Current Development Priorities

I am very excited about the new functionality we are building in our current development sprint. Here is a quick rundown of those enhancements.



Directly responding to our users’ requests, the major focus of this sprint is to rewrite the exam portion of courses, from both author and student perspectives. For course authors:

1. We are adding the ability for authors to include pretests in their courses. This will enable authors to measure how much learning and comprehension is happening in their courses.
2. One of the largest changes to exams relates to the entire experience of creating exam questions and exams. We are creating an enhanced authoring experience that is going to be easier to use and will function in more of a wizard-like manner. The exam builder will step authors through the process of creating questions and answers.
3. We will change the definition of courses a bit, with regards to the requirement that all courses have exams. Authors will still be able to create courses with exams, but they will also have new options to either create courses without exams, or to create “courses” that contain only exams.
4. Exam questions will now support HTML markup and images, using the same editor interface we use throughout the site.
5. Exams will now support the grouping of questions, allowing authors to present a scenario or description before asking one or more questions.
6. We are enhancing the way multiple choice questions are created. Specifically, we are adding built-in options for “all of the above” and “none of the above” options. This will facilitate the ease and speed of creating these types of questions.
7. Exam questions will have an option for an explanation to students. This will allow authors to explain their question in detail and to provide supportive information relating to the correct answer.

Course and exam enhancements for students include:

1. The display of which questions were incorrectly answered. This has been a frequent request and we think this will help students gain a greater understanding of what the author is presenting. The display of incorrect questions will be something that authors can control on a course-by-course basis.
2. Students will see exam question explanations that were supplied by the author.
3. Some “courses” may not contain an exam, and some may not contain any course material. This functionality makes sense when the course material is only available outside of LearningZen, but the mastery of that material needs to be proven by the student.
4. Authors will have the ability to describe their exams’ relatively difficulty and expected time requirements for completion. This will help students make decisions about signing up for specific courses and decisions as to whether they want to purchase them.
5. Finally, if the course is set up for a pretest, the student will be required to complete the pretest prior to entering the course material.

If all of that were not enough, we are also working on the following other enhancements in this sprint:

1. We know that the ability to import Microsoft PowerPoint and Word files has been requested by many users. This is a high priority for us as well. We are researching the best ways to accomplish this important feature.
2. We are working on a new feature that would allow a course author to share his or her course with others during the authoring process, in a collaborative manner. This feature will be implemented in a minimal way to start. I’m sure we will end up building out this feature more completely in future sprints. This feature is one in which I would like to get more feedback, so please share you thoughts.
3. We are adding functionality to highlight new courses on the site. We will be showcasing them in a new list as well as with the use of RSS feeds. Users of LearningZen will be able to subscribe to this feed and several others. Stay tuned for even more feeds soon.
4. Finally, we are adding the ability to do a mass import of users into a Premium Services portal, which should dramatically improve the process of authorizing users for portals.

Holy cow that is a lot a new stuff! I’m even more excited about this sprint than I was before starting this blog entry. Our development team is really working hard to enhance this great site. As usual, I am interested in your feedback. Please share your thoughts by commenting on this blog entry.

Thomas Klassen