There have been so many changes to OLab3. And, as usual, the documentation is woefully behind.

So I am very grateful to some authors from our SharcTOOTH project who have spent many hours in updating and reorganizing the User Guide.

The official guide for v3.1 of OpenLabyrinth is available from

http://openlabyrinth.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/OpenLabyrinth-v3.1User-Guide.docx

This is always a work in progress – we aim to migrate it from its current state as a MS Word docx file to a wiki, using Atlassian Confluence. This will make it much easier to multiple authors to keep the guide updated, without worrying about version control etc.

While the guide is still being actively updated, the best place to grab the most recent (cluttered) version from is my Dropbox account:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3159431/openLabyrinth_UserGuide_v5m.docx

If anybody has expertise with Confluence and would like to help us migrate this behemoth of a document, I’d love to hear from them. Email us at

info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca

The dev team has created a whole bunch of small improvements in v3.1.1

These improvements are particularly useful for advanced developers and teams.

As usual with a new release, there are likely also some glitches, so if you are using OLab in a production environment where stability is paramount, we suggest that you stick to v3.1 for the moment.

For those who want it, v3.1.1 can be downloaded from Github at

https://github.com/olab/Open-Labyrinth/releases/tag/v3.1.1

The dev team have done a wonderful job in placing some safeguards that help prevent team members from overwriting each others’ work.

Increasingly, we find that great cases are a team effort. But not many virtual patient authoring platforms out there support team authoring. The collaborative touches that we mentioned in January have been improved.

But the big thing is that there is now a check-out mechanism in place. When one author starts editing in a case, other authors are prevented from working in conflicting areas. Some of the editing modules like the Visual Editor open the entire labyrinth at once. So, when such a tool is in use, many other dev tools are locked for that case by OLab.

But when an author is working with a tool that is more focused, such as the Node Editor, only that node in that case is locked. So two authors can be working in two separate areas of the case concurrently.

This is not completely bullet-proof. There is only so much that is feasible in a browser environment, given the funds that we have. But it generally works pretty well and has saved my bacon several times now over the past couple of weeks while we had a team working on some competition cases.

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.

OpenLabyrinth virtual patient cases are very powerful and allow the case authors to be very creative in terms of case complexity, variety, types of feedback and learner analysis.

But the cases always have the same look and feel… which gets a bit boring after a while.

We are pleased to announce that we are testing some very interesting new layout features that will allow authors to design cases and pages that look very different, and accept a whole new way of interacting with them.

The skin and display editors are still in late alpha/early beta mode. We’ll provide links to some example cases when they are ready.

In the meantime, if you are itching to explore this, give us a buzz.

The OpenLabyrinth team has been working for some time with the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) SharcFM group on creating virtual patient cases for a shared curriculum in family medicine across Canada.

SharcFM is a coordinated effort, involving all 17 medical schools in Canada, creating shared content and curricular materials for clinical clerks, that can be repurposed and easily adapted to the needs of any group.

For those who are interested in such shared materials, you can find some details here:

https://sites.google.com/site/sharcfm/sharc-fm-home

On December 7th, the University of Calgary Dept of Family Medicine secured some funding and is pleased to lead a collaborative initiative in further developing virtual patient cases for all of the core topics in SharcFM.

If you are interested in collaborating, please contact us:  info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca

We just released a significant new version of OpenLabyrinth today. Version 3.1 is a significant advance on v3.0.2 and has a number of new features.  We have been running 3.1 on our demo servers for several weeks now with no crashes. You can get version 3.1 from:

https://github.com/olab/Open-Labyrinth/releases/tag/v3.1

v3.1 brings quite a few new features:

• Scenarios: a way of grouping cases into a scheduled series of activities. (working towards integrating full scenario-based learning capabilities)
• Forums: an integrated discussion forum, both for use with Scenarios and for other case discussions.
• Rapid Reporting: for group use. You can generate rapid group comparisons of how various sections within a case were tackled. (Most useful when used along with Scenarios)
• OAuth authentication: now you can login using your Google, Facebook etc ID.
• Questions: several improvements to question types: sliders and drag/drop, as well as radio button/check box improvements.
• Free text input: within Questions. You can now include simple rules to process free text with MATCH() etc.
• Rules: several improvements from v3.0.2 about how conditional rules are parsed.

There are a few other fixes. As usual, the documentation is not as up to date but we’re working on it.

For serious use, it is best to have your tech guys set up an OpenLabyrinth server for you.

But many clinical teachers, who just want to try out the software and see what it does, do not have ready access to a tech team who will do this at a moment’s notice.

If you are a Mac user, it is not hard to set up your own OpenLabyrinth server that you can run on Mac OS X, at no cost at all. Download these instructions and simply follow the steps.

We do this using a free application called MAMP, which is also very easy to install.

The instructions show you how to install version 3.0.2 of OpenLabyrinth, our most stable version, which has all the main features of version 3.

For users on other operating systems, it is only a wee bit harder to get OpenLabyrinth running. For example, Windows users can use WAMP and Linux or Android users can use a standard LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) setup.

This wee server will be empty and have no cases that you can play with. We soon hope to provide you with an annoted list of OpenLabyrinth cases that you can download and import into your wee server.