Random Walk in Learning: Fablusi New Website

Monday, 11 April 2005

Fablusi New Website

Fablusi has just launched a new redesign of its website to mark the availability of Fablusi Enterprise Version 2.

It has taken me over 14 months to completely rewrite the software. There are a number significant differences between this new version and the previous version.

Some of the Feature Improvements

Stages A new concept is introduced. From the initial role selection to the final debrief, a simulation author can define as many or as few stages as required. At the transition of stages, the author can control whether a role can advance to the next stage or not depending on whether there is any incomplete task. The right setting of the interaction space can also be overridden at debrief stage so that all the interactions previously unavailable to some roles will become available.

Component-based tasks In the previous version, publishing task has its semantic components pre-defined. In the new version, the author can define different semantic components to reflect the structure of the required task. Later, version 2.1, the assessment assistant will be able to pick up the defined components and apply rubrics according to the assessment rules.

Address book To model "knowing who" is important in some social situation, author can now assign address book to roles. When set, roles can only communicate with those in the address book. An associated function is "introduction" where a role can introduce two other roles to communicate.

Some of the Technical Improvements

Client-side Processing A lot of jobs are not handled on the client browser rather than transferring the data back to the server for processing. This improves the response of the interaction as well as makes the server scale much better.

CSS-based look and feel The delivery engine will only deliver the dynamic pages in generic format and an author defined CSS will transform the page into different look and feel depending on design.