Monthly Archives: April 2016

OpenLabyrinth v3.4 released

Delighted to announce that we released v3.4 of OpenLabyrinth today.

Lots and lots of changes in this one… maybe too many… we are considering putting out a v3.3.3 which had fewer changes.

Those who have been following this blog will be familiar with what we have been working on. We’ll put out a more detailed list of changes on the forum soon. The main things are as follows:

xAPI reporting to a LRS
H5P widget integration (https://h5p.org/)
Turk Talk for chat style small group communications
Improved LTI stability

For the latest release, server administrators can pull this from Github. For the rest of us, we always run the latest version of the software on our demo server so if you want to try these things out, contact us for a free trial account.

Activity metrics at Medbiquitous conference

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It’s conference season indeed, around here. The Medbiq Annual Conference is coming up again soon in Baltimore, May 15-17, 2016.

Following on from previous years, activity streams and learning analytics will again feature prominently. OpenLabyrinth will be heavily used in a workshop we are holding about the Experience API (xAPI), along with some interesting widgets and gadgets to track/stress your learners.

This will make a nice extension on some of the other work we have recently presented about big data principles, applied to educational metrics, at the Ottawa Conference and CCME over the past month.

Come and play – we’ll make you sweat!

OpenLabyrinth at CCME

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The Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME) starts tomorrow in Montreal, QC.

This annual gathering brings together medical educators from around the world, discussing a wide range of topics and research interests.

OpenLabyrinth features in several presentations, workshops and posters at this conference. If you are there, chat to us more about this educational research platform. Since OpenLabyrinth is free and open-source, we don’t have the funds to have a fancy exhibitor booth. Plus, we are not selling anything.

But we are always interested in talking to groups who are interested in educational research and who want to explore what can be done with activity metrics, branched pathways, embedded video or facilitated small group scenarios.

OpenLabyrinth’s timings tighten up

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We are pleased to announce an interesting new development on our OpenLabyrinth test site. We are experimenting with timestamps that have millisecond accuracy – this opens up this tool to a whole bunch of new research areas.

For example, you can now start looking at reaction times or which player was first to the buzzer in competitive team scenarios. Lots more fun stuff.

Previously, in OpenLabyrinth, all of our participants’ activities when playing a case were recorded into its database but the timestamps for each activity point were only recorded to the nearest second. For most purposes, this is just fine.

But now we are able to track these same activity points much more accurately. The internal database will now record timestamps in microseconds. Now, for anyone who works with such research, it will be clear that you also have to take into account the tiny fractions of a second between an activity and the time it is stored, including the processing time in between. There are established techniques for accommodating these timing offsets.

So, if you have an interest in taking advantage of this greater timing accuracy in one of your projects, please contact us.

Turk Talk improvements in OpenLabyrinth

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Today we released a new improved format for our powerful Turk Talk function in OpenLabyrinth. Many small tweaks have made this much more user friendly.

Check out the addendum to the User Guide which explains in better detail how to use this new functionality. Here is what the Turker now sees when guiding up to 8 learners simultaneously:

OLab Turker Chat panel

This is just a glimpse. The instruction notes show this much more clearly, but you can see 5 users waiting (pink columns) for the Turker to respond. The Turker can see where they are in the case, and who has been waiting longest.