SAIT Course Builder Guide

FiLMS Course Builder - How to Build a Course for SAIT - Part 1

This document will help to assist and speed up the course building stage of development. Pay attention to text spacing and naming conventions, as these are strict standards to be adhered.

  • See last page for more information.

Known Issues

  • 405 scorm error, lesson ID contains a space or special character, delete or replace with _
  • Course doesn't popup, course packaged index.html is launch the course instead of popping up file loadInterface.html

Unique Functionality of the Courses

  • course is to track and resume frame bookmarking regardless of completion using films ini "useFrameBookmarkingOnCompleted"
  • Knowledge checks are set as "Lesson" lesson type so that even they can be resumed though the lessons and interface has unique code to apply it's own unique lock over the next and previous buttons and the vcr, that unlocks on last frame.
  • If exit button used, user will always resume on frame they left off, regardless of lesson or course completion
  • Index.html contains unique code to close TRACCESS window window.opener=self; window.close();
  • D2L launches the course in an IFRAME and because of this, the user may not use our exit button since it really wont do anything to "close" the course and thus try clicking elsewhere or close IE entirely, oddly this doesn't trigger our index.html unload even to lmsFinish and commit data to LMS thus causing the possible occurrence that cmi.core.exit=suspend doesn't get sent to LMS and thus on relaunch the progress is wiped. Code has been added to set this and commit right after lms initialized.
  • Client needs the ID/names of the lessons to reflect the lesson names in the course so they need to be had modified in the structure.xml with the restrictions of
    • Letters and Numbers no other characters
    • Separated by '_' no spaces
    • The name is limited to 255 characters
    • Be aware of duplicate names and add a number at the end as each ID/name is to be unique
    • EXAMPLE. knowledge check == knowledge_check_1

Course Builder

Step 0: Create New Course from Scratch

  • Launch Course Builder
  • Choose 'Course Builder v3'
  • Click 'Add New Course...'
  • Click 'Yes'
  • Target path should be Y:\SAIT\SAIT RFP\_Phase 4\course_folder_goes_here\_export\
  • This creates all necessary paths and files for creating the course. You should always create course from scratch to avoid any issues.

Step 1: Module Name

  • Course code [remove all spaces in text]
  • Use lesson name as ID [checked]

Step 2: Title

  • [None][None][Watched]
  • All boxes [unchecked]

Step 3: How To Use This Learning Tool

  • [Both][Self][On]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]
  • ID [use underscores wherever a space occurs]

Step 4: Learning Outcomes and Objectives

  • [Both][Threshold][Watched]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]
  • ID [use underscores wherever a space occurs]

Step 5: Introduction

  • [Both][Threshold][Watched]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]

Step 6: Objective

  • [Both][Threshold][Watched]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]

Step 7: Knowledge Check

  • Leave lesson type as [Lesson]
  • Navigate to With set to [Both]
  • Track Complete On [Self]
  • VCR State Control [Off]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]
  • ID [use underscores wherever a space occurs]

Step 8: Lesson

  • [Both][Threshold][Watched]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]
  • ID [use underscores wherever a space occurs]

Step 9: Final Note

  • [Both][Threshold][Watched]
  • Lock until complete [unchecked]
  • ID [use underscores wherever a space occurs]

Step 10: Publishing to ZIP

  • Now that you're done, the final step is to click the green arrow to the right of "Publish"
  • Select SCORM 1.2
  • Wait a few seconds for the file to publish and ZIP is created

Process to Change

  • In the course's folder paste files from Y:\SAIT\SAIT RFP\_BrainCore Files (excluding _bkup) this will make sure the course has the proper files required for SAIT's requirements.
  • Open the index.htm file in a text editor and change the course name to match.
  • Open course (structure.xml) in a text editor and edit each lesson to update the ID to reflect it's lesson name using the above format
  • Export the course as a scorm course, then open the ZIP using anything other then IZArc and delete index.html not index.htm
  • Now, still inside the ZIP file, rename index.htm to index.html
  • Add the films.swf and scorm.swf to the zip file
  • Upload the course to QA3, as a new course
  • The course will popup twice by default, just confirm the name on the base popup has the correct course name.
  • Launch each lesson and make sure there isn't 2 arrows pointing to 2 lessons that would indicate duplicate ID's. An error should be thrown at the start of the course if there are ID's with incorrect characters or spaces.

Additional functional requirements of future courses in this document created by the client. File:Subtopic Functional Guidelines.docx

Deployment Notes

The following must be in the FiLMS_ini.txt

<completion_percentage> <![CDATA[95]]> </completion_percentage> <courseCompleteMessageText> <![CDATA[]]> </courseCompleteMessageText> <useFrameBookmarkingOnCompleted> <![CDATA[true]]> </useFrameBookmarkingOnCompleted>

Finalizing Course - Proceed to Part 2

Additional Information and Assistance

  • This guide is used to assist developers using FiLMS Course Builder v3.45 / FiLMS v3.79.
  • Last updated: May 27th, 2013
  • This document is a work in progress -- as process and technologies may change at any moment. Should developer have further questions, do not hesitate to ask your project lead for assistance.
  • Thank you.