Release Notes 2019-1¶
Full Release (April 2019)¶
New Features¶
Sharing published courses¶
Now published courses (e.g. GIFT Experiment, LTI) can be shared with other GIFT users. You can assign Manager and Researcher roles to any of the published courses that you own. A Manager can do everything an Owner can do, except delete the published course. This includes the ability to share that published course with others. A Researcher can only generate reports. Researchers can't export raw data.
Unity Land Nav scenario¶
A Land navigation scenario developed in Unity is available for download on the downloads tab of gifttutoring.org. When running GIFT from your computer, the GIFT installer can be used to automatically download the file for you and place the file in the appropriate location of your GIFT install so it can be used by GIFT Wrap authoring.
This WebGL built version of the Land Nav Unity project can be used in the GIFT TUI as an embedded Unity training application. Authors can build location based assessments for learners that will move around in that environment.
GIFT Wrap authoring¶
A map based approach to authoring has been introduced into GIFT real time assessment authoring called GIFT Wrap. GIFT Wrap is intended to alleviate the burden of authoring location based assessments such as Follow Path by providing an intuitive experience where authors can draw graphics such as points, paths and areas on a map around the location where the learner will be assessed. In the past, the three dimensional coordinate would have to be typed into a text field which is cumbersome and has a high probability of mistake when dealing with three large numbers. Now the coordinates are capture as you draw and a better visual representation of your places of interest is shown.
Currently only Android Events and Unity WebGL course objects have GIFT Wrap capabilities.
For Unity WebGL you must use the GIFT Wrap landing page to create a new real time assessment that exposes GIFT Wrap.
For Android Events, google maps is used.
GIFT Wrap Landing page
GIFT Wrap Authoring new Area graphic (Android Events - google maps)
GIFT Wrap list of graphics (Android Events - google maps)
GIFT Wrap Avoid location condition (Android Events - google maps)
GIFT Wrap Follow Path condition (Unity WebGL Land Nav)
Learner Actions used as triggers¶
Authors can now leverage learner actions as events to start or end a task's assessments or to end a real time assessment. A learner action is currently a button on the GIFT tutor webpage shown during a real time assessment. The button can have a label and a description (e.g. Use Radio). Learner actions are meant to augment the training environment when the author is unable to inject additional UI components into that environment.
Changes¶
Dropped support for Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11)¶
We no longer regression test in IE 11, nor do we test new user interfaces in that browser version. GIFT is mainly tested in Chrome but should also support Edge and Firefox. The downloadable version of GIFT no longer launches IE 11 automatically and instead will launch the default browser installed and configured on your Windows computer.
Strategy sets in real time assessments¶
In previous versions of GIFT you could sequence different strategy types together such as {feedback 1, mid lesson media, survey, feedback 2} by authoring 4 different strategies. Now you can author this as a single strategy. This allowed us to provide strategy escalation across all strategy types where before you could only escalate feedback (i.e. first time a feedback strategy was used it would use the first authored feedback, second time the second authored feedback and so on until the last feedback was used for each subsequent call to that strategy). Now, the first time a state transition is activated the first authored strategy is called (which can be a set of things to do like mentioned earlier), the second time a different strategy set and so on. From an authoring perspective this greatly reduced the complexity of delivering a series of events that might change for each subsequent violation.
New and improved real time assessment (DKF) authoring tool¶
The DKF editor that is used by most training application course objects (e.g. VBS) has been dramatically over-hauled.
Improvements include:- filter available conditions according to the training application being assessed (e.g. can't use Avoid Location condition with PowerPoint)
- filter coordinate types according to the training application being assessed (e.g. Unity doesn't use GCC or GDC)
- mid-lesson knowledge assessment surveys can be authored inside a DKF
- easier to see where tasks, concepts, state transitions and strategies are used
- more visual based authoring and less text on screen (e.g. toggle buttons and tool-tips instead of check-boxes with labels)
- customize real time assessment rules for several conditions allowing you to over-ride the default Java coded behavior of a condition
- Real time validation that provides helpful messages about the missing inputs in your DKF, also jumps you to where the input is needed in the user interface.
