Greg Gardner and Faith Powers from ICF International presented how they have managed the development of two large eLearning courses involving 15 people (with two Lectora developers) where team members are located in five different states. Their development cycle is similar to a software development process and included phases such as requirement gathering, design, implementation and test/QA cycles. They also came up with a naming convention for all objects and resources in Lectora so that each item can be identified where it is used (chapter, section, page, etc) just by looking at the name of the object. For example, the name of an image used on a page will contain some identifiable acronyms of chapter, section and page that the image is used on. They also have setup a versioning system so that the developers at different geographic locations can share, check in and out the data files.

They take advantage of Lectora's Library Object feature where each library object may be small segment of a page or sometimes, an entire page. This approach has increased the code reuse tremendously; especially since ICF put in place some “rules” where the developers must get the “legal” copy of the object from a shared drive.

Greg, being quite familiar with JavaScript programming, also made liberal use of the “External HTML Object” feature of Lectora. He went over a number of ways that JavaScript customization was used in the project including how to custom control the audio object or using the FlashVars parameter to control the flash animation.

In general, this presentation helped anyone who has the responsibility of managing a large online course development project and/or for advanced Lectora developers who are interested in custom controlling the objects using the External HTML Objects.

Robert Aung-Naing
Robert is a Software Engineer for Trivantis and is based out of the Boca Raton, FL office. Robert has been involved in the development of new features and resolving issues for the Lectora Online product. He has been involved with Web application development using Java and Javascript for over ten years. Robert has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University.