The WAVES Project group had its first meeting in London over the past couple of days. More info will gradually be released on the project web site.

OpenLabyrinth will be extensively used in creating and supporting virtual scenarios for this project. And what the heck are virtual scenarios, I hear you ask? Scenarios in this context relate to the work of Ruth Colvin Clark in her book, Scenario-Based eLearning.

We have found this book to be very useful in our Scenario Based Learning Designs. Scenarios are basically groups of learning activities, put together so that you make best use of the resources available. We use the concept of Scenarios within OpenLabyrinth as a way to group together virtual patient cases (in a logically connected series if necessary), groups of learners, reports, counters, rules etc so that the Scenario Designer can take things way beyond a single simple case.

WAVES is coordinated by St George’s University, London, who are long time experts in OpenLabyrinth. This is a huge project involving health professional schools from many countries in Europe.

We are excited that the group is keen to explore the use of xAPI as a means of tracking activity metrics, and is also keen to work with Medbiquitous on forging common practices and Profiles around xAPI and Scenarios.

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.

On Wednesday afternoon, we will have a small local workshop on learning about clinical procedures.

This workshop will feature the CURIOS video mashup tool heavily and also some other functions in OpenLabyrinth that we can use for learning about clinical procedures. You can find a short one-page synopsis of the session, along with a bunch of links and resources here.

The course itself is led by Rachel Ellaway, our Director of OHMES, and renowned author on medical education. Rachel was closely involved in our PocketSnips project at NOSM, which led to many of the innovations and discoveries that inform this workshop. Many of the videos from that project can now be viewed on our Clinisnips channel on YouTube.

I was delighted today to come across some virtual patient cases on our demo OpenLabyrinth server, written in Slovak – a couple of nice cases created by Eva Kvaltinyova. The multinational, multilingual nature of OpenLabyrinth continues to be robust.

I previously created a multilingual case before at ‘Multilingual cases…‘ – but it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, if you’ll pardon the pun. However, it does show that OpenLabyrinth can support most languages on its pages.

Now, anybody interested in helping us with a multilingual interface. We did put the basics of internationalization into the core code, but have not had time to flesh this out. Any takers?

We have written before about how to find good OpenLabyrinth case materials. Indeed, some groups have created some pretty sophisticated methods to enable such discovery.

For example, see the ‘Semantic Indexing’ post, featuring the work of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki.

But how do most of us search for stuff? Google of course! One simple tip for finding relevant OpenLabyrinth cases is to simply include the word “openlabyrinth+” in your Google search e.g.

openlabyrinth+ chest pain

Adding the “+” sign emphasizes to Google that you really only want hits that include “openlabyrinth”. Because many OpenLabyrinth server admins have left their virtual patient servers open to the search robots, you will get lots of additional case examples that way. I had forgotten about this simple technique and spent a nerdy hour tonight just wandering around some of the stuff that Google dug up.

As well as finding URLs for dozens of active OpenLabyrinth servers around the world that I was not previously aware of, I also found this great YouTube video from Dr Robert Larson at Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

He gives a lovely description of how they are using OpenLabyrinth as a teaching tool. We note that they are using quite an old version of OpenLabyrinth but it’s good to see what you can still do with it.

A year ago, the Supreme Court of Canada over-ruled a ban on assisted suicide or physician assisted death. They gave the federal government a year to create new legislation. So today would have been the deadline.

This opened up a huge debate but it has been good to see that generally, the debate has remained reasoned, on both sides, with many complex viewpoints brought to light.

On 21 Jan 2016, the federal and provincial governments were granted a four month extension to their deadline, to give them a bit more time to sort things out. (Note that recently, CBC mistakenly stated that the Feb 6th deadline was still in effect but this is not so.)

For local healthcare providers, we created a webinar and some challenging case discussions in OpenLabyrinth. This was presented as part of the CURIOS series of webinars. If anyone is interested in access to these cases to help facilitate discussion around these tricky issues, please contact us.