Untangling a web of technology issues
The Problem:
Our friends at Video Interact had been commissioned by a large transport company to create some interactive video-based training for their staff. These videos were to include SCORM tracking.
The first SCORM packages worked fine on a http server, SCORM Cloud, and CourseMill – but when the client installed the courses on their LMS (with the videos hosted externally), they hit problems. The videos wouldn’t play, the screen just froze. We got involved and started digging.
How We Helped:
The first issue was clearly a lack of bandwidth. We reduced the video file sizes and embedded them in the LMS. While this improved performance on their network, this didn’t fully solve the problem. The LMS seemed to be blocking the content.
We identified that the LMS was running the courses in Quirks mode – essentially making the browser run as if it were IE6. Interactive videos are based on HTML5 technology and require a more modern browser than that! After some dialogue, the LMS provider made some changes and we reached a point where we could run the videos as intended, in Native mode.
However, the problems didn’t end there. The version of Citrix used on our client’s workstations was designed for data entry and retrieval; many users didn’t even have audio. We conducted testing with a wide range of devices and locations to try and find a solution; desktop PCs running Windows XP, new laptops running Windows 8, Citrix ‘thin clients’, and iPad Airs. Together with our client, we came to the unavoidable conclusion that their network was simply not built to stream video, and users in this environment wouldn’t be able to do so until the network and workstations were upgraded.
However, there were several areas of the network that had been modernised. They had better capacity and many of the users were on iPads. So our final solution was to run the course as a blend of training, delivered primarily using iPads.
The Result:
We helped our client to understand the challenges and limitations imposed by their environment, so that in the future they can ensure their products will be suited to it.
We’ve developed our interactive video technology to be more resilient in bandwidth-limited environments.
Our client’s upcoming course development wasn’t affected by the Quirks issue, since we uncovered it before launch.
We began a long and friendly relationship with Video Interact, which has led to us partnering with them many times since. Head to our showcase and theirs to see some of the fruit of this partnership.