New help docs, better searching, and more
Posted July 12, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
Early this morning, we deployed a new version of our LMS to our production site. Along with several bug fixes, there are over a dozen new features in the release. We hope you find them useful. Here are the highlights:
New help documentation
Assessment presentation settings
We’ve completely revamped the help documentation that is available from within the LMS. This was a long process but useful to us as it identified a few areas of our application where we can improve things. There is now complete documentation for both administrators and students. It can be accessed from the ‘Help’ link in the top-right corner of the LMS when you’re logged in (it’s also available on our public site’s support section). The documentation you see from within the LMS depends on your assigned role.
Documentation is an ongoing process so we’ll continue to improve it over time. We also have plans of making the default help page context-sensitive so that it’s determined by which page it was launched from.
Search across all your clients
It was really easy to search for a user within an organization — but not if you didn’t know what organization the user was associated with. Sometimes you may get a support request in the form of a voicemail or in an email which doesn’t give a clue as to the person’s organization.
We recognized that we didn’t have an effective way for administrators to search across all their clients. Given that some of our clients have hundreds of their own clients using our LMS, we needed to do something.
We’ve added a new tab called ‘Search’ which is available, for now, only to Master Administrators (in fact, it is their new default page). It provides a quick way to search for a user or to jump to a client. The page may look a little sparse for now but, don’t worry, we’ve got greater plans for this page coming.
Edit presentation settings of assessments
Our built-in assessment engine offers many presentation options to control the user’s experience when taking a test or survey. You can specify:
- a time limit
- whether users can suspend and resume an attempt
- how users can navigate through questions
- what feedback is displayed
- the information displayed to the user after they complete an attempt
While we’ve always allowed you to control these settings at author-time, we didn’t provide an easy way to update these on the fly. This is now possible. This is especially useful for our clients who share the same test or survey across many clients but want different settings to be used.
Easier updating of your content
Quite often, typos are found or some tweaks are required after you deploy your learning content to a population of users. We’ve made it easier for you to update previously loaded content. There is now a new option on the content loading page which specifies that you want to update the resources of content in place.
Other new features and enhancements
A few more of the new features and enhancements include:
- Ability to display the list of locations as an expandable hierarchy
- Ensure that learning content with long-running videos doesn’t time out
- Complete support for SCORM 2004 roll-up rules
To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.13.
