As you saw last week, we are making a group of cases available to help authors to create better cases.
This week we would like to highlight ‘Decisions, decisions‘ – this walks case authors through the important principle of creating meaningful decision points in their cases.
This case is also featured in our series of Examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmgSucgM9Y3NdGdZMFFteGdJN1RDUkhXRTdVbllON0E&usp=sharing – you can also download a zip file example of the case from there.
Extending on the last post, we are gradually making available more and more example cases to show what can be done with OpenLabyrinth.
Because these cases are to be found on many different servers, we have been looking for a way to link to these, along with enough metadata about the cases so that you can find what you need. For the moment, we have decided just to use a simple Google Docs spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmgSucgM9Y3NdGdZMFFteGdJN1RDUkhXRTdVbllON0E&usp=sharing
Sorry about the messy long link.
On that sheet, you will find direct links to the cases so you can play them. For many of them, there is also a link to Medbiq format zip file so you can download the case for use on your own OpenLabyrinth server.
At workshops and presentations, we are often asked for good examples and where to learn more about how to write good cases.
We have revamped one of our early cases, the Welcome case, to provide better information about OpenLabyrinth’s new capabilities, where to find help and case examples, VP case libraries etc.
We are working on a better way to make information about case examples available. Suggestions on how we could improve this are most welcome.
We will be featuring the latest and greatest new developments in OpenLabyrinth 3.11 at the Medbiq 2014 conference, tomorrow May 19th. (http://medbiq.org/)
Come check us out if you’re there.
We’ll be showing:
Medbiq is devoted to advancing the health professions through data standards… which doesn’t sound very interesting… but the good stuff is in working with others on what you can get various to do when they play nice together.
We have been working on making the main User Guide more accessible.
The latest version is here:
http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca:8099/display/OLab3/openLabyrinth_UserGuide_v5p
This is currently hosted on an Atlassian Confluence wiki. This allows us to have a collaborative space where team members can keep the main documents more up to date. It also allows us to easily create an exportable PDF that you can keep handy on your own machine.
This version supersedes the temp copy that I had posted in my DropBox, that we mentioned previously.
Finally, after many years, we have some clarity in Canada about how we as educators can make fair and appropriate use of materials that we find on the Web for our learners.
Many educators have blithely relied on “Fair Use” (the USA term, more accurately known as “Fair Dealing” in Canada) as an excuse to copy parts of materials for educational use. The original Fair Dealing provision was designed for paper copies and it was only in 2012 that the Supreme Court of Canada finally made a ruling on Fair Dealing as it pertains to electronic materials, and parliament finally amended the Copyright Act in 2013. And it’s a pretty good one.
Now, fair warning: I am not a lawyer and this is not an official legal opinion. The comments that follow are based on writings in this area and consultations with colleagues. If you want an official ruling, fire up your own lawyers.
(… read more…) – this covers the several ways that you can include images in your cases.
We created a few more notes on how to create your own localizable version of help files for your OpenLabyrinth cases. See…
http://demo.openlabyrinth.ca:8099/display/OLab3/How+to+create+a+case+specific+Help+file
This gives you the full skinny on how to do this.
This page is also an early example of where we are going with support, help and user guides for OpenLabyrinth. We have set up an Atlassian Confluence server, which will make it much easier for our support team to collaborate on keeping our documentation up to date. More on this soon.
We have introduced a simple but flexible online help system for using along with your OpenLabyrinth cases.
Building upon the work that we did before, we are now delighted to find that the new version is much easier to work with.
Check out this example case, showing all sorts of different ways to provide help and other information within an OpenLabyrinth case: http://vp.openlabyrinth.ca/renderLabyrinth/index/51
In particular, take a look at this page: http://vp.openlabyrinth.ca/renderLabyrinth/go/51/2572
This makes it very easy to incorporate into established OpenLabyrinth servers. But it also means that case authors can easily adapt it to create help files that are specific to their own cases.
The new approach makes it quite easy now to have …
1. authors can easily make custom help pages for their own cases
2. users can now edit the page and download it to save their changes. Note that these user-created annotations are not saved on the original file on the OpenLabyrinth server, so the case author’s carefully crafted help file is not affected.
SharcFM is a collaborative project, supported by the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC), http://cfpc.ca, around shared curriculum and learning objects for Family Medicine.
SharcFM was launched a couple of years ago and is steered by the CUFMED group (family medicine clerkship directors across the country) to bring together a number of shared objects, cases and clinical cards. OpenLabyrinth, as an open-source, open-standards platform, has provided one of the tools by which such content is shared.
We received some funding a few months ago to bring the collection of virtual patient cases up to full speed. Based on the learning objectives specified by the CUFMED group, (https://sites.google.com/site/sharcfm/sharc-fm-home), our small group of clinical authors have been busily assembling cases, instructor guides and ancillary materials to support this project.
Watch this space next month when we announce the full list of SharcFM cases.
We have been asked quite a few times whether we are considering doing an app for OpenLabyrinth. The short answer? Not at the moment.
We have focused on ‘responsive design‘ in our OpenLabyrinth interface when cases are being played. This means that the material on the screen scales quite well to the screen size so it is usable on phones, tablets or big screens. For an example of this, check out the
that we developed for AFMC and Norlien. This case has been tuned for mobile use but we would love to have suggestions on how to make it more useful and portable.
So why no app? Well, funding is one thing – if there is a group that is keen to fund this or to take it on, OpenLabyrinth is an open-source application so anybody can have a go at this.
But more importantly, we wonder how much benefit there is to doing this. A simple app would lose all the background power (metrics, tracking, conditional logic) that the OpenLabyrinth server provides. You would still get linked pages but is that enough?
There are a number of sites that do offer app conversion and other reasons for/against doing so e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2013/09/05/how-to-make-your-website-mobile-friendly-on-a-budget/
If you do have ideas on how mobile can be explored further, we would love to hear from you.