Short posts containing helpful code snippets and general advice.
If you spend any time using Captivate to create SCORM-conformant courses, you’re bound to have run into an issue or two that caused you to read some Captivate forum posts. Almost without fail, someone will mention that the solution to their problem was changing the value of the magical g_intAPIType JavaScript variable from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1.
So what the heck is g_intAPIType, and why does changing it make a difference?
What happens if the browser window containing your course is closed by the learner before the course finishes sending data to the LMS? If you’re not careful about how you’ve coded your course, you can lose some of the data.
A number of people have recently asked me about the scorm.save() function in the pipwerks SCORM wrappers. What is it, and when should it be used?
Two simple functions for comparing and cloning JavaScript objects without requiring a framework like jQuery.
Someone recently asked me if it was possible to customize Captivate’s SCORM template to reduce the need for manual editing after publishing. In her case, the manifest needed to be edited to include SumTotal TotalLMS’s custom SCORM extensions. The answer is yes. Here’s how.
Most browsers do not allow images to be cropped using CSS3’s border-radius. Tim Van Damme recently posted a workaround for this issue. Here’s a MooTools script that automates Tim’s workaround yet degrades gracefully when JavaScript is disabled.
Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, refuse to support the MP4/H.264 standard because it isn’t open-source and free from licensing constraints. Without Ogg, Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless and requires a Flash-based fallback system. However, Firefox’s handling of the video element breaks the fallback mechanism. A scripted solution is required.
Here’s a simple script that will detect whether HTML 5 video is supported in the browser, and if it is, will check to see if this is Firefox. If yes, it deletes the specified video element but leaves the Flash fallback in its place.
As a Mac user, one of the more annoying issues I frequently encounter is funky PDF handling in Firefox and Safari. Here are some things you can do to get PDFs working in your browser(s).
Tired of Moodle? Former Dokeos developers have forked Dokeos’ open-source code and used it to create a new LMS named Chamilo. It’s basically Dokeos under-the-hood, but with newer features and a new direction.
There’s a big difference between best practices in terms of learning theory — something that’s difficult to quantify and/or prove — and technology.
