Working with Moodle

Yesterday myself and Seaghan structured a Moodle course for a client. This involved breaking down the programme given to us by the client into courses and modules, and then creating these. I also constructed a sample course populated with material that is often used on Moodle, such as content pages, files, discussion forums, and assignment handups. These will be shown to the client as a demonstration of what they can do with this particular VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). I also created several different types of users and enrolled them in the sample course with different access levels, for example a student user can only access the material without editing, whereas a teacher can add to the course with new documents and topics.
It was very useful to get experience of structuring the course from the beginning. Moodle is a very popular tool for educational institutes, and is effective in providing for the delivery of e-learning components.

Users I created

Beauty Therapy course modules

ePublishing with Narr8

Narr8 is a simple, stripped down ePublishing platform. Its features are much fewer than Inkling Habitat, and the interface involves drag-and-drop methods of content entry. This makes it simple to use for people who don't have knowledge of HTML and CSS. From what I can see, it's really useful for creating heavily graphical EPUB builds, for example comic books. This actually seems to be primarily what it's aimed at; indeed, the default font is a comic/handwritten-style font.

A simple page in Narr8.

Another page, before the animation begins.

The above page, after animation has been executed. A new background image and some article text appeared.

There are some limitations with this package. While the drag-and-drop mechanism is great in terms of being free to place content wherever you like, it doesn't allow the same level of control that using HTML and CSS would. You are also limited in the amount of ways you can style the text - there are about 10 preset templates, so if you want more, there doesn't seem to be a way to customise them. The animations either occur on entry to the page or on click by the user - there doesn't appear to be a way to set the animations to occur at a certain time. With the on-click method, there are no visual cues to the user to alert them to the fact that they should click something. However, there is a function to add audio, which may be a way to alert users to the possibility of clicking onscreen. 

This seems to be a really useful way to publish content electronically. However, for non-fiction, and for publications that aren't graphic-heavy, I think a platform like Inkling Habitat is much more suitable. Narr8 is an excellent beginner's tool and a great way to make your graphic content accessible to many.

From template to functioning site

Yesterday at 9:30, the website I had installed to our server for a Physiotherapy company looked like this:

And today, at 15:06, it looks like this:

Now it's certainly not completed, but I have created all the necessary pages, menus and modules, and all that's really left is to alter the CSS to make it look a bit nicer. I'm really proud of my work here. It's great to be able to install the template and make it into a functional website about something completely different.

*makes the 'achievement unlocked' noise* XD

Completing a project

We completed work on the OTB site yesterday. For this site, as I mentioned in a previous post, we were switching from one template to another. Many of the features in the new template weren't present in the old template, and vice versa, so that got quite confusing at times, but it just involved a lot of figuring out and a little bit of thinking outside the box (hahaha get it...?). Here is the finished site:

The frontpage slideshow was very unusual - there's a built-in slideshow in the VirtueMart Metro template, and to activate it, you have to create custom modules for all of the different images you want. In the custom module, you enter the text you want to appear as a caption, and you name the module after the image, eg. Module Name = slide-1.jpg. This was not in the documentation for the template - the publishers had a detailed set of instructions that were actually incorrect, so we had to experiment with it and eventually we figured it out. We had some other issues with the collapsible nature of the template; for some modules, the default setting is collapsed, meaning you can't see all of the content in that module until you click it. This is probably useful for some clients, but our client did not want that, as it obscured some important content. Unfortunately we haven't quite figured that out yet either so we're waiting on advice from the publishers. My guess is that we need to write some PHP for it (based on some information I found online) but I'm not sure as yet. We'll see!

Impress Pages CMS

We are currently working on prototypes for an online portfolio site for a client. These portfolios are for secondary school students to showcase their language ability and learning. I used Impress Pages CMS to create the prototype. This CMS is interesting because it uses drag-and-drop methods to place HTML and widgets on the page, so it is very easy to use for someone with no experience of web development. Therefore it will be easy for school students to use. The problem with this is that more normal HTML and CSS functionality is difficult to create for someone who does have experience of it. File paths are odd and it's difficult to find what you're looking for. 

I still don't know how to change the colourscheme of the template, which would be really useful for this project, as it would be nice to brighten it up to make it more interesting for the user. It has a lot of potential as a learning tool though and I'm looking forward to working with it more.

Storyline continued

I completed the project with Storyline yesterday, or at least completed the first render. I will most likely have to do some extra work on it. I created a presentation using one still image as the first slide, and a video as the second slide. This medium isn't great for still images; there is still a timeline in place, which means you have to wait til a button appears on the timeline before you can click it. So far I haven't figured out if you can just get the buttons to appear when you close the preceding dialogue box that has been triggered by the preceding button. This would be much more useful than the current waiting process.

It does work nicely for video though. The button appears where you place it in the video, corresponding to the place in the video where information is needed. It's definitely a very useful e-learning tool when used in the right context.

The only real problem with this software is the usablity; because it's a cross between Powerpoint and Flash, it combines the tediousness of Powerpoint with the frustration of Flash. It's not difficult, but it is laborious. The results are generally worth the effort though, and can be put to good use, so it is worth getting the head around.

Technical writing

I'm getting lots of excellent experience with technical writing. Often when I'm working on a site, there will be work that I have to pass on to another member of the team. I have to explain in writing exactly what I've done so far, how it works, what needs to be changed, how that works and what's needed. In many cases, I know what needs to be done but not how to do it, so it's important to specify very clearly the exact circumstances and all the factors affecting the issue. 

In some cases I have to email clients to explain what I've done, and what they need to do to maintain the site. Many of the clients don't have the technical experience that I have, so it's important to write clear instructions, without leaving out any steps that might seem obvious to somebody who is used to the technology. I think this is very good experience for me.

Articulate Storyline

Storyline is a piece of software that allows you to add informative text content to videos in a Powerpoint-style presentation. It is aimed primarily at e-learning practitioners, which was why Seaghan thought it would be a good fit for Digilogue. It's less complicated than Inkling so he thought it would be a good project for me to work on in the time frame that we have. The way it works is that you add graphics to the video and the user clicks these to receive information that you have also added. To create a presentation, it works like a cross between Flash and Powerpoint. You add triggers to graphics in order to hide layers or show layers, according to what you want to show your user. I'm working on a different machine today so I don't have my own screenshots, but I'll post them later.

It's definitely a very useful platform for e-learning; it's great to be able to click into a video for a more detailed overview of what you are learning, and I think it could be very useful to Digilogue's clients. The software can be finnicky in places though; for example, often when I added a new button and placed it farther along the timeline than its parent, the video clip I was working with moved along the timeline itself, which is very irritating when you're trying to place everything correctly, as often you don't immediately realise that it has moved, leading to some frustrating moments.

App testing, server administration, template modifications, oh my!

Digilogue have been part of the development of an online fantasy football/betting app. Last week, testing began for the app. This involved going into the app on various platforms and finding out what worked, what didn't, and reporting any errors via Mantis Bug Tracker. Each error had to be reported in order of priority and assigned to a member of the team to be fixed. I took screenshots of the errors and added a detailed description so that the errors could be fixed in a timely fashion.

Another project was the migration of a website from one Joomla template to another. This involved analysing all of the modules and module positions, finding out where content was in the original template, and moving it to the new template. This was quite confusing at times, as I had to continually publish and unpublish each template, and ensure that whichever template was live at that point in time had all of the necessary content. It was necessary to copy over some modules and place them in different positions, and to unpublish some content. It's quite difficult to explain but actually a pretty simply task. This is the site with the older template:

And the site with the new template:

This week I also did a lot of server administration. One of the sites on the server had a .htaccess file with bad content - the redirects were actually sending the user to pages that didn't exist, resulting in a 404 error. I had to find these and remove the offending links. I also had to administer Joomla core updates to several of the sites. This involved changing the permissions on these sites from 0755 to 0777 (Read, Write and Execute permissions given to all users), going in to the Joomla back end and administering the update, and then changing the permissions back for security reasons. This resulted in websites with the latest Joomla updates.

Working more independently

This week I've been lucky enough to create a website for a client almost entirely by myself. The client runs clinical trials in Ireland, and their website is in a question and answer format, allowing users to find all the information they need about clinical trials.

I chose an appropriate responsive Joomla template, installed this, and installed the standard components that Digilogue works with on all sites, such as Akeeba Backup, Admin Tools, and JCE Editor. Then, using content provided by the client, I edited images and added text content to the various different articles.

The way this site works, there are many articles on a page. You can see the title and the article's main image. You then click on the article and it is enlarged, showing the full text without the image.

I organised the menu architecture and the ordering of the articles, and took all the content from the existing blogger site as well as from a variety of PDFs. The site is almost completed; Aine is now fixing any of the issues I was unable to sort out. We had a great deal of trouble with the logo for the website - the template was not very flexible on size. The site should be finished by today though. Here is a screenshot of the work in progress:

I should have a screenshot of the completed site by the end of today, but I'll be working on other jobs for most of the day I think.

Update (08/08/2013):
Aine sorted out the background for the Clinical Trials website. Here is the screen shot: