Some of our customers have noticed that some of their users get meeting requests that are a bit confusing since the time stamp inside the body of the meeting request is in GMT time which is not normally recognized by users.  The date/time stamp in the meeting request itself is correct for their local time but when they see the GMT time stamp in the body they may be confused.

Who does this problem normally affect?

This problem usually only affects users of Outlook 2003.

What can you do about this problem?

The best thing you can do is upgrade to UniversitySite 7.5.3 and set time zones for all your existing users.  If you have specified time zones for your users then UniversitySite 7.5.3 will send meeting requests in local time so that there will be no GMT stamp even for users of Outlook 2003.

“Automatically compute completion status” is a checkbox that can be enabled/disabled on a roster when you are recording attendance.  It is typically used when you need to disable it so as to record attendance separately from course completion.  It should never be unchecked unless you require more than attendance in order to grant credit for completing a course.  If you do uncheck it you should be aware of what this means.  Read on.

When “Automatically compute completion status” is checked then the date the course was held is recorded as the date it was completed.  They are one and the same date.
When you uncheck that box you can manually control when they get a completion status for the course separately from their attendance record.  You do this by checking “completed successfully” when you are ready to give them credit (presumably after a quiz or assignment is turned in) and then clicking Finalize.

Recording attendance:
When they attend the class then you only mark attendance but do not check “completed successfully”.  You then click “Save for later” which records the attendance you wanted to preserve and leaves this open roster in your to do list for you to finish later, presumably by recording the completions.

Recording completions:
When you have graded their quiz or exercise or whatever requirement you specified beyond attendance, you need to give them credit for completing the course.  You do this by clicking on your still open roster and putting a check mark in the “completed successfully” column for each user who deserves to be given this credit, then you record this in the database and remove this open roster from your to do list by clicking “Finalize”.  This action of saving the roster (either by finalizing or save for later) when you have the “completed successfully” boxes checked results in the current date being saved to the database for all users for which that box was currently checked when you saved.

Recommendation
Be sure you finalize rosters to close them and remove them from your open roster list after you have finished recording all the completions you need so that you don’t accidentally finalize them at a later date and thus overwrite the correct completion date with today’s date.

Office location is a very important field for UniversitySite. 

Why is it so important? 

It is the basis for what appears on a learner’s calendar in the Learning Center and it is central to most of the reports and all learning plans you may produce.  If you have location inconsistencies in UniversitySite your users may not be seeing your training events on their calendars and your reports may be inaccurate.

If the data source you are using to import office locations for users has inconsistencies in it e.g. “Washington, D.C.” vs “WDC” vs “Washington DC”, etc, then it is likely your users and instructors will not have the experience you want them to have.

More to the point, when training rooms are defined with an office location that does NOT appear on a learner’s profile, then that learner will NOT be aware of any events that were scheduled with that training room.  For example, suppose your calendar is automatically filtered for “Washington, D.C” and the location that was used with the training room that has been scheduled might have been “WDC”.  In this case, you will not even be aware of any opportunities for “Washington, D.C” since they were in fact scheduled for “WDC” instead.

Clearly this is a significant problem that you will want to identify and resolve as quickly as possible so how do you do that?

Steps you can take as a UniversitySite Administrator

1.       Identify the problem by comparing the office locations in use for your training rooms with the office locations that are assigned to user profiles. 

a.       Training rooms – Use the Learning Centers Admin tool to examine the office locations used to define your training rooms.

b.      User locations – Use the User Manager Admin tool to search for users by location to see what locations have been assigned to your users’ profiles.

2.       If you find inconsistencies between training rooms defined and user locations continue to step 3.

3.       Ensure that all training rooms defined are using the desired locations.  These locations should match what you want to be present on user profiles.

4.       Share improperly defined user locations from step 1b with a DBA who can locate and correct these in your data source (AD or another database).

Steps that a DBA should take after problems are found

5.       Correct the inconsistencies in your data source, which should be either Active Directory or another database in your network, typically from an HR source.

6.       Use the Fix Locations SQL script we provide (Request Location Fix Script) to identify all location inconsistencies and fix them

Some of you may have noticed that UniversitySite automatically assigns certain defaults for newly uploaded SCORM eLearning content.  These defaults may not be to your liking so you are forced to edit the settings on each uploaded eLearning piece OR update those settings in the database by means of a SQL query.   We have not yet provided a gui to set SCORM upload defaults but are considering this.

In the mean time, you can make use of these queries to update all eLearning in the database.

–set all courses to launch full screen
UPDATE [ScormPackageProperties] SET [desired_fullscreen]=1

–set all courses to use the player launch settting of “Frameset”
UPDATE [ScormPackageProperties] SET [player_launch_type]=1

–set all courses to use the SCO launch settting of “New Window w/o browser toolbar”
UPDATE [ScormPackageProperties] SET [sco_launch_type]=4

–set all courses to wrap each SCO with a copy of the API
UPDATE [ScormPackageProperties] SET [wrap_sco_window_with_api]=1

Have you ever wondered if UniversitySite records answers to individual questions in an eLearning piece such as an assessment?

Guess what?  It does.  This data is not however exposed through the reports in UniversitySite so you have to dig them out of the database using a SQL query such as the one below.

/*
0 Undefined       – The value has not been specified.
1 Correct         – The learner responded to the interaction correctly
2 Incorrect       – The learner responded to the interaction incorrectly
3 Unanticipated   – The learner responded to the interaction in an unanticipated manner
4 Neutral         – The learner responded to the interaction in a way that was neither correct or incorrect
5 Real            – The learner responded to the interaction in a way that is best represented by a number (of type Real)
*/

SELECT Learner=u.lastname + ‘, ‘ + u.FirstName, r.[registration_date], Course=dbo.[fnStringTrainingCourseFullName](c.Prefix, c.Number, c.Title), o.[item_identifier], i.[interaction_id],
      Result=CASE result
            WHEN 0 THEN ‘Undefined’
            WHEN 1 THEN ‘Correct’
            WHEN 2 THEN ‘Incorrect’
            WHEN 3 THEN ‘Unanticipated’
            WHEN 4 THEN ‘Neutral’
            WHEN 5 THEN ‘Real’
            ELSE ” END
      FROM [ScormRegistration] r   
      inner join ScormActivity a on a.scorm_registration_id=r.scorm_registration_id
      inner join [ScormActivityRTInteraction] i on i.scorm_activity_id=a.scorm_activity_id
      INNER JOIN [ScormObjectIdentifiers] o ON o.[scorm_object_id]=a.[scorm_object_id]
      inner join users u on u.id=r.USER_ID
      INNER JOIN [TrainingCourses] c ON c.[ID] = r.[training_course_id]
      order by u.lastname, u.firstname, r.[registration_date] desc, c.[Prefix], c.[Number], o.[item_identifier]

When reviewing data in UniversitySite reports you may occassionally find that the date completed for a course is wrong, and in fact that it happens to be the date you actually recorded attendance, not the date of the event itself.  If this is your situation please read on.

We provide the “Automatically compute completion status” checkbox on the attendance screen to support situations where you do not want to give someone a completion merely based on their attendance, but when additional requirements must be met, such as a quiz or homework of some kind.

If you are granting completions based on attendance only however, you should ALWAYS leave that box checked so that attendance and completions are marked simultaneously and so that the date recorded for this completion is the date of the attendance, not the date your recorded it.

If you DO uncheck that box, UniversitySite will record the completion date as the date you mark that completion.  This is by design.

This checkbox is sticky on a course by course basis, so if you DO need to uncheck it for some courses, it should stay that way based on the status you had used for the last event of that course you recorded attendance for.

If you are using UniversitySite 7.5 or later, you may have noticed that we now use red highlighting to show when a filter is in effect, both in the Learning Center and in InstructorSite. By default it is a very bright red.

You can however with a little editing make it look like this.

Both the text color and the background color can be controlled by editing the following file on the web server:
D:\Inetpub\Sandbox\UniversitySite\ClientScripts\dropDownListHelpers.js

So in my yellow example above I changed mine from the default:
dropdownlist.options[selectedIndex].style.color = “white”;
dropdownlist.options[selectedIndex].style.backgroundColor = “red”;

To the new yellow look: 
dropdownlist.options[selectedIndex].style.color = “Black”;
dropdownlist.options[selectedIndex].style.backgroundColor = “Yellow”;

If you need to have a very specific color or shade this javascript supports hex notations for colors.

Note: This file will be overwritten during upgrades to UniversitySite so you will need to either keep a copy or make your edits again after upgrading. This change will affect the filter display in the Learning Center as well as InstructorSite on the Catalog and Calendar.

The reminder service runs once per hour. Each time it runs it looks for reminders that should be sent based on the reminder setting times relative to the recipient’s time zone selection.

If the recipient time zone has not been specified it will use a default, if specified, otherwise it will use the SQL server time zone.

Initial Reminders the day before training

On Monday normally at noon in the time zone of the recipient the reminder service will send initial reminders for events occurring on Tuesday.  It does the same on Tue, Wed, and Thu.  But on Friday normally at noon, the reminder service will send initial reminders for events occurring on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday.

Final Reminders the day of training

On each day including weekends normally in the early morning, the reminder service will send final reminders for events occurring that same day.

If  a class is scheduled for 8am and the final reminder is scheduled for 8 am, either the final reminder will likely be sent at approximately 8:01am on the day before training, but it will certainly not be sent at 8:01am on the day of training.If you schedule a class for later in the same day, only the final reminder will be sent.

IIS will prevent many file types form being launched via Internet Explorer unless it is explicitly told to allow them. In this case you may need to add a Mime Header file type to the UniversitySite website.

1. Right click on the UniversitySite website in IIS and choose properties.
2. Select the HTTP Headers tab
3. Click the File Types button under the MIME Map section
4. Click the New Type button
5. Enter nrl or drf or scl or whatever file type you need to allow through IIS in the Associated Extension and specify “text/plain” for the Content type(MIME) field
6. OK your way out

If you are having some problems with eLearning content that you have uploaded into UniversitySite and want to figure out whether the problems can be addressed through UniversitySite SCORM player settings or your eLearning authoring tool publishing process, then read on.

UniversitySite can play and track any eLearning content as long as it is either SCORM or AICC compliant. If it is, that content will be published as a .zip file and will contain an imanifest.xml file.

If your content was purchased from a third party, such as the Traveling Coaches CLASSe content, please contact them for assistance first, unless you have reason to believe the problem is with UniversitySite. In that case you might first confirm this by reading the following.

If you do not get the experience you expected when playing your content in UniversitySite you can eliminate UniversitySite as a factor by testing your content via www.scorm.com ’s test track for SCORM http://www.scorm.com/products/testtrack.aspx. The registration is free and quick.

It will make your job easier if you can cut down the size of your elearning piece for testing purposes and make it very short. You can also experiment with publishing for the SCORM 1.2 vs SCORM 2004 standard to see how this affects your playback experience.

If the problem repeats on Test Track this means the problem is not with UniversitySite’s SCORM player but exists somewhere in the content authoring or publishing process. In this case please consult the makers of your content authoring software for support.

If the problem does not repeat on Test Track please contact Daniel Wallace for UniversitySite support.

Sometimes IIS on the web server running UniversitySite has to be “told” to allow certain file types which it will otherwise block, such as .flv for flash video files.  There are a number of file types that must be added to run Tutor Pro content. See my blog on that specific subject for more details on that including how to allow Mime Header files in IIS.  Some eLearning content uses .flv files and if this file type has not been added as an allowed Mime Header then your eLearning will fail to play properly.