OLab4

Well, we just had a lovely wee example of how sustainable OLab cases are.

We received a request from Ontario about an InterProfessional Education (IPE) case that was previously designed in OLab v2 in 2007, posted at NOSM.

Lost in the Bush is an interesting story that presents you with the challenge of Search & Rescue for a challenged individual. It is a neat case with 90 nodes, multiple pathways and some thoughtful dilemmas. It works well for IPE teaching because it puts you in 4 different roles as you navigate the case.

As we noted above, this case is now 16 years old (in Scotland, it could get married, and it is nearly old enough to vote). We ported it from v2 to version 3 with very little in the way of changes needed.

You can still access it on OLab3 at https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/renderLabyrinth/index/1840 – but that server is getting pretty long in the tooth and, with all the use that it gets from multiple groups around the world, it can be pretty slow at times.

So we ported it to OLab4 – and it works. It needs a wee bit of tweaking and polishing but it still works. Pretty good after 16 years.

What is also neat to see is that there are features that the original authors requested back in 2007 that were difficult to implement back then. New functionality in OLab4 now makes this possible.

Wow, it has been a while in coming. So many changes, so many challenges.

We finally have a stable version of OLab 4.6 up and running.

We won’t bore you with all the technical niceties. We are looking for alpha testers. So if you are interested, please contact us.

We think the dust has settled. You can continue to use this URL to access our OLab3 demo server:

https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/

We apologize because the transition was not nearly as smooth as we had hoped. We have copied all of the case information, media files, user identities etc from the old server to the new one.

We have repointed the https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/ URL from the old server to the new one so that outside references to your cases should now work as before.

We have left in place the URL https://mvp.olab.ca/ to point to this same server so if any of you have altered your links and references, these should still work.

Phew. A lot of fuss for something that should have happened invisibly. Sorry that it did not but this resulted from a lack of resources at UCIT, who have many other things on their plates just now.

 

The move was successful!

You can now find your cases and scenarios at https://mvp.olab.ca

We also moved all the user credentials, groups, logins etc over at the same time so you should be able to login using the same username and password as before.

The forgot-my-password link now works again, in case you need that.

All of the case/scenario/map names remain the same. Also the map ID numbers are the same as they were on https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/ — this means that if you have a URL that points to a particular map or node, it will almost work. Map IDs and Node IDs are unchanged.

Remapping a URL

If you have a URL in an external file, such as a Moodle Course or a WordPress page, you may need to edit it to point to the new site e.g. for the well known ‘Welcome’ case, instead of…

https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/renderLabyrinth/index/5

…it will now be at https://mvp.olab.ca/renderLabyrinth/index/5

We are working with UCIT to reassign demo.openlabyrinth.ca to this new server so that the original URLs will work. We are not sure how long this will take for them to implement. Please contact us if this is creating problems for you.

Sorry everyone for the inconvenience. We have been having issues with the server at https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca for a few weeks now.

We will need to switch to a more stable server – this will probably happen on Monday 5 DEC 2022. We will post the new server URL at that time.

In the meantime, what to do?

1. You can continue to use https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca until Monday.
2. The forgot-my-password link on that server will not function properly. (It will say that it will send you a link but that will not be sent.)
3. We will copy the data files from https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca to the new server on Monday. This means that…
   1. Case materials and edits on https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca should still be carried over
   2. User account details will remain the same
   3. Session data (who played what when) will be carried over.
4. The server at https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/ will be running more slowly because of these internal problems.

We are delighted that we were successful in the recent round of collaboration funding offered by MITACS.

We now have two Interns who are actively engaged in the OLabERATE project for the next year.

We welcome Ismail el Hardoum and Mahdi Hosseini to the project and have already seen valuable contributions to our efforts by both of them.

Our project with Universite San Tomas, Concepcion, Chile that was first mentioned in Chile adopts OLab for virtual scenarios, continues apace.

After some initial challenges with language, which was greatly mitigated by excellent translation services and multi-lingual Zoom meetings, our team (led by Michelle Cullen) has been assisting teachers in Chile in the creation of virtual scenarios.

OLab is largely language agnostic, as noted here (Multilingual OLab), even supporting Right-> Left languages and scripts. We are exploring to what extent the authoring framework should also be made multilingual but are happy  to report that, so far, this has not been a barrier for our authors.

Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) recently completed the first phase of their Virtu-WIL Project, https://www.collegesinstitutes.ca/what-we-do/canadian-partnerships/virtu-wil/.

Together with Simulation Canada, they assembled 137 virtual simulations for healthcare professionals in various disciplines: nursing, paramedicine and medical lab technicians. The entire collection is available at https://simulationcanada.ca/virtu-wil/

OLab was pleased to collaborate with a group of authors from many institutions in the creation of some of these cases.

This initiative was funded by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) via The Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative – Canada.ca.

CICan has been invited to create more cases for Phase 2 of this initiative. We intend to support this second round of cases.

We are so sorry that servers on our openlabyrinth.ca domain were down since Monday. Good news is that all are working normally again.

The services affected were:
https://openlabyrinth.ca/ — this WordPress site
https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/ — our main OLab3 site
https://curios.openlabyrinth.ca/ — our CURIOS video mashup service

The actual servers themselves were happily running all through this time. No downtime and no data lost. But they were invisible to the outside world, which makes them just a tad useless. The miscreants on the network team will be flogged with a wet noodle.

There was no data breach, no hackers, etc.

We do now have a backup installation running on a separate service which we can rapidly switch to if needed. We will post this on this site if we have to turn things over to the new server.

For my heaviest users of OLab3 on this server at https://demo.openlabyrinth.ca/, I wanted to give you guys a heads-up about a few upcoming things.

This server is getting quite slow and bogged down at times. Yes, we all want to migrate to OLab4 asap… still getting a few hiccups on that… coming soon.

Sadly on this OLab3 server, some of the slow-downs seem to be because of memory leaks in the Kohana framework on which OLab3 is based. We also have some heavy class loads coming up so we are making a few wee changes so that this server does not slow down too much.

We hope also to give you access to some alternatives. Anyway, these are the important points: 

1. The demo.openlabyrinth.ca will be rebooted periodically to clear the memory leaks. The usual time for this will be 06:00 UTC. 
2. This will not be everyday. We should be able to set up a cron job so that it only happens one day per week, probably Sunday mornings.
3. Over the next couple of weeks, it may happen more often as we prep for some big groups of students.
4. Please contact me if there is a class or exam or whatever coming up that you want us to avoid.
5. We have been working on some alternate servers that you can also use. These will have largely the same code and functions. Initially the database of cases will be mostly the same between them but they do not share a database so cases developed on one will not automatically show up on another. Thank heavens for import/export and MVP.zip files.