At the annual Medbiquitous Conference in Baltimore, OpenLabyrinth provided the underpinnings for a workshop demonstrating the capabilities of the Experience API (xAPI).

 Using a simple Arduino computer, the team of Ellen Meiselman, Corey Albersworth, David Topps and Corey Wirun were able to track the stress levels of workshop participants as they played a very challenging series of OpenLabyrinth mini-cases. Sensors on the Arduino continuously measured heart rate and galvanic skin response which, even on these cheap ($30) kits, were easily sensitive enough to detect subtle changes in stress levels.

We intentionally set a very tight set of timers on the case series so that participants were increasingly pushed to make very rapid decisions. The data from the sensors were collected in our GrassBlade LRS, along with xAPI statements from our OpenLabyrinth cases.

Seeing such simple technology providing quite sophisticated tracking of learner stress levels prompted a lot of vigorous discussion in the workshop on how such activity metrics can be used in other ways.

We really appreciate the collaboration and help we received from the xAPI community in pulling this workshop together. We had naively thought that, since both Arduino and xAPI are simple to work with, this would be a nice quick effort. Corey A ran into a lot of tiny but time consuming quirks and put in many hours in getting this all to work smoothly.

We especially want to acknowledge the detailed help we received from Pankaj Agrawal (GrassBlade LRS) and Andrew Downes (Watershed LRS) for their patience and troubleshooting. For some parts of the project, we had some quite sophisticated statement pulls from GrassBlade to Watershed, due to the collaboration of these folks. It really showed us how much more you can achieve by blending the capabilities of these various devices and platforms,  using xAPI.

Our work with activity metrics and the Experience API (xAPI) continues apace with the OpenLabyrinth platform. We have been able to integrate xAPI statements into our CURIOS video mashup tool.

Now when you insert a video mashup into one of our OpenLabyrinth cases, you can track how your users are using your videos, which bits they watch and replay again.

This will dovetail nicely with some of the xAPI features that we can now access with the H5P widgets. It will also allow us to track activities across a widening range of educational activities.

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.

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.

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:

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.