e-Learning Blog

Launching Expression Web 4 automatically

Leo Lucas — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:11:33 +0000

In one of our authoring tool projects, we need to launch the newest version of Expression Web on the author’s computer. When an author had ExpressionWeb 3 and 4 installed on the computer, our code was always launching Expression Web version 3 instead of version 4. The problem was not in our code – the problem was in the registry settings created by the Expression 4 installation. The installation of Expression Web 4 leaves does not update the registry setting responsible for launching the application by its name (ExpressionWeb.exe). You can change the registry setting by creating a .reg file (see contents below) and then launching that .reg file.

The first line of the .reg file must contain Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00. Save the .reg file as a Unicode file using notepad.

Here are the contents of the .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\ExpressionWeb.exe]
@=”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Expression\\Web 4\\ExpressionWeb.exe”
“Path”=”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Expression\\Web 4\\”

Scrolling listboxes in Silverlight

Leo Lucas — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:44:54 +0000

We have been doing quite a bit of work with Silverlight recently. I was working on a list of questions for a Silverlight-based test. The list of questions was placed into a Silverlight ListBox control. I needed to automatically scroll to the selected question within the ListBox. This seemed like a very easy thing to do because the Silverlight ListBox control have a ScrollIntoView() method. I called the method and nothing happened – very frustrating.

I searched the web to look for an answer – I found many people were experiencing the same problem. Here was the source of my problem – I had included the ListBox control inside a ScrollViewer control – I put the ListBox inside the ScrollViewer control because I thought the ListBox itself could not scroll. Once I removed the ScrollViewer control surrounding the ListBox, the call to the ScrollIntoView() worked just fine.

Question, quiz and test functionality

Leo Lucas — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:02:34 +0000

One of the common limitations of authoring tools is the functionality of questions, quizzes and tests. In our new e-Learning Authoring Tool we tried to provide a broad range of features while making it easy to create quizzes and tests. We let the author create one or pages in a course that contain individual questions, a quiz and a test. The quizzes and tests use one or more question pools and provide randomization over the question order and possible answers for each question. The individual question pages and quiz pages provide immediate feedback. The test pages provide delayed feedback shown after the learner submits the test for a grade. Here is a YouTube video showing our question, quiz and test features. We’d love to get your feedback on the question, quiz and test features. You can download a free trial of the authoring tool to see exactly how it works.

Multimedia capabilities

Leo Lucas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:03:38 +0000

One of the common questions I get is, “What is the best format for audio and video?” I wish there was a perfect answer for every situation. The best answer usually depends on the target audience and the servers used to deliver the audio and video. If the target audience only uses Windows computers, then selecting Windows media is a good choice. If the target audience will use different platforms and browsers, then it is best to pick either Flash audio and video or MPEG for video and MP3 for audio. When considered the need for different types of audio and video when we created our new e-Learning Authoring Tool. We decided to support all of these video formats and we decided to support audio and video delivered form the web server (progressive media) and from streaming media servers. This video on YouTube shows the audio and video features.

Creating buttons

Leo Lucas — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:17:19 +0000

It seems like everyone wants a different look for navigation buttons used in a course. Usually authors have to turn to a graphic artist to create these buttons. If you do not have immediate access to a graphic artist, you can use one of the sites that creates buttons for you for free – here is a good choice – http://cooltext.com/

Creating a good user interface

Leo Lucas — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:29:39 +0000

One of the biggest challenges in creating a good e-Learning Authoring Tool is to create a user interface that is both easy to use for new authors and efficient for experienced authors. You can see a demonstration of our e-Learning Authoring Tool user interface on YouTube. In the demo, you can see the authoring tool makes it easy to construct the structure of the course. The structure of the course is a hierarchy of individual pages that provide the instructional interactions. The built-in interactions include information pages (HTML pages), questions, quizzes, tests and a summary page. The user interface provides a built-in HTML editor for the information pages. There are also built-in editors for the questions, quizzes, tests and summary page. You comments are welcome – are there ways we can improve the user interface?

Getting ready to launch the e-Learning Authoring Tool

Leo Lucas — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:37:59 +0000

We have been working on a new e-Learning Authoring Tool for quite a while. Our goal was to create a tool that makes it very easy to create the most common types of courses and also allowing power-authors to extend to tool to create all types of courses. You can learn more about the new tool at the e-Learning Authoring Tool product page.

Our goal with the authoring tool was to provide all of the features you would expect in a clean, easy to use interface. The features include information pages, questions, quizzes and tests. The information pages are created with a built-in HTML editor so your course can contain all of the elements from a good web site including rich text, multimedia, tables and more. There are also built-in editors for questions, quizzes and tests.

We very interested in your feedback on this new authoring tool. Please comment in the blog or send us your comments by email.

Articulate QuizMaker fix

Leo Lucas — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:37:03 +0000

Articulate recently shipped a new version of its QuizMaker product. The new version sent non-ASCII data to the LMS (for example our столовеLearning Management System) for SCORM 1.2 communications. This was a problem for most LMSs so Articulate quickly offered a free update to their software.

Flash problem fix for Articulate

Leo Lucas — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:05:44 +0000

Articulate presenter is a popular course authoring tool for the people who use our Learning Management System (LMS) Hosting Service. Learners who use the 10.0 version of the Flash plug-in will not be able to view the content within an Articulate course. Articulate released a program to patch existing courses. The patch program is easy to use and works nicely to fix the problem.

Aligning movies in the Flash Toolkit

Leo Lucas — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:23:37 +0000

Our Flash Course Development Toolkit uses a JavaScript function to insert the Flash movie into the HTML page. This function is currently set to center the Flash movie in the HTML page. You can pass the salign:”L” parameter to left-align the movie:

var FO = { movie:”player.swf”, width:”100%”, height:”100%”, salign:”L”, majorversion:”8″, build:”0″, id:”ufoCom”, name:”ufoCom”, swliveconnect:”true”, allowscriptaccess:”always”, setcontainercss:”true” };