At the end of every case, registered users can have the option to get a detailed feedback report on how they did on the case. But while some of the analytics available were quite powerful, they were not very accessible.

We have been working on improving the Session Reports. On the testbed server at http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca we now have some initial improvements in place. Plus, you can now export this Session Report to Excel for further analysis.

It is now easier for case authors to embed much more sophisticated feedback about your performance. More information on this will shortly be available in the improved User Guide.

If you have particular requests on what you would like to see in these Session Reports or other ways in which to improve them, now is a good time to tell us. info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca

From the last post, you will have seen that anyone can get a case going in OpenLabyrinth. But for more extensive projects involving many cases, it is best to get a team going. A mix of skills and activities often makes for a more productive setup.

Coming soon to OLab3 is a set of enhancements that will make collaborative authoring more feasible. Look for things like hidden node comments (visible only to authors), object annotations, integrated messaging, workflow management (at a simple level).

For example, just finding useful images from the web to illustrate the finer points of your case can be incredibly time consuming. Do you want to burn hours of your skilled clinical authors’ time on this when they can better focus on crafting good case narratives? Our new markup and annotation tools will make it easier to ensure that images are properly attributed and licensed, before publication.

I had a very pleasant surprise today. I just received an email from a medical student at Harvard. She had installed her own OpenLabyrinth server on her Mac, and used it to create her own case from scratch with no outside help.

She was asking for a way to able to publish this for her colleagues. I was delighted to give her an account on our demo server so that she can make this widely available.

But for me, it was a lovely testimony that we are approaching the point where anyone can do this. Now, I admit that setting up your own OpenLabyrinth server is still not as straightforwards as we would like, but you no longer have to be some high powered sysadmin to do so.

Keep the feedback and ideas coming. This platform is gaining strength through your wonderful collaboration.