I’ve just released SLK 1.6 to Beta on the CodePlex site. This has actually been ready to go for a while, several months in fact, but I haven’t managed to find the time for documentation of the new functionality. I’ve now taken the decision to release it without the documentation so that people can at least start using it and feeding back any problems.
The main changes are:
- Better handling of not quite fully compliant SCORM content
- Textual grading as well as numeric (optional) e.g. ABC type grades
- Quick assignment type. That is assignments not based on a document. This should make it much easier to use for a homework diary, especially if the assignment is along the lines of "Read chapters 1 & 2 of book y."
- Email alerts. The most requested extra functionality.
I’ve just completed a couple of changes to SLK which although reported as bugs, were actually just rigidly enforcing the SCORM standard.
The first one was that you couldn’t have a question where the question text is greater than 250 characters long. The question text gets stored in cmi.interactions.n.description so that when reviewing the results the context of the answer can be seen. However in the SCORM standard this value is limited to 250 characters. I must admit that the error message, while quite descriptive if you know the SCORM standard, wasn’t very user friendly.
The second one was that you couldn’t submit quizzes with a large number of questions. The reason here is that the questions and answers get stored in the cmi.suspend_data which in SCORM 2004 2nd Edition is limited to 4000 characters. This was actually masked by a bug where if the length of the data was greater than this, the error was ignored and the same page just displayed again.
Strictly speaking both of these problems are actually errors in the SCORM packages themselves as they are passing values which do not conform to the standards. There’s even threads in the Articulate forums about it.
Normally, I’d be dead set against violating standards, however in these particular cases they are getting in the way of usability. So in these 2 specific cases I decided to relax the requirements and allow more data to be stored. Later versions of the SCORM standard do this for suspend_data anyway.
So in SLK 1.6, these restrictions have been relaxed.
I’ve just uploaded the SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 source code to CodePlex. I’ve been waiting until I had an automated build process to handle the releases for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007, which is now present.
You can download it from http://slk.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets.
