Constructor Learning monthly update: August 2023

What's new with Constructor LMS?

Overview

• SCORM playback enhancement
• Restricting content access for authors
• Showing and hiding scores for objectives

SCORM playback enhancement

Instructors want to enhance the learning experience by enabling learners to navigate seamlessly through their shareable content object reference model (SCORM) courses. This functionality helps learners effortlessly retrace their steps through the course to find relevant information covered by the SCORM content.

To meet this need, we have introduced a new way of embedding SCORMs into courses. This is particularly useful for long readings, where learners can find SCORM-related information directly alongside the SCORM itself. Learners can choose to maximize the SCORM playback in full-screen mode, or minimize it to fit the text size in the long read.

However, it's important to note that not all SCORMs correctly save progress and state when maximized or minimized, nor do they support size changes. To solve this problem, we have added several compatibility settings for authors:

• Choice of SCORM playback size (full-screen, embedded, custom size)
• Support for maximizing/minimizing the SCORM playback
• Support for pausing or stopping the playback

This allows authors to select optimal settings and check how the SCORM behaves in the course they are creating.

Restricting content access for authors

There are many content development scenarios in which administrators or content authors prefer to limit access to the learning content items.

To help authors and groups of authors manage access to the learning content at a granular level, this release introduces the concept of teams. Now administrators and authors can create and manage teams, which are groups of content developers with specific access permissions.

Within a team, each member can be assigned one of the following access levels:

• Team Lead — At this access level, team leads have the authority to add new team members or remove existing ones. They also have full access to all content created by the team. This includes the ability to create, edit, delete, and utilize any content item created by any team member.
• Team Contributor — Team members with this level of access have the capability to create, edit and utilize content items that have been created by other team members.
• Team Reviewer — Team members with this level of access are only authorized to review (i.e. preview) content elements developed by other team members.

What's more, from now on, an author must be a member of a team working on specific pieces of content to have access to it. In this way, team leads can, for example, easily group authors into teams working on different courses, or manage freelance authors without revealing other parts of content that should be hidden from them.

Another team-related feature is the ability to transfer content created by one team to another.

Showing and hiding scores for objectives

In many learning scenarios, instructors prefer to have full control over when and how scores and grades are revealed to learners — whether immediately or with a delay.

In this release, we introduced additional configuration options for learner enrollments. These options allow administrators and instructors to define how they wish scores and grades to be revealed to learners:

• Never show — permanently hides scores and grades from learners.
• After completion — reveals scores and grades to learners immediately after an objective (course or program) has been completed and graded (automatically or manually).
• After the selected date — reveals scores and grades after the date defined by an administrator or instructor.