Product update: May 2019

New feature: Reply to external reviewer comments

The external review feature gets an update!

Thousands of users are already using this simple yet effective way to give feedback, and to send notes and suggestions to authors and co-authors. Reviewing courses or a particular piece of content becomes extremely easy and handy with Easygenerator, as all the feedback is immediately visible to authors and co-authors for the corresponding content or question items.

Next, to enable users to mark comments as “resolved”, which we introduced in Feb 2019, we are pleased to announce a new addition to the external review feature – replies to comments of external reviewers.

Many of you are probably familiar with having threaded conversations in forums and on other platforms, so we thought it would be a good enhancement to the collaboration workflow in Easygenerator.

This new feature comes in handy here, where, say, your team needs to discuss the feedback, add notes or exchange ideas to follow up on comments from your reviewers. Replies let authors and co-authors respond directly to a comment from a reviewer, keeping the replies organized neatly in a single, threaded conversation right within Easygenerator, in the external review panel. To make sure everyone who works on the course is up to speed, all replies are visible to all authors and co-authors.

Interested in starting with replies? You can learn more about external review comments and replies here on our help site.

Co-authoring improvements: notifications via email

Notifications keep you informed about things that need your attention. With this update, we introduce a tiny yet powerful enhancement for those who work a lot with their mailbox.

Now, when existing users are invited to co-author a course, they are notified about the invitations not only within Easygenerator but also via email. Email remains one of the most widely used, fast and simple to use communication channels in the corporate world.

Haven’t used co-authoring in Easygenerator yet? Learn more about it here on our help site or just try it out by inviting your first co-author in Easygenerator.

All-in-one template improvements

The brand new All-in-one template, which was publicly released in March 2019, is becoming more and more popular among our users due to its modern look and feel, animated transitions and improved performance. We will continue releasing improvements and features for this new template.

This month we are delighted to announce that the following features have been added to the All-in-one template:

Support of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standard, developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium, and it’s used when you need to:

• provide rapid and seamless integration between a growing set of cloud-based learning applications and a growing set of learning environments or platforms, such as learning management systems, portals or learning object repositories.
• allow a user to navigate between various learning tools without having to log into each tool.
• carry information about the user, the platform from which they came, the role of the user and where they are going.

Easygenerator already provides you with an option to embed/integrate the Easygenerator authoring tool as well as Easygenerator courses based on the Simple course template into a 3rd party tool or platform (like an LMS) using LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard.

Now, this option is also supported in the All-in-one template. Interested in integrating your courses seamlessly into other platforms? Check our help site article about LTI for more details.

Interactivity improvement: opening hotspots on images just by hovering over them

Humans are visual beings. We’re attracted to beauty, so an eye-catching piece of content with rich visuals engage us, helping our brain to focus on the subject and the meaning that the message is conveying.

While images make content nicer, these days a regular image is still flat. To bring your images to life, you need to make it interactive, clickable. Adding hotspots on the image is a good way of doing it. And a cool thing we love about this feature is that it helps to explain a complex idea with just a single image. Such a visual way of explaining is much more effective than a typical text description.

With the new update, we are changing the interactions for hotspots: now it’s possible to view the content of a hotspot by just hovering over it. No need to click on hotspots anymore. This interaction proves to be more user-friendly and is also familiar to users who used to create courses based on the Simple course template.

If you haven’t used hotspots on images, we recommend checking this article that will guide you towards creating interactive images in Easygenerator.

What to expect in the coming months

We are going to continue polishing the All-in-one template, the external review as well as co-authoring features, so expect new features and improvements every week.

If you like the update or have any questions, please let me know in the in-app chat.