An abstraction layer is a way of hiding complexities and maintaining cleanliness in your application. When integrating tracking support (SCORM, AICC, etc,) into an an e-learning course, it’s a good idea to abstract as much of the tracking code as possible. Here are some examples.
In 2008 I posted a quick writeup on how I dealt with cross-domain security issues for some of my e-learning courseware. Since then, I’ve had a lot of people contact me with various questions and for example files. Tonight I decided to revisit the topic and whip up some quick example files.
By popular demand, I’ve updated my CaptivateController to work with Adobe Captivate 5 (CP5). Since this is an open-source project, there’s no upgrade fee. (What? “Adobe” and “no upgrade fee” in the same paragraph?!) I kid, I kid… I’m a kidder.
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.
Introducing EasyCaptions: A simple system for adding captions and an interactive transcript to online videos. EasyCaptions uses progressive enhancement to provide the best possible experience for all visitors, regardless of their browser’s JavaScript, HTML5 or Flash support.
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.
It does exactly what is says: expand textareas. No more, no less.
