Done with the proofreading and checking of courseware. Took about a week of fulltime work after several months of anticipation and waiting for shoes to drop. Organized the task, uploaded about 130 lessons for three different books, ran through each lesson to completion, made sure each registered in the gradebook.
I wasn’t trying to check the content itself, which has already been examined many times. Just watching for oddities. Found about 10 leftover typos and inconsistencies. Some of these typos had been visible in other systems but I hadn’t caught them before. A few were specific to Canvas.
These e-learning peculiarities are NOT well documented, so I feel an obligation to share them.
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The Canvas LMS is fussier than the other major learning systems in two ways.
1. Canvas reads and uses the titles in the IMS Manifest file, a sort of packing slip for every SCORM package. The manifest tells the system a title, a version, and where to find the files in this module. The other systems do read the manifest and complain about misplaced files, but don’t seem to notice the title line. In two places I had failed to fill in the title properly, and Canvas used those as the main title for the lesson.
2. Canvas is fussy about upper/lowercase filenames. I had mostly filtered those out because ScormCloud is also fussy this way, but I had missed a few. These weren’t problems in Blackboard and Moodle, but in Canvas the image comes up blank. For instance, the image tag in the HTML was looking for 401c.jpg and the actual file was 401C.jpg. Canvas appears to derive its SCORM add-on from Rustici, the owner of ScormCloud, so the case-sensitive behavior is not just a coincidence.
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Now maybe I can loosen up and get back into more frivolous activities without feeling like I should keep the desk clear for real work. Haven’t done a tech history piece in quite a while.
Polistra's Mill 