Thanks to Articulate Support My Articulate Presenter Preview Problem Has Been Resolved

You may remember my previous post in which I mentioned that I've been having a bit of a problem with Articulate Presenter. In particular, I could use Presenter to develop content, but I couldn't preview my content before publishing it. Anyhow, thanks to Articulate Support, you'll be pleased to know that the problem has now been fixed.

For just over a week, a large number of email were exchanged between Articulate Support and myself as we tried to figure out what the problem was. I must admit, Articulate Support were fantastic. They were really quite attentive and seemed to be genuinely interested in trying to help me. Anyhow, we did the email ping pong thing for over a week until we reached a point where we seemed to be running out of options so one of their senior customer support engineers suggested we organise a virtual meeting.

So that's what we did. We had a virtual meeting last Tuesday morning from 8am until about 10.35am. The engineer was very professional and seemed to know his stuff. Suffice to say, by the end of it I was tired but relieved because although we hadn’t found an answer to my problem, we had found a clever way around the problem. To cut a long story short, after extensive testing by Articulate, it appears that my user account has somehow been compromised. We know this to be the case because we created a new user, logged in as that user and successfully previewed Articulate Presenter content whereas I wasn't able to preview content when accessing Articulate Presenter by way of my old user account.

So, since my old user account has somehow been compromised, from now on I'm going to start using my new user account instead . I'll keep the old one just in case. Mind you, I've got a bit of work ahead of me moving all the stuff from Outlook in my old user account to Outlook in my new user account. However, as far as I'm concerned, it's just a minor inconvenience. The important thing for me is that I can now preview in Articulate Presenter.

My Articulate Presenter Preview Problem... Can You Help Me?

You'll have to excuse me. In recent days I've been a bit pre-occupied with an important software problem which has taken up a lot of my time. In particular, when previewing content in Articulate Presenter I see nothing. In other words, when I go to the Articulate Ribbon and click "Preview, Preview this slide" or "Preview, Preview Next 3 Slides" or Preview, Preview Range of Slides" the Preview window appears but it doesn't contain anything. Here's what I see:

This has been happening for about two weeks now. It doesn't matter whether I'm trying to preview something that was created an hour ago or a year ago: preview simply doesn't work. I'm not sure what the trigger was or is. Perhaps there's more than one trigger. All I know is that it's very frustrating.

The software works as it should except for the fact that I can't preview anything. I can create a presentation and then publish it but I can't preview. I've tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the software as well as uninstalling and then reinstalling Adobe Flash which the Articulate suite uses. I've also uninstalled Internet Explorer 8 such that I'm now running Internet Explorer 7. So far nothing has worked.

I've had an ongoing conversation by email with Articulate Support and I must admit they've been very helpful. However, at this point in time, I still can't preview Articulate Presenter content. Personally, I think it has something to do with Adobe Flash and/or Internet Explorer. Why do I think this? Because, as Articulate Support told me in one of their emails, and I quote, "Articulate Studio '09 products need Flash Player to work properly, and this is the Flash Player plugin that is installed in Internet Explorer."

All I can say to you right now is that I've invested a lot of time in trying to find a solution to this problem and that I hope to have resolved this problem before the end of the month.

Testing a Multi SCORM Learning Object in Moodle 2.0

At last night’s Melbourne Moodle Users Group meeting I demonstrated how to create a multi SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) learning object using JCA Solution's Simple SCORM Packager (SSP). Apart from the fact that we had some minor technical difficulties, it was a good night. In particular, there were several IT-savvy people in the room but no-one could get the data projector to recognise the laptop. We tried a few different keyboard combinations on the laptop but it didn't work. In the end we got everyone to crowd around me as I used my laptop to demonstrate how to use Simple SCORM Packager.

OK. So that was problem number 1. Problem number 2 was that I had a particular multi SCORM learning object which I wanted to show the group. This was a SCO (Shareable Content Object) which I had viewed that morning. Anyhow, for no apparent reason, we couldn't view this learning object half a day later. It just wouldn't open. The only thing that had changed was the Internet Service Provider (ISP). In the morning I was at home using my ISP, namely Internode, whereas in the evening I was using the meeting room's ISP.

Not being able to open a SCO which had opened easily previously is not unusual. I've had learning objects which would open on one occasion but not another. I have found from past experience that this problem can sometimes be solved by simply changing browsers. On this occasion, we started out using Mozilla Firefox. When that didn't work we changed over to Internet Explorer. As soon as we changed to Internet Explorer we were able to open the SCO which we hadn't been able to open earlier.

I have absolutely no idea why a SCO can be opened in Firefox in the morning but not in the evening. Would it be a problem with the browser? Or is it a problem with the Internet Service Provider (ISP)? Maybe it's something to do with Moodle 2.0. What do you think?