News – LMS Demo

Tangible LMS v0.5.2 includes foundational work for content integrity and the Course Builder (our take on pedagogic content editing).

Getting Started

To get started, navigate to “Courses” in your WordPress admin menu, or click this link to navigate there directly.

“Courses” is a custom post type that serves as the presentational container for Tangible LMS learning content, so it benefits from support for custom fields, featured images, taxonomies, the block editor, and all of the other lovely things that WordPress offers for posts.

Next, edit an existing course or add a fresh one. When you add a fresh course, you’ll need to give it a title and publish it or save it as a draft before you can start building your course outline.

Next, use the tabs at the top of the editor to navigate to the “Builder” interface. From here, you have two options for inserting content:

Use the inserter button to insert existing steps
Add new steps, multi-step pages, and sections using the provided inline buttons

Your inserted item will appear at the bottom of the editor. If it’s a new step, it must be named and published using the “Publish Step” action before it will be stored:

A step’s resource type can be modified using the “Resource Type” selector.

Rich Text provides a content area
WP Post allows selection of an existing WordPress post
Video provides controls for video embedding

Each step offers actions in its panel header:

Preview (will be wired up at time of course viewer deliverable)
Duplicate: Creates another instance of the step, section, or page
Toggle Visibility: Sets visibility true/false to show or hide steps, sections and pages
Edit: For steps, launches the standalone editor, for sections and pages, opens the sidebar
Remove: Removes the step without deleting it from the database
Expand: Expands the accordion panel containing the step settings and content, or the section or page children

Saving and publishing

Draft auto-save

As you make changes to your course outline, your changes are automatically saved to a draft. If ever you’ve made changes that you wouldn’t like to publish, your draft can be discarded using button displayed when clicking on the draft status indicator in the toolbar.

The draft status indicator will automatically update to let you know that it’s saved your changes or if there’s an error during saving in which case you’ll be offered a “Retry” action at the top of the builder.

Modifying step content

Modifications to steps will always impact every version of the course, and will be visible to students as soon as you save them. Because of this, you’ll receive an impact summary before changes are applied to steps, letting you know which versions, branches, and courses contain the step and will be impacted by your modification.

If you’d like to edit the step independently without impacting the other areas that use it, the “unlink” button allows you to proceed with a cloned step instead, while preserving any changes you’ve made.

Publishing a version

When you’re ready for your changes to be shown to users, publish your draft course outline using the Publish Version button in the toolbar. A panel will open at the right side of the screen offering pre-publish options.

If your draft does not contain changes to the mandatory structure of the course (steps which are required for completion), then you’ll have the option to update it as a minor version. Once enrolment and progression are implemented, users on the current version will be automatically migrated to new minor versions, whereas migrations between versions must be triggered manually.

The optional “notes” field allows you to describe what’s changed to leave a better audit trail. When you’re satisfied with your changes, click the “Update” button and your modifications will be assigned a version number and published.

Building your course outline

Tangible LMS offers three broad types of course outline item:

Section: a container that groups steps and multi-step pages together.
By default, sections cannot be nested within sections, but future versions may support deeper nesting if it is needed, and this is already supported by the architecture and the UI
Multi-Step Page: a container that groups steps together presentationally. Multi-step pages will be presented in the course viewer as a single step, but can contain multiple steps of various types. A good use of a multi-step page would be steps with multiple videos, or steps with a video and a quiz.
Step: a step is where the content lives. It wraps a resource of type video, rich text, WP post, or (future) Tangible Quiz, providing settings for how a student should engage with the resource, whether it’s optional or not, how much of a video they must watch for it to be considered complete, etc.

All items can be organised via drag and drop, keyboard controls, the overview panel, and the provided buttons for moving items up and down. Items can be inspected to edit hot field values and section and multi-step page settings.

The overview panel

The overview panel provides a searchable, condensed view of your course structure for quick navigation and quick reorganisation. Open it by clicking the button in the toolbar. Once open and when search isn’t active, you can use the provided drag handles () to move items up and down within their hierarchical level.

Clicking on an item’s title in the overview panel will scroll the main builder to that item, select it, and unfurl parent containers if it has any.

The inspector

The inspector can be opened using the button in the toolbar, or by double-clicking on a panel heading. It contains a title setting, additional settings for sections and multi-step pages, and a hot field tab for configuring hot fields within rich text. While the inspector is open, click on an item header or panel, or select it in the overview panel to inspect it.

Hot fields

Hot fields are named “chips” inserted into rich text content whose values can be updated per branch, allowing contained overrides within content for small, cohort-specific modifications. To insert a hot field into a rich text step, open the panel and use the button to create a new hot field. If you select text and click the hot field creation button, that text will be used as the name for the hot field.

Once you’ve added a hot field, click it to open the inspector panel and modify the hot field’s name, default value, and type.

Branch Management

Tangible LMS allows creation of branches which will be used to override visibility and hot field values. Branches share the same version with main, so changes made within branches will cause the course version to increase.

Branches can be managed from the “Branches” tab, which allows you to create branches, view branches, and switch the editor between branches.

Once you’ve created branches, you can switch between them using either the provided buttons in the Branches tab, or the button in the editor.

To create a branch, click “New Branch” in the “Branches” tab and fill out the provided form. Branch names must start and end in an alphanumeric character, be lowercase, and may include dashes.