TCS Instructional Design

This one will be short and sweet. I write this post intentionally on the eve of our unveiling of the new TCS websites (next week, yea!). First of all, I want to credit Mark for passing along some javascript code about three months ago. If this page does not change within a few seconds, please click here Of course, you would change YOURURL.html with the link to the page where you want the student directed. That code as written will show your url within the window in eCollege. Quick note, if you want the target page to open up in a new window (instead of within the eCollege frame), change target="_self" to target="_blank". If you want it to open in the same browser window, but in a new tab, use target="_new". Unfortunately, this code is now deprecated. This means that the page will not pass W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict validation,  *yawn*   but that is not really important to us. Again, kudos to Mark for the javascript, but I am going to show yo...

For those of you who are interested in exporting Captivate 5 SWFs for use in Articulate Presenter, there is an interesting dilemma preventing us from importing Flash Movies. We will address a workaround for the dilemma in this blog post. My hope is that this issue will become irrelevant as Articulate upgrades their standards, but for the moment it seems as though Articulate only recognizes Flash Movies written in ActionScript 2. The current design standard is ActionScript 3. ActionScript is essentially the code used to define the various flash components in the SWF. It was originally developed by Macromedia, but now Adobe owns it. For those of you who are still using Captivate 4, the solution is actually fairly simple. When you publish your SWF file in Captivate, make sure that the settings are set to publish using AS2 (ActionScript 2). To import it, simply click on Flash Movie (in the Insert group of the Articulate ribbon) and locate your SWF file. The Captivate 5 users wil...

Okay team, by now you should have an idea of the functionality of html. Html is code that allows you to write in a language that web browsers can read. You use the html tags to define certain elements on the page such as: <h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>This is a paragraph.</p> But there is a main problem with using html. It is not useful for defining large quantities of elements on a page. A very relevant example is that some designer prefer the font in eCollege to be size 3. In order to do this, you highlight everything and select "3" from the font dropdox in the visual editor. The result is a whole lot of <font> tags throughout the page. But what if you could say once and for all "I want all the font to be size 3 unless I specify otherwise (and quit making my code all cluttery!!!)". Come to think of it, who is it that decided the "default font size anyway?? The font, it turns out, is defined either by 1. the browse...

Hey -- check out this article from from Inside Higher Ed called The Thinking LMS (this is the same site Gia pointed us to for the Blackboard/eCollege comparison ). Basically, the University of Phoenix wants to build an LMS that will automatically present course content in the modality that best suits each learner... kind of like how Amazon, Netflix and iTunes can predict what we like to read, watch and listen to. That's a pretty provocative idea, given our current model of "the course is the course" which basically hopes that one size does fit all. How many of us have had a conversation with a TCS SME about building in some flexibility for different students' learning preferences? While the idea of "learning style" has become pretty cliché in our field by now, there's of course a lot of truth to it, and I'd encourage us to bring up the idea with our more engaged SMEs... even if it's just to gauge their understanding of the concept and h...