I just started exploring using an external instructions source for our lab profiles, because there is no versioning or publishing check for lab instructions in LOD itself. I was dismayed to see that labs that use an external instructions source cannot include questions or automated activities.
I guess this ties in with the other suggestions to be able to export questions and automated activities – to have a way to render those in markdown or scripting so that they can be stored in an external source along with the markdown for the instructions.
| Who would most benefit from this idea? | Lab Developers or Lab Authors |
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What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Versioning and source control for lab profiles with questions and automated activities |
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Thanks for taking a minute to send along this suggestion! Our Product Group has given this an initial review and assigned this a status of "Future Consideration." This status mean this Idea is not yet on our roadmap, but will be part of our normal prioritization processes.
If you have additional context or would like to generate more demand, feel free to edit your original post, add a comment, and/or invite your peers to upvote your Idea.
This is important for our translation strategy for 2023.
Hm, okay, then I guess it would be helpful for the documentation on this to be more detailed.
Right now, the page on using an external instruction source (https://docs.learnondemandsystems.com/lod/instruction-source.md#external-management-disadvantages) simply says "Automated and question activities are unavailable when using an external repository as an instruction source."
It sounds like you can use them in the lab instructions, but you can't manage the activities from the external instruction source.
It is possible to include activities and questions in labs with externally sourced instructions, but it is not as intuitive as when working with local instructions. When using local instructions, you can place the cursor where you want to activity or question and then use the insert function of the editor to add the IDLx token directly to your instructions. The token can be added to external instructions, but you will need to manually enter the token into the instructions. The IDLx format for adding activities is :
@lab.Activity(%token%)
where %token% is the token you define for the activity.
Rowan, thank you for your idea submission. We are currently looking into this scenario and will update this comment again with some further posts.