Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition

Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition release - New Features Summary


Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition has been released. This version is significantly enriched with new functionalities and introduced by the number of new features.

 

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New Functionalities

Among the new functionalities is a completely new Valamis Dashboard. Furthermore, the Valamis Curriculum tools section has been enhanced and it now includes, among others, the Phenomenizer Studio and Competences management – the newly introduced curriculum tracking tools.

With the Phenomenizer Studio it is possible to turn the content of a course into a form of a story, which is related to real life working scenarios. The story helps in understanding which of the study modules are related to each others and to the story in question.

The Competences management, on the other hand, can be used for keeping track with the different levels of skills of the company's personnel. There are also some changes and improvements in the design and functionality of some features already familiar to you.

Below you can find a brief review of all the new features, changes and improvements of Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition release.
 

1. Login page

Entering Valamis, now you will see the Valamis login page. This is a standard login page for entering user credentials, and it contains all the necessary corresponding options.
 


Important: When you deploy this version of Valamis, a site will be created at location http://localhost:8080/web/valamis, and access to this login page and to Valamis Dashboard (see subparagraph "2. Valamis Dashboard page" below) will be available.

Also, upon the Valamis deploying, some of your Liferay settings will be changed. Namely, the Default Landing Page setting in Portal Settings will be changed so that it points to the Valamis Dashboard page. This means, that after signing in at Liferay, you will be redirected to our Valamis Dashboard page.

You can change the Default Landing Page setting back in the Control Panel of Liferay.
 

2. Valamis Dashboard page

Valamis Dashboard page displays all the statistical information concerning your learning courses – all the lessons you have passed, the lessons you have recently passed, all the certificates you have and much more.

Valamis Dashboard can be composed of several sections: Achieved Certificates, Learning Paths, Recent Lessons, Valamis Study Summary and Valamis Activities.

Also, the Valamis Activities feature introduces the social aspect into Valamis. Within it, you can e.g. see all the latest lessons and the certificates received by others. Furthermore, you can share the lesson you have liked, post status updates, give likes, post comments and so on.
 

 


3. Valamis Theme for mobiles has been improved

Valamis Theme for mobile devices is now more responsive and has more attractive appearance.
 


4. Content Management - new design and functionality

4.1 Subcategories

Content Management portlet has undergone some changes. Now you can create subcategories or subfolders for questions. Nesting level of subcategories can be as deep as you want.
 


4.2 Question Details panel

When a question is selected in the Content Management view, the Details panel appears on the right, displaying content of the question selected, and buttons to perform actions upon the question.


4.3 New fields in question Content details

Furthermore, two new fields are added to the Content details screen: Correct answer text and Incorrect answer text. Contents of these fields are displayed to the learner in the Lesson Viewer, after the learner gives some variant of answer to the question asked.


5. Lesson Designer - export to Lesson Studio added

In the Lesson Designer, a new action upon lessons has been added – exporting a lesson to the Lesson Studio. Accordingly, a new item appeared in the Actions pull-down menu.


6. Lesson studio - enhanced functionality

Lesson Studio functionality has been significantly enriched. Four new elements appeared on the Component Panel, namely Video – embedding a video clip, PDF and PPTX – inserting a .pdf file or .pptx presentation respectively, and Math – inserting a mathematical element.

Besides that, a new toolbar containing three buttons has been added. These are Edit, Arrange and Preview buttons. This set of buttons allows to perform corresponding actions on entity of screens (pages) that you create.

6.1. Page Statements

Another important innovation is a Page Statements feature. The corresponding button is added to the Page Properties Panel.
 


Page Statements feature allows to define certain statements for each page (screen), which are sent to Learning Record Store (LRS) when a learner reaches this page in the Lesson Viewer. The statements are sent in the form of "Verb - Object - Topic".

Topic is an additional information concerning a statement. Later on, topics sent to LRS, are used in Phenomenizer Studio and Phenomenizer Report portlets (See subparagraph "8. Valamis Curriculum tools - Phenomenizer" below).


6.2 Adaptive learning

Within the presented release of Lesson Studio, certain elements of adaptive learning have been introduced. Some of the content constructing blocks, in particular text and image components, now have a button for linking to another screen (page) among the set of their context buttons.
 


6.3 Embedding video

Improved Lesson Studio of Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition release gives you vast opportunities for creating multimedia lessons. Now it is possible to fill screens or pages, created by you, with various video content.
 


Videos can be uploaded to your Lesson Studio page from different sources and by different ways:

- From Media Gallery.

- From your hard drive or another data carrier.

- From your Google Drive. In order to do this you must enter the Valamis Administration portlet and create/configure your Google account.

- From the Internet by using the Google Search. You also must have the Google account mentioned above.

- Using a special feature called YouTube-TinCan Extension. If video file has been uploaded to a lesson from the YouTube resource, then playing it in the Lesson Viewer will produce detailed minute-by-minute statistics of the viewing process (starting time, finishing time, rewinding). This information will be stored in the LRS (Learning Record Store) in a form of statements.


7. Valamis Curriculum tools - Competences management

There are two new portlets that have been added to the Valamis Curriculum tools group: Competences administration and My Competences.

Combining these two features gives you an extremely useful tool for all kinds of top executives, including managers and business executives, as well as teachers and supervisors. By using it, you can create something like a "skill database", containing information about skills, abilities, experiences of your subordinate personnel.

First, in the Competence administration portlet,you create, if keeping to database terminology, "auxiliary tables", by adding and defining categories of human activity, competences, skills and skill levels.

My Competences feature, according to this scheme, is used by your subordinate personnel, where each of employees or students self-estimates his knowledge, skills and experience. So you receive a database, which can be viewed in the context of people, skill and so on.
 


 

Note:  Competences administration and My Competences features are available only in Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition version.


8. Valamis Curriculum tools - Phenomenizer

Purpose of Valamis Phenomizer is to give teachers a tool to construct a story. Teachers can construct the story with content so that the students will know what they'll have to learn in order to understand the story. They also get to see the relationships between the different objects and get a possibility to understand how the objects relate to each others.

Valamis Phenomenizer consists of two features added to the Valamis Curriculum tools group. These are Phenomenizer Studio and Phenomenizer Report.

With the help of these two features you are able to receive visual schedule of passing courses or number of lessons (questions), and subsequently to receive a report on the learning results.

The schedule is created in Phenomenizer Studio in the form of a "knowledge tree", assuming the "tree" term as it is defined in graph theory.
 


 

The results of passing your "knowledge tree" can be seen and analyzed within Phenomenizer Report feature.

Note:  Phenomenizer Studio and Phenomenizer Report features are available only in Valamis 2.4 Enterprise Edition version.
 

9. Revisions

- The file size limit of 15 Mb for uploaded lesson packages has been eliminated.

- Passing lessons created in Lesson Studio on mobile device has been fixed.

- The needed fixes for reports done.

 

Request for a Valamis Demo

Are you interested in Valamis? You can contact us and request a demo in order to get a better understanding on how Valamis really works.

Request a Demo