some questions randomly from a category (click PLAY on the video to see it in action).

So let’s take a small (7-slide) example of a typical learning presentation you may want to create. From a slide-design perspective, it might look something like this:

Slide 1 > Introduction
Slide 2 > Talk about item A
Slide 3 > Talk about item B (part 1)
Slide 4 > Talk about item B (part 2)
Slide 5 > Ask Question about Item A
Slide 6 > Ask Question about Item B
Slide 7 > Completion Slide

First, you probably know the exact slides you want to use for the non-question slides, so, when you author those slides, you might put them into a category named “presentation 101″ for example.

If you know the exact questions you want to use as well, you can also drop those questions into the same “presentation 101″ category as well. If you want the two questions to be randomly picked questions instead, you will want to drop them into a different category (lets say ‘presentation 101 questions’).

Now, for scenario 1, where you know the exact questions and slides you want to use, you can achieve the desired result in two ways:

The First Way

1. Sequence your questions and slides inside the category from the question bank tab

2. (during publish phase) Use the Wizard Block button to insert ALL slides SEQUENTIALLY from the “Presentation 101” category:

This will result in a wizard block placeholder being placed in the ‘items to use’ column for your presentation:

The Second Way

The other way to do this is as follows:

1. (during publish phase) Pick ‘presentation 101‘ from the ‘pick slides from a category‘ drop-down box:

2. Drag and drop each slide and question from the left to the right column,and order them the way you would like them to appear to your users:

Now, if you would like the questions to be randomly chosen (remember, we placed them in the ‘presentation 101 questions’ category), follow these steps:

1. (during publish phase) Pick ‘presentation 101‘ from the ‘pick slides from a category‘ drop-down box (just like above).

2. Drag and drop each slide from the left to the right column,and order them the way you would like them to appear to your users (again, just like described above):

3. Now click the Wizard Block button and insert 2 random questions from the presentation 101 questions category:

This will place a wizard block placeholder into the to-use column at the bottom — you will want to drag it up in between the item b slide - part 2 and the conclusion slide:

It may not happen often, but occasionally you may have a need to print off a quiz (or even a presentation) for a user, or perhaps even for prototyping purposes.

Weblearning 9.6 introduces a new feature to do just that - enable you to easily print off a quiz.

Keep in mind that Weblearning is not designed specifically to create printed quizzes, so you wont have the plethora of options as you do for configuring the quizzes for online delivery.

To access the print function, click on the LEARNING MODULES tab, and then list the learning modules in the LIST ALL tab, and click the EDIT button next to the learning module you would like to print:

This will open the learning module up in edit mode. From here, click the SLIDES tab, and then finally, click the PRINT button to print off the learning module:

Quizzes will print out nice almost every time. Presentations will print out nicely for the most part, but if you have sophisticated layouts the output may not be 100% perfect.

New in Weblearning 9.6 are question and slide effects. These are a simple set of effects you can apply to your content that may add some pizazz to your quizzes and presentations (or drive your users crazy if you over-do it).

Slides and questions each have slightly different options, but both are accessed by clicking the ADVANCED button along the top of the main content editor inside the question and/or slide editor:

When working with slides, the effect applies to the entire slide content (although you can apply effects to sections and objects individually via JavaScript, it gets complex and is not as simple as simply picking from a drop-down box, and therefore is beyond the scope of this article). Simply choose the entrance effect from the drop-down list:

When working with questions, separate effects can be applied to both the question text, and the answer/choice section. For each section, simply choose the entrance effect from the drop-down list:

Behind the scenes, when you choose these effects, a bit of JavaScript code is getting written. If you do not know what JavaScript is, don’t worry - you don’t need to know. However, if you do know what JavaScript is, and know how to code using JavaScript, you can both see the code, as well as add to and/or modify it by clicking the OTHER tab, and then clicking the OPEN EDITOR button in the JavaScript Code section:

Essentially, any code inside this section will execute each time this question or slide comes into view.

New in Weblearning 9.6 is the Master Login feature.

So what does this feature do exactly? Well, if you use your Weblearning system to create multiple courses, and your users are often enrolled into multiple courses, the Master Login feature was designed for you.

In a nutshell, the Master Login is a login page your users can access that (once logged in) will provide them access to all courses they are currently enrolled in. This prevents you from  having to hand out multiple login links (one for each course), or, from creating a ‘master course’ that is a course simply containing links to other courses (a common way to achieve the same thing in earlier versions of Weblearning).

So here is how it works. You hand out a single link to each and every user to log into (which is a link to the master login page), and they will have access to all courses they are currently enrolled in, and as you add/remove them from courses, their login will reflect that.

The link is available from the COURSES tab inside your account:

The link is actually very simple though.
Its http://your.site.com/user.php?ca=your_course_admin_username

New in Weblearning 9.6 is the ability to include certain question types (currently multiple-option, true/false and yes/no) inside your authored presentations.

When you include questions inside presentations however, the operate a bit differently than they do inside of a quiz.

First, when a user first encounters a question inside a learning presentation, the navigation buttons will be disabled - thereby forcing them to choose an answer to the question.

Next, the user will receive feedback when they choose an answer:

• if they choose wrong choice, the will get feedback telling them so, and then have the opportunity to choose another selection
• if the choose the correct answer, they will get feedback telling them so, and then the navigation button(s) will be re-enabled so they can navigate to the next question or slide

By default, the ‘instant feedback’ displayed to the user is a generic ‘you were correct, you were incorrect’ kind of message. However, you can author into each question a specific feedback for each choice if you choose by doing the following:

1. edit (or add) a new question (that works inside learning presentations)
2. click the OPTIONAL tab
3. scroll down to the IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK RESPONSES section to apply responses

As you are probably already aware, there are several places inside your Weblearning system that emails can be and/or are sent out:

• Course Invitations
• End-of-quiz report emails to admins
• End-of-quiz report emails to users

By default, emails are sent as plain-text, and therefore the editors provided to you to change the contents of these emails are plain-text editors (no styling or sizing options like you get in, for example, the question editors). However, there is a way to force the emails to be sent out as HTML emails.

To do so, place the following tag at the beginning of each mail body:

<html>

When the email function inside your Weblearning system sees this tag in the body of the email, it will treat the body text as HTML markup instead of plain text.

It is important to realize that once you do this, all of the text is treated as HTML markup code. This opens up the opportunity to put formatting into your emails. For example, you can bold text (using <b> tags), change fonts, sizes, colors. You can also include hyperlinks and images - if you understand how to use the HTML markup tags for these items.

Here are some examples (there are thousands possibilities):

<b>this will be bold</b>
<em>this will be italicized</em>
<u>this will be underlined</u>
<font size=3>This will be sized text</font>
<font color=blue>This will be blue text</font>
<a href=’http://www.yoursite.com/somepage.htm’>This will be a hyperlink</a>
<h1>This will be header text (large)</h1>
<h2>This will be a bit smaller header text</h2>
<h3>This will be even smaller header text</h3>

.. And for an image …
<img src=’http://www.yoursite.com/someimage.jpg>

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.