We have simplified our look.
Now you will find info about our main services right up front.
We had previously mostly used this site as a news blog. But more of our clients wanted easier access for finding our servers, help pages, stuff like that.
You can still find our Posts listed on the right side of the main page.
We have a new domain: olab4.net
You can try out an early instance of our cloud-based version of the OLab 4.6 Player at https://player.olab4.net/ , using guest as the username and password. It is not yet completely bullet-proof but the transition to cloud services has gone reasonably smoothly.
We added olab4.net for a few reasons:
We are keeping olab.ca for some things because there is no advantage (yet) to moving. So you will still see the most recent news, announcement and stories on https://olab.ca – this site here.
Even from its earliest versions, OLab has proven to be remarkably flexible and powerful in how you can design your maps and scenarios.
In this page, Learning Designs in OLab, we describe some of these designs and approaches.
We would love to hear from other groups about interesting learning designs that they have created; or from others who would like to create an innovative design but are not quite sure how to do this in OLab.
We have had to make some changes to where we host various OLab services.
Moodle for OLab – courses, examples – most students and teachers who are using OLab in a course or workshop will come here.
Support, blog, how-to pages, contact info – our main WordPress page with general information relating to OLab.
OLab Player – use ‘guest’ as username and pword if you don’t have one – this is the link to our main OLab server, when you want to play cases directly, not via Moodle.
OLab Designer – login credentials required – for authors, teachers, course designers. You must have a specific login.
Dev server – player – this is our test and development box. Don’t put production cases or course materials on here. There is no guarantee of stability, uptime or backups.
Dev server – designer – this is for authoring cases on our test box.
CURIOS video mashup service – this is for integrating YouTube videos into your course materials.
Help files – general and specific help for OLab.
We still have our other servers running on the University of Calgary virtual machines. It has recently become difficult to maintain these in a stable form, hence the move of some of these services. We will update you if this improves.
demo.openlabyrinth.ca – Openlabyrinth v3.5.1 – pretty slow these days but still mostly works.
https://demo.olab.ca/ – currently offline
https://dev.olab.ca/ – currently offline
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.
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.
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?
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.
