Learner Dashboard Notifications

Earlier this year we released the notification system, which compiled all the important activity on Wunderkind Pro into personalised email digests to keep learners abreast of enrolments, course changes admin messages and more.

We’ve now extended the notification system so that a log of all recent notifications is also visible in the learner dashboard. When a learner logs in, they will see all their recent notifications in a list down the right-hand side of the screen. The important ones like courses ending soon and direct messages from administrators are shown up the top with prominent icons so they are not missed.

Any course notifications also click through directly to the course, making navigation easier too.

Better Balloons

The balloon component in the content creator has been greatly improved:

• Stay open – you now have the option of making balloons stay open. The learner can still close and open them again, but the first time they see them they will be already expanded and will be able to read the contents of them immediately
• Rich text – you can now use rich text (bold, italic, underlines) in your balloons.

Question Storage and Reporting

We’ve upgraded the system to store all the answers to questions that your learners enter into quizzes.
All the reporting is not yet enabled, but for the time being you have access to a new report called Topic Feedback that allows you to view the answers to Free Text questions. We’ve found that a common use for the Free Text question is to request feedback from your learners. You can use this report to see a full list of the feedback users have entered while completing the topic.
This is the first step in providing you with much more visibility over performance and completion. In the future we’ll be adding the ability to drill down into a learner’s results and see all the answers to each specific question.

Improved Summary Bars in Tables

Many of the data tables in the admin system have been improved to make them much easier to read. Instead of having totals at the bottoms of all the columns, the summary bars all read more like a legend, with much more relevant data being shown.
The summary bars automatically update as you filter the data, so they are a quick way of getting a nice summary and segmenting your data. You will find updated summary bars in the User section, Topics and Enrolment.

Bigger Bullet-point Lists

We’ve found that often you’d like to create a page with a single large image and just 2 or three key points about it. Previously the bullet points looked too small on the page, so we’ve added a new option to make a bullet list small or large, making them much more readable on pages with just a couple of points.

We’ve integrated our own video transcoding engine and plugged into Amazon’s global content distribution network. In simple terms this means:

• You can now upload any type of video – you can upload just about any video up to a maximum size of 200 megabytes. Our transcoding system will convert it from whatever format you upload it as, to the industry standard MP4 format and then securely distribute it to our network of streaming servers.
• Videos now stream - Without streaming you have to wait until the video fully loads in before you can skip to the end. With our streaming servers you could have a 30 minute video and instantly skip to the end, perhaps where you were last watching before you got interrupted, without having to wait for the entire video to load. This is very useful for longer training videos where your learners may not be able to complete it in a single session.
• Videos are fast from anywhere in the world – Using Amazon’s CloudFront global content distribution network means that whether your learners are in London, New York, or Singapore they will automatically stream the video in full speed from a server geographically close to them. This means that the video will load fast and stream seamlessly no matter where they are in the world. CloudFront has 16 locations throughout America, Europe and Asia.

You will notice a few changes to the content creation interface:

• When uploading videos, you are no longer restricted to only selecting .FLV videos. You can now choose any video to upload and our system will take care of the conversion behind the scenes.
• After uploading a video, you will now see a “Processing” message. This continues to be displayed while our system converts the video. You can continue to create content and even save out of the topic before the processing is complete, and  the video will just automatically start working once it’s ready. Processing can take as little as 30 seconds or as long as 10 minutes or more depending on the size of the original video file you uploaded.
• The video player now also shows a buffering spinner when it starts to play and also when a bad internet connection causes it to load slowly.

Before you upload a video

Processing - after you upload a video

Until now, all communication with the user has been through very simple text-only emails. These emails were sent out for important things like invites, reset passwords and manual emails to users, but many other system events like courses starting or ending were not sent to users to avoid the users getting too many emails in the course of a day.

The new notification system introduces much nicer HTML emails, more notification types, and helps to reduce email load by including a “Recent Notifications” section in the emails. The recent notifications section is what really ties the new system together. It allows us to be more comprehensive with the communication with users by summarising all the recent activity into an easy to read list, categorised and prioritised by the notification type. When the system generates notifications, it bundles them together and sends them to the user at the same time at various intervals throughout the day. Also, when a new user is invited to the system, the system waits a while before sending the invite to give you enough time to enrol them in all the appropriate courses. That way the user will get everything they need in the first email and not get confused by logging into a system that they don’t yet have access to view anything in.

Directly emailing users has also been vastly improved. While the admins could previously email users directly, it was only one user at a time, and the emails were not nicely branded. Now admins can send emails to all the users, a single user group, or just users in a single enrolment class. Enrolment classes can also be filtered by completion, so you could send a notification to all users that have not started a course to remind them, or to send an email to all users that have passed to congratulate them.

See below for some examples of the new notifications:

Manual notification example

An invitation with enrolments and other recent notifications

This release includes a new Agree to Terms template, which forces the learner to accept an agreement before proceeding with the topic. We also now have an integration API for clients to integrate with their existing systems and portals, and a few other new features are detailed below.

New Agree to Terms Template

This new template can be found under the Assessment tab in the template selector, and allows you to insert an agreement that learners must accept before proceeding with the topic. This is really useful for sensitive areas like tobacco, alcohol or medical where you must ensure the learner has fully read and complies with the regulations.

• You can select from Accept/Decline, Agree/Disagree, or Yes/No for the buttons
• The learner cannot navigate past the agreement page until the agreement has been accepted.
• If the learner declines, a popup will come up saying “This topic will now close”, and the topic viewer will close
• If the learner accepts, they will automatically be taken to the next page and can then freely page through the topic as normal.
• After accepting, if the learner backtracks to the agreement, page navigation will still be enabled and the accept/decline buttons will be greyed out. The learner can backtrack past the agreement and continue back forward again without having to accept the agreement again.
• The agreement body is scrollable, allowing you to add an existing, detailed agreement if required.
• You can have multiple agreements in the same topic. They are independent of each other and will both stop navigation until the user has accepted the agreement.
• The agreement can be anywhere in the topic, so there can be content before the agreement that all learners will see, despite not agreeing yet.

The new Agree to Terms template - stops learners until they accept

New Integration API

We have released the first phase of our Integration API. Customers can apply to be allocated an API Token, which can be used to make server-side requests to Wunderkind Pro from their existing systems. The API currently allows you to authenticate users (using the Wunderkind ID or your own custom-configured field value), and also to launch topics directly from your own system, without requiring your users to login into them.

Topics now also have an ExternalID field, which can be configured in the topic’s properties under the Advanced tab. This can be used to link topics with entities in your own database/system and then launch these topics by referring to them via their ExternalID.

Quiz Question Order

Previously, our system presented quiz questions in a random order when a learner viewed a quiz.

Customers have expressed a need to have questions presented in a specific order. Questions will now be presented in the same order in which they’ve been configured in the quiz. You can change the order of questions in a quiz by dragging them up or down in the list.

You can still show questions in a random order if you are only showing a subset of questions. Eg If you have a quiz of 10 questions which are not compulsory, then set the number of questions to show to 5, then 5 questions will be picked at random and shown in a random order.

Page Attachments

Page attachments are now fully operational. You can attach documents or files to pages in your topics. Learners can then download these when they view the page by clicking the attachment link at the bottom-right corner.

Page attachment at bottom-right corner of topic viewer

Other Changes

• Revert Button - now pops up a confirmation before reverting, to avoid accidentally reverting to an old version.
• Video Transcoding Guide - We have prepared a guide to help you with converting videos to the FLV format used by Wunderkind Pro. You will find a link to this guide in the window that pops up when you upload files.

This version includes some major upgrades to the way Topics are saved and previewed.

New Autosave Feature

We’ve had numerous reports of customers losing work because their browser or machine had crashed before they had remembered to save their work. We understand that we’re all used to our desktop applications automatically saving our work for us, so it’s easy to forget.

WunderkindPro will now automatically save your work every 10 minutes while you are editing Topic content.

If your browser crashes, or you are disconnected from Wunderkind Pro for any reason after an Autosave has occurred, the next time you load that topic it will notify you that you are editing an Autosaved version and you have the option to revert to the last manual save (see the Revert feature below).

New Revert Button

We’ve included a new button at the top of the topic editor that allows you to revert to the last manually-saved (ie not autosaved) version of the topic.

This is useful if you’ve made a bunch of changes, saved them, then realised you preferred it how you had it originally.

It is also useful when you are just playing with features and changing an existing topic and the changes are autosaved. You can then easily revert back your changes.

The new Revert button, just to the left of Save and Preview

Clicking Revert prompts you to confirm, to avoid accidentally losing changes

New Preview Mode

When you’re working with topics with a lot of pages and you just want to see how your current page looks to the learner, it can be quite painful to launch the topic preview and have to page forward until you get to the current page. We originally did this deliberately so that you get to view the entire learner experience. While our content editor is WYSIWYG, so normally looks almost identical to how the learner will see it, we understand that it’s nice just for peace of mind to be able to just quickly flick to the learner view of the current page just to check.

We now have a new Preview Page button at the top of the topic editor. This will quickly change to the learner view of the current page. You cannot edit anything in this mode. You can get back to the edit mode by pressing the Back to Edit Mode button.

You can still view the entire topic in the learner view. This can now be done via the Launch button (it was previously Preview), which will launch the topic in a new window as the learner will see it.

Page in edit mode, with all controls available

The same page in preview mode, all the tools slide away and you can test simple user interaction

We’ve been listening to everyone’s feedback and have made a bunch of tweaks and improvements to interface. Many of these have been done to make the content creation even more intuitive, but there have some positive changes right across the system.

Some of the most significant changes include:

• Right-click menus on items in all the tables such as Users, Courses, Topics and Silos
• Resend Invite feature now appears in Users (useful for when an invite has been caught by a spam filter or when an email was entered incorrectly)
• Vastly improved user import tool – much more intuitive for searching/filtering, managing groups and moving users around
• Topic time limits are now enforced

The content editor changes include:

• The list editor has seen many improvements, making it much easier to edit and reorganise items
• Some new 3-column templates have been added
• Hotspots and Balloons are now much easier to position exactly where you want them
• Many text elements have been improved to make adding and entering text much quicker

We’d like to thank everyone who has given us the important feedback that allows us to keep making Wunderkind Pro better. We strive to make Wunderkind Pro the most simple and intuitive online training product on the web, so please keep the feedback coming!

Enhanced Enrolment Tool

Each silo provides the following additional features:

• A unique URL and entry point for users
• Custom Users (with discrete admin user permissions)
• Override default styling and branding

Additionally, courses and topics that are made public within one silo can be referenced within other silos.

Silos can only be created and managed by admin users with access to global settings.

Silo Management Console

navigating between silos

Wunderkind Pro v1.5 introduces styling options to allow you to customise the look of the learner dashboard and module viewer with your own logo and colour scheme.

The new styling tool is so easy to use that you can style it with your own branding in mere seconds. It uses intelligent image processing techniques to indentify the primary colours in your logo, automatically pick the most prominent colour for the background gadient, and provide a quick pallete of alernative colours from your logo. In most cases, the styling tool will automatically generate your colour scheme, but if you want to tweak it, you still have the flexbility of selecting from a wider palette of common colours, use the on-screen colour picker, or enter a specific colour that perhaps you use on your main website.

All you need is a copy of your logo on a white background. Upload it into the styling tool and our system will do the rest.

Want to brand each silo differently? No worries, just go to your silo settings, override the global styling and create a new one!

Setting the Global Style - just upload your logo and the tool automatically resizes it, picks out the primary colour and selects the main colour for the theme colour

overriding the global style to customise a silo's branding

Learner Dashboard with custom styling

This is our most significant release yet, and has so many new features that we’re not even going to try to fit them into a single post. We’ll be blogging about some of the new features individually over the next few days, but here’s a really quick summary of some of the major features:

• Branding / Styling – as well as a major overhaul to the look and feel of the interface, you now have the ability to use your own logo and colour scheme, making Wunderkind Pro a seamless extension of your brand.
• Silos – you can now manage separate divisions of your organisation in separate silos, each with their own course content, users and branding.
• Enhanced Admin Permissions – admins can now be controlled with discrete role-based permissions. Grant someone global access to everything or perhaps allow them to only publish content or manage the users.
• Course and Topic Sharing – you can now share courses across silos and indivudal topics across multiple courses.