One of the more interesting features that has been designed into the new Visual Editor for OLab3 is the ability to work with predefined sets of nodes. 

We have created a short podcast which gives you some idea on how to do this. Check it out at:

You can select set of nodes from a case, copy them to your clipboard and then paste them in elsewhere. You can also do this between cases. This really opens things up in rapid case design. If you have a useful set of nodes that present some common choices in a case, you can reuse them. 

Thinking along these lines, we have been creating a few generic set of nodes, which we call snippets, that can be copied into your case, thereby speeding up authoring. 

The other useful feature that we now have in the new Visual Editor is the ability to insert predefined sets of blank nodes, called templates, set up in common node patterns. Over the past year, we have been making great use of a node pattern called a dandelion to present better options to players. But dandelions are a bit of a pain to code by hand. The new Visual Editor allows you to drop predefined dandelions into your case. 

Want to find some great examples of what you can do with OpenLabyrinth v3?

We will have a list of exemplar cases posted on the main web site at http://openlabyrinth.ca/ shortly before we launch version 3. Watch this space.

The list initially will be a simple list of cases and descriptions. But we are also working on a neat feature where this list will be automatically updated with rich metadata, generated from the cases themselves. 

More on this soon… we are quite excited about this. 

We are really pleased with how things are coming along with the new Visual Editor for OpenLabyrinth v3. The code is not yet released to the public but for those of you who have an account on our demo/test server at http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/, you can get a taste of it now. 

We have created a really simple podcast about how to use the basic functions of the Visual Editor. You can catch it here on YouTube:

No finesse to this podcast, I’m afraid. We’ll do up a fancier one when the features etc in the Visual Editor have stabilized. For now, it is changing and improving day by day. 

We now have a full service production box running OpenLabyrinth virtual patient cases.

Lots of example cases to try. Stable code version on a fast server.

We will be releasing the URL for this server shortly before our version 3 launch on April 21st.

So, what’s the fuss about this production server?

Well, for anyone who is keen to set up their own OpenLabyrinth server, the code is open-source and posted on Github as it is developed. But for most people who want to try out some cases, they are not interested in setting up their own server first. 

So we established a development machine, running the latest code, at http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca 

But the problem with that is… it is running the latest code – which is great to see where new developments are headed but not so good for groups who want to have cases that are not affected by the latest tweak by the development team. 

We ran into this in January when we placed some student cases on our development box. These cases were being judged in a competition (more on this shortly) but a new tweak to the OpenLabyrinth code made the cases look weird. We had to roll back the new code to get the cases back to a presentable condition. 

As those in the development field well know, you don’t host important cases or production level cases on a development box. At the time we had no choice because the production box installation had been delayed. Well, now our production box is up and running, with all those cases moved over seamlessly. 

The production server is primarily for our projects here at the University of Calgary. We can also host small series of cases for other groups. Note that this is done as a “favor between friends.” There is no fee, and reciprocally no guarantee of service. The server has been very stable, is backed up, running in a properly maintained server room etc. But we don’t want to set up false expectations that we are running a full hosting service here. 

There is consideration of running a full hosting service. If you are interested in something like this, do contact us via info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca

Coming soon! Public launch of OpenLabyrinth v3 – we will be showing off what it can do at CCME in Quebec on April 21st.

Watch this space over the coming days for more news.

CCME is the Canadian Conference on Medical Education, hosted by AFMC, this year in Quebec City. 

We are happy, happy, happy with the new Visual Editor interface for OpenLabyrinth v3. If you have author access, check it out at http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/

Building on the style of concept mapping provided by Tuft’s VUE editor, we have rebuilt the Visual Editor from the ground up. Some of you may have tried it in OLab v2 and found it lacking. Rachel did a great job of coding that but ran into the many limitations of Flash. 

The new Visual Editor in OLab3 is flash-free. It is also more reliable, autosaves your changes, works quickly even with very large maps (how about 550 nodes, 700 links!). 

We are still tweaking and refining the interface but it is now pretty stable. It also provides some simple templates for pre-defined segments, including customizable dandelions. What the heck’s a dandelion? These are multiple node question structures – the term makes much more sense when you are in the Visual Editor. 

Previously, we used Tuft’s VUE concept mapper to create our cases. This is a nice easy tool but the process of converting a concept map to an OLab case was quirky to put it mildly. Now, the transition is seamless. Text formatting is a breeze. You can now create very complex, highly branched cases. 

If you are interested in giving OLab v3 a whirl, contact us via info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca

One of much improved areas we have been noticing in the past month is the much improved editing available in OpenLabyrinth version 3. 

http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca

Previously with OpenLabyrinth v2, this was a bit of a pain. While the OLab2 VP engine is enormously powerful, allowing the creation of really complex, multiply-branched cases, the actual editing of the case was quirky at best. 

It had the odd tendency to get single and double quotes mixed up, introduce other odd characters and was generally a bit of a pig. Plus you had to follow a very specific order in which to edit things. And if you needed to do some direct editing of the underlying HTML code (always a bit of a dark art for the average clinician anyway), OLab2 would catch you out with weird corruption of code. 

We’re happy to say that those days are past. With OLab3, you can edit your content in a number of different ways, and these different approaches don’t fight with each other. 

This has made an enormous difference to our case writing productivity, which is great with the large amount of case material we have to put together this month. 

Check out the new interface for OpenLabyrinth v3. 

Many thanks to Matt Simpson, Janet Corral and Lazaros Ioannidis for their combined efforts on this. 

If you only have general public access to the server at http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca, you may not see much change. But for those with author access, you will see a much improved UI. 

Matt and colleagues based this new interface on new design frameworks, notably Twitter Bootstrap. It is now much easier to scoot around and rapidly edit and refine our cases. 

If you have thoughts on how this can be further improved or would like to get involved with the project, contact us at info AT openlabyrinth DOT ca