Composica 4.0 Release Notes

Social Learning / eLearning 2.0

Composica 4.0 is focused on merging its proven state-of-the-art authoring capabilities with social media, to create true eLearning 2.0 courses.

Composica 4.0 provides authors with the ability to create highly rich, interactive and structured content, but it also empowers them to take full advantage of social media tools to create a learning community around each course. Courses then become both formal and social by nature - learners can share knowledge with others, learn from each other, comment on anything, rate everything and more - all while browsing a course, without ever leaving the learning environment.

Composica courses now offer a real Social Learning experience with:

Blogs:
A course can include any number of blogs. These can be open to the public (virtually a Wiki), closed to authors-only, or a mix of the two where posts require approval. These blogs are implemented independently of the course, which means courses still don't require any specific server-platform even when social elements are used. Each blog includes many optional widgets, such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Top-Rated Posts, Blog Archive, RSS Feed, Tag Cloud, and more. Additionally, they can also be accessed and edited outside of the course, in case learners want to catch up on updates without opening the course.

Comments:
Comments can be added on any document, they're not limited only to blog posts. Any page can include one or more comments element and learners can give feedback about absolutely anything.

Rating:
Rating elements can also be added to the document. Using these, learners are able to rate any object the author chooses. When the content is viewed, the aggregated average rating by all users is displayed.

External Feeds Reader:
A blog element can be configured to display the remote RSS/Atom feed of any other blog or other RSS/Atom-based service. The feed is presented using the Composica blog element, with all of its features.

Mashup Widgets:
Authors may easily add YouTube movies (and search for them directly from Composica), Google Charts, and Multiple Search Engines to the course and fully customize them to the finest detail.

All these elements are "normal" Composica elements, which means they are fully customizable both visually and in functionality. They also play well with other Composica elements as usual, so putting a Ratings element inside a Hot Spot is as simple as ever.

Social Authoring

Composica has always been a collaborative authoring platform, where authors can work together at the same time and easily share resources. These capabilities have been massively expanded in the new version to create the first social eLearning authoring platform:

Development Blogs:
Each project in Composica now contains a fully-featured blog, in order to share knowledge and opinions while building and working on the project. Anyone with access to the project can freely add posts and comment on posts.

Team Visibility:
Users can easily see who's online and what they're working on. When multiple users are working on the same project, they can even see which document each user is currently editing, and immediately preview it.

Chat:
Users can chat with one another in real time, to discuss the project, specific pages, or even review the project together as a group, as any number of users can participate in a group chat. Chat logs can be saved as part of the project and be marked as either private or public, if they can benefit others.

Tasks:
Tasks management has been massively improved. Tasks can now be assigned, prioritized, tagged, commented on, sent by mail to notify of changes, and much more. Additionally, each task keeps a detailed audit trail, showing the changes it went through and who made them.

Tasks Report:
Reports can now be viewed in the scope of the project, or in global scope of all projects. They can be grouped by Status, Document/Project, Opener, Assignee, and Priority. They can be limited to a date range, and further filtered by numerous conditions.

Tagging:
Any type of resource can be tagged, colored, and searched, including media files, project documents, tasks, and more. Tag clouds are available for easy viewing.

Project Dashboard:
The project dashboard summarizes different aspects of the project using many optional widgets. It includes the project blog, recent blog posts/comments/feeds, team members, pending tasks, recently saved documents (by anyone in the team), recent publishes of the project, saved chats, project links, and even personal notes.

Composica Dashboard:
The Composica dashboard appears immediately after logging into the application, and aggregates information from all project dashboards that are relevant to the user. Users can easily see their pending tasks across all projects, prioritized and filtered. They can see the status of projects they're involved in, view new blog posts and comments from any project, catch up on saved chats, and more.

Contributor Role:
The new Contributor role is ideal for SMEs and other members of the team who contribute content, but shouldn't have access to change the structure of the course. Such members are able to change content, add images and perform other limited editing operations, but they are not able to use the advanced editing functions, or add, remove or re-order documents in the outline.

New Major Capabilities

Narration Recording:
Composica now features a built-in audio recording tool, right at the author's fingertips. No need to record audio offline and upload the result - a simple press on the record button is all that's required to add narration to the document.

Automatic Narration Sequencing:
Narration wouldn't be complete without the ability to synchronize the appearance of elements to audio, and Composica makes this a breeze. The author never needs to think about the time it takes for each bullet to appear, the recording time, or matching one to the other. A simple click on the element and another click on the record button for each element that needs to be narrated, and the page will sequence them automatically according to the order chosen by the author. Changing the order of narrated elements is as simple as dragging the elements to their new positions, the narration will automatically adjust.

Closed Captioning:
Hearing disabled learners can easily enable closed captioning for the entire course, to compensate for the lack of narration.

Universal Media Player:
The new Composica Media Player is able to play almost any type of media, including MP3, FLV, AVI, MPEG, WMV, WMA, WAV, MOV and others. All of these types are played within a single highly customizable element. Authors can control the look and feel of the player down to the finest detail, just like any other Composica element.

Smart Content Preloading:
Authors can now control when and how much content is preloaded when a course starts and as it plays, highly optimizing the loading speed of documents while navigating courses.

New Reviewer UI:
Viewers and Reviewers receive a new slimmed down User Interface that allows them to better focus on the task at hand.

New Features

A new Survey element allows for the inclusion of rating questions and open questions, which are then reported to the LMS via SCORM
Quick URL editor to either pick an existing resource, directly upload one, record audio, or link to an external resource
Specificity Markers on Properties Grid to immediately see which properties are set on an element, realize which properties will be collected if a style rule will be created, and optionally revert any changes to properties with a single click
New Element Navigator, to easily navigate between elements on the page and within their hierarchy
SCORM Improvements, including new properties, new interaction types, and higher duration precision
Widgets tab accessible directly from the resources pane
Lock next navigation can now be applied to hot spots, media player, sequences (including narration), and any interaction with feedback
Apply Widgets dialog now shows preview and able to apply widgets directly from other projects without having to import
New default theme for Blank Project
Offline Tracking
Image quality choice when importing from PowerPoint
New variables to display the current page within a chapter, total pages in the chapter, total done pages in a chapter, current global score
Runtime Properties interface now appears as a step in New Project Wizard
Modify menu only shows items that are relevant to the selected element
Reorganizing resources in the outline tree vastly improved
Recent Projects accessible directly from Project menu
Enhanced quality of author-resized images (now using bicubic instead of linear)
Improved Style Rules
An element Style Rule can be created for the document itself
Multi-SCO Publish is now available (but still not recommended)
Option to include all media instead of only detectable media in Publish
Stage background in Media Explorer is now configurable, to facilitate better viewing of white/transparent resources
New trigger to navigation button - reveal, allows instant navigation when an element is revealed
Option to show empty chapters in menus
New options added to the When property of feedback, to control in which attempt to display a specific feedback
New option to not reset a timer upon navigation
New redirect property on pass/fail/custom test feedback elements
New condition property on most test feedback elements, to only show them based on a compound condition
New progress bar property to display the progress within a chapter
New custom root option for one-level menus
New menu layout-type - drop down menu
New 'current chapter' marker, with option to mark all, nearest or farthest
New 'done chapter' and 'current chapter' style rule properties for menus
New Liquid speed property for Master Plumber game
Many performance improvements