Launch a demo course in a new window immediately

Launch a demo course in a new window immediately

by Kev C -
Number of replies: 1

Hi! I have a specific requirement that I am hoping someone can help me with.

Basically I am launching a moodle demo course directly from a link on a standard HTML website. However, when a user clicks the link it opens a page with intro text where you have to click "enter" to continue. Next the course launch page appears and I have to click the launch button to start the course in a pop-up window.

Is there a way I can launch the course direct in a pop-up window from the link without all the extra pages in-between?

It's a SCORM course and you can find it here: http://www.empowered2train.co.uk/

You can see what I mean about the interim pages by clicking on the "View Demo Course" menu option and looking at the demo course launch sequence.

It seems like it should be a fairly simple thing to do but I just can't figure it out. I am new to Moodle so that doesn't help! Any tips or advice you can give me on this would be very much appreciated.

Thanks! smile

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In reply to Kev C

Re: Launch a demo course in a new window immediately

by Dan Marsden -
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Hi Kev,

You should always start your posts with the moodle version you are running, but I can see that your site is running the new SCORM player so you are running at least 2.0

that pop-up is being generated by your SCORM package - it needs the "parent" window as the "pop-up" window communicates with the "parent" window which contains the SCORM API inside Moodle. so in it's current state you can't launch without the other pages.

But in Moodle 2 there is a "way" to improve this (make sure you're running the latest 2.2Stable code though as older versions don't display the new window option quite as well) - also there is a bug in the tracker that affects the height of the package that will probably go into core sometime in Feb, see MDL-31381 for more info.

If you modify your SCORM package (using your SCORM authoring tool - not Moodle) to open the package in the same window you can get closer to what you need but you need to make a few config changes in Moodle to improve the display.

SCORM in Moodle has an option to open the package in the current window or in a new window - in previous Moodle versions the SCORM api was always loaded in the "parent" window so you couldn't remove it, but in 2.1/2.2 the API now loads in the pop-up window itself, but Moodle still opens both (I have plans to change this a bit sometime soon)

So...
step 1 - modify your SCORM package so that it doesn't load the package in a new window (you will need to ask your SCORM authoring tool vendor if you don't know how to do this - or ask for help in your scorm authoring tools own forums (if they have one)
Step 2 - in the Moodle settings page for your scorm set the option to open in "new window"
step 3 - enter the SCORM and look at the URL that is used to load the SCORM (it will have something like yoursite.com/mod/scorm/player.php?somevars - copy that url and use it as the link to load the SCORM package.

Also have a look at some of the other settings that change how the package is displayed - you can hide/disable the TOC on the left (looks like a good idea as your package doesn't seem to have one)

hope that helps!

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