We want a LMS(coded in ASP.NET/vb.net) which is able to import SCORM packages & display it to learner for viewing content. I am totally new to SCORM and have been shifted to this project. I want to know how can I access SCORM Assessment object's (Test) result, like Learner ID, passed/fail, time.
Can you please guide me what will I need to implement in ASP.NET code to accomplish my goal ?
Task that I have done so far is,
Reading a manifest zip file, unzipping the file and get all information from the file(content name,description,items and launching page) and when user clicks on a particular course a pop up window is launching the page.
I eagerly want to know what I can do next to communicate with the LMS with the APIs. Shall I need to develop my own LMS to get the result,If there is a quiz which is running, all I need to know is the no of questions attempted by the user, whether the user is pass or fail and I need to store all information in the database for individual user so that I can review the result afterwards.
So the task remaining.
Tracking mechanism to deliver the content.
SCORM/LMS sequencing engine that controls the navigation between parts of SCORM conformant course.
Please help.
SLK at codeplex provides a good starting point. However, if you are truly wanting to provide an in-house written SCORM play that is fully compliant, you have a major task ahead of you. In essence there are three party you need to fully develop:
CAM - the unzipping process, which it sounds like you have already achieved.
RTE - the javascript host for SCORM, providing the 8 specified methods. Behind this you also need to implement the SCORM object model, which SLC does help with. If you have implemented all of this, then there should be data entries on the data model that indicate completion etc.
SN - the sequencing and navigation processing. This is significantly the most complex part. I am still in the process of trying to implement this, using SLC, and it is hard. It is the completion of this that will potentially give you more information that will enable you to know what has been done.
it is also worth looking at scorm.com, who are a consultancy, but provide a lot of useful information about the scorm standard.
That is true. SCORM is one of these stadarts where you can implement as little as possible. But you will need some of Javascript with a Backend-Script (JSON to the rescue) so you can track the scorm data, and save it your database.
But let me tell you this: This is the easiest task! Making your own course-creator is a whole other beast.
Related
I am coding an LMS. Backend and UI is almost ready. Our first intention was to code our own content studio but using existing studios are way quicker. We want to use rise and rise gives the following exports:
This is a github repo of xapi and scorm 2004 exports. As you can see, index.html (scormcontent/index.html in scorm2004) is working perfectly. UI is intact and it is saving progression value internally.
My question is how can I get that data and save it to my own database (I know how to use a database, I just cant get the data stream from scorm).
After I save those values to my database, I also need to insert them back into the scorm or xapi when the user opens website.
If you guys can just show me how to retrieve that data, I can do everything from there. I read something about an endpoint??
Note: Functions at the bottom of index.html such as finishQuiz() are not working, at least I couldnt make them work.
Another Note: I really don't want iframe please
See my answer to Get the scorm values from the LMS
SCORM is a set of standards defining not only APIs for communication but also structures for packaging learning content. You will need to implement one of the SCORM APIs (SCORM 1.2 is probably easiest if you want to support most authoring tools and don't need any of the advanced sequencing features of SCORM 2004) or xAPI.
If you are going to implement xAPI you will want to look into how to implement it as an "LRS" (i.e. the server that consumes xAPI data from a learning activity) as xAPI doesn't normally refer to LMSes. Since you will also want to serve the content rather than just consume the data they generate, you might want to opt to implement cmi5, which builds on xAPI to also define a packaging format to replace SCORM.
I've a couple training courses that I sometimes provide to clients. They are both a few text pages + 20-25 videos + a link out to take an exam in my LMS.
My preference has always been to provide embed links to the videos, as it allows us to easily push out updates. Then the client embeds that in their own LMS / training package (however they want). But two clients are requesting the courses are delivered in a SCORM package to be delivered on their LMS.
I'm familiar with the authoring tools like Captivate and Storyline Articulate. I'm not a huge fan as they feel like canned powerpoints. I'm also not sure that's what the client wants.
Two questions:
(1) My understanding is I can package a SCORM file manually. How does that content present itself when put into an LMS? Would it present slide-by-slide in a single panel (similar to how I see storyline work) or is it distributed based on how the LMS is set-up?
(2) Would doing it manually be advantageous in any way?
Couple things to watch out for -
Simply zipping your content folder with a imsmanifest.xml maybe not put the files in the root of the zip like the LMS may possibly expect. Instead you end up with folder/imsmanifest.xml vs /imsmanifest.xml. Something to watch out for, but some LMS's do not care.
You can manually edit the imsmanifest.xml, but I'd work to validate it. Performing this task in editors that do not provide feedback can lead to validation issues.
Content Packaging is part of it, but the LMS may have its own subset of additional options like how to launch the content (popup, new window/tab, or in a IFRAME). They may have additional scoring/attempts and other settings outside of what the SCORM CAM provides.
Aside from familiarizing yourself with the IMS Manifest format and the above cautionary items you can do do this without to many hiccups.
There is a packager on https://cybercussion.com if you'd like to demo that after you have prepared your Shareable Content Object.
GL
I've read some topics about GraphQL, and one of the great features I like is you can specify fields you want (Client End).
I'm thinking maybe I can also add it into REST API. I look around and find there has already such specification: fetching-sparse-fieldsets
So I'm trying to add such feature in Symfony. (Especially, in FOSRestBundle+JSMSerializer).
But I'm not quite sure whether it is valuable or not. Can someone give you advice?
That is a question you should ask to your API users and your customer. It might be useful for the API user, but it has a lot of downsides:
By building it yourself, you spend a lot of time by developing, testing and maintaining this 'optional' feature. Is the customer willing to pay? (YAGNI)
As mentioned above, you must maintain the code for this feature, you cannot remove it unless you decide to release a new API version. As external packages change, your code might require an update aswell.
It can become difficult when troubleshooting. API users might be trying to retrieve a field that isn't specified in the API URL (ofcourse these issues arise after project transfers to other developers). Questions can come up why some data isn't available, but is present in API documentation.
Especially the first one in the list is incredibly important. Don't build features that the customer does not need. Personally I always return all accessible data available, even null values. The API users decide what to do with that data. Bandwidth isn't such a problem these days I guess.
I'm curious about website scraping (i.e. how it's done etc..), specifically that I'd like to write a script to perform the task for the site Hype Machine.
I'm actually a Software Engineering Undergraduate (4th year) however we don't really cover any web programming so my understanding of Javascript/RESTFul API/All things Web are pretty limited as we're mainly focused around theory and client side applications.
Any help or directions greatly appreciated.
The first thing to look for is whether the site already offers some sort of structured data, or if you need to parse through the HTML yourself. Looks like there is an RSS feed of latest songs. If that's what you're looking for, it would be good to start there.
You can use a scripting language to download the feed and parse it. I use python, but you could pick a different scripting language if you like. Here's some docs on how you might download a url in python and parse XML in python.
Another thing to be conscious of when you write a program that downloads a site or RSS feed is how often your scraping script runs. If you have it run constantly so that you'll get the new data the second it becomes available, you'll put a lot of load on the site, and there's a good chance they'll block you. Try not to run your script more often than you need to.
You may want to check the following books:
"Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL"
http://www.amazon.com/Webbots-Spiders-Screen-Scrapers-Developing/dp/1593271204
"HTTP Programming Recipes for C# Bots"
http://www.amazon.com/HTTP-Programming-Recipes-C-Bots/dp/0977320677
"HTTP Programming Recipes for Java Bots"
http://www.amazon.com/HTTP-Programming-Recipes-Java-Bots/dp/0977320669
I believe that the most important thing you must analyze is which kind of information do you want to extract. If you want to extract entire websites like google does probably your best option is to analyze tools like nutch from Apache.org or flaptor solution http://ww.hounder.org If you need to extract particular areas on unstructured data documents - websites, docs, pdf - probably you can extend nutch plugins to fit particular needs. nutch.apache.org
On the other hand if you need to extract particular text or clipping areas of a website where you set rules using DOM of the page probably what you need to check is more related to tools like mozenda.com. with those tools you will be able to set up extraction rules in order to scrap particular information on a website. You must take into consideration that any change on a webpage will give you an error on your robot.
Finally, If you are planning to develop a website using information sources you could purchase information from companies such as spinn3r.com were they sell particular niches of information ready to be consume. You will be able to save lots of money on infrastructure.
hope it helps!.
sebastian.
Python has the feedparser module, located at feedparser.org that actually handles RSS in its various flavours and ATOM in its various flavours. No reason to reinvent the wheel.
I am working on a design spec for a new application that will be heavily workflow driven.
Before I re-invent the wheel, is there a decent lightweight workflow engine that plugs into ASP.NET already around?
Basically, I'm looking for something that handles moving through a defined set of workflow pages while handling state management automatically.
If this isn't around already, I'll definitely try to abstract the engine from my app and put it on codeplex, as it would be really handy.
Any suggestions?
Note: .NET 2.0, so no WWF, though I think WWF is overkill for my needs.
EDIT: Seems like there is a legitimate need for this, and there isn't a product out there...So I might build this.
Here is what I'm picturing:
Custom Page class called WebFlowPage
All WebFlowPage's are registered in a Workflow mapper.
Each WebFlowPage has some form of state object.
A HttpHandler handles picking the appropriate WebFlowPage based upon the workflow, and populating it from the state object.
Is the workflow dynamic, or static?
If the workflows are simple, you could roll your own workflow engine.
In certain situations, it can be fairly simple, and just a couple of data tables to handle the rules, processing and state.
Alot of workflow engines are built for large scale processing (credit card applications, for example). For small scale, you should at least consider your own, which would eliminate the overhead and dependency of/on an engine.
Not sure exactly what you wish to do here, but Ra-Ajax can easily keep state at least if you want your solution ajaxified...
For reference purposes you might want to check out the Ajax Calendar sample or even the (banalistically implemented) Ajax Wizard sample. It surely beats the hell out of doing it with JavaScript...
And every time you "do something" you're in "server-land" which means you can store temporaries all the time as you wish...
The project is LGPL
(PS!
Yes I do work with it)
Building a custom workflow engine is not trivial, although it may seem simple at first. We've tried that. It depends a lot on the complexity of the logic you need it to cover.
Given the current state of the Windows Workflow Foundation and the lack of another framework that abstracts the workflow concepts, I would choose WF if you need complex logic, asynchronous handling or branches in your workflows.
Tracking your state through the workflow can be accomplished by carrying some kind of xml payload or storing the state in a database,
If your workflow is actually a sequential set of forms that need to be filled in by the user, tracking the steps and guiding the user to the next step can be accomplished with some simple custom solution.
You could take a look at the InRule engine too.
Also, there is nxBRE.
These too are mostly used for business rules.
InRule is proprietary, whereas nxBRE supports RuleML (the defacto standard).
You might need to make your own implementation for the pages, and use the rule engine as the "structure".
At this moment, I know that Sharepoint 2007 supports page workflows (using WF), but this would imply using .NET Framework 3 and deployng sharepoint.
My suggestion would be to use whatever you find more light and easier to use.
I think the term "workflow" is very open to interpretation. I have been working lately with a type of workflow that is very different from what you seem to be describing. Mine is a state machine based workflow where the state of a particular record determines what actions a user can take to move the record to the next step in the business process. So "workflow" in this instance means how the record flows from one state to another until it is finally completed.
Your usage of workflow seems to have more to do with moving a user from one page to another in a linear multi-step process, which is a completely different use case (correct me if I'm wrong). So before coming up with a general purpose "workflow" engine that anyone could use, I would recommend defining a little bit better exactly what types of situations this system would handle.
I've been using this for a few months http://objectflow.codeplex.com. Not asp specific but it may fit your needs
While browsing the web for some workflow & BPM resources, I found the following project: NetBPM. Unfortunately, the project seems to be stopped.
I don't think there is a workflow engine that will automatically handle state for you, but if you are moving through a set of pages like a process such as checkout on an ecommerce site, perhaps the ASP.NET wizard control could help you?
There are few workflow options. "Aspose" and "Skelta" are the offers I´m evaluating.
Fábio
you can use WorkFlow Engine, just read the document and run the Demo.
all of the features you need for a dynamic workflow engine they added in there.