Author Archive
It’s amazing how much support labor is expended trying to find out what browser (and on what platform) a user is using.
Not to throw IE under the bus, but if the user is using IE6, that’s something the support team will want to know (and soon). Unfortunately, it is also something that doesn’t always surface immediately.
We do see users who, when encountering launch problems, do a little dance. First they try their phone, then their iPad, then their wife’s Android device, then that dusty old laptop in the corner with the annoying fan.
Then comes the report, “it worked once … I think on my wife’s phone”.
What we’ve discovered is that it’s better if the support team “just knows” the user’s user agent without having to ask. Even when they ask, the answer they get might be incorrect.
As such, with a nod of the hat to everyone who does the dirty work of coaching people on how to clear their browser cache, we are happy to add easy to use user agent tracking to bright.
This information is available straight from the Bright API. To use it, you’ll need to know your Bright realm guid and realm secret key. Don’t know yours? Ask us. You also need to know your Bright URL, it looks something like:
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2
Now you might want to know your learner’s email address. For this example, will use rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu.
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2/launch_history.json?realm_guid=[realm-guid]&realm_secret_key=[realm-secret-key]&learner_id=rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu
You can actually type that into your browser and get this user’s launch history out. Since you are using your secret key, don’t do this on an insecure computer and don’t do it over HTTP (use HTTPS).
Now what you’ll get out is fairly nice ….
Now what you really want is the JSON Formatter for Chrome 😉
If XML is more your speed, try a URL like this:
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2/launch_history.xml?realm_guid=[realm-guid]&realm_secret_key=[realm-secret-key]&learner_id=rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu
We’ve recently become aware of workaround for courses with IE10/11 where you touch the course window to move or resize and it locks into a smaller than full screen window.
After some additional testing by dominKnow support, the best options to use for the “launch parameters” will be the settings below. Please change the existing courses to this and then adjust your procedures for adding new courses.
In this Deloitte review on technology trends ….
“there appears to be a perfect storm of conditions that could make massively open online courses (MOOC)s a major factor by 2020.”
The section title is even “Massively Open Online Courses: not disruptive yet, but the future looks bright.” They said it, not us.
In the Aura lab we’ve been toying with visualizations; and this was just a little proof of concept we whipped up for a customer.
Each spoke of this wheel is a course, and the colors correlates to categories defined in the Bright metadata. Then the length of the bar is number of times the course has been completed, with the title around the outer edge.
Bright, you are about one year old.
How far have you gotten in a year?
– 5255 users registered.
– 349 course modules served
– 11720 individual trainings delivered.
After a long amount of foot dragging …. Bright now polls and stores xAPI/TinCan Statements. What is in all of this data? That remains to be seen; but for the moment, at least there’s a somewhat consistent structure to it.
In the past, we’d have to go spelunking into a course production tool’s activity storage format, which usually turned into some sort of bizarro XML-parsing exercise.
The first step of what is sure to be a long adventure.
Some brilliance going on here:
http://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/#http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aura-software.com%2Fblog
I fed it our blog and look what popped out:
Bad blogger; I’ve been distracted and not doing my blog-job!
So much has happened with Bright we barely have time to tell anyone about it.
So here’s something new, its the Bright API Doc-ed via github!
About Aura
A W E S O M E !!!! aaah, what a joy to work with professionals like you 🙂
– sebscm
Bright versus existing LMS
I love it and think it is a massive improvement! Much cleaner and streamlined that the current version of AA and CA.
– klee
Custom E-Learning Site Build
looks awesome! I like the functionality – simple but powerful. Thanks again, the site is awesome – really appreciate all your work on this!
– eks
Per the Dan Marsden blog:
I spent a lot of time discussing the opportunity to run a crowd-funded project to complete SCORM 2004 in Moodle but it’s hard to define a fixed figure that would allow us to complete the project and I wonder if such a large amount of my time could be spent on projects that are more current.
Full support for SCORM 2004 is already available in Moodle by using the Rustici SCORM cloud plugin for Moodle and I think it is more cost-effective to purchase a subscription to their hosted solution which is much more stable/reliable and feature rich than what we could provide directly in Moodle anyway.
