Longevity in OLab cases

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.