Requirements for course uploads in zipBoard

zipBoard is a review and approval tool that embeds annotations on webpages, courses, PDF documents, videos, etc. For standard formats like PDF and videos, zipBoard is able to tag comments on the exact location because of an easy way to identify the location of those tags. But, for webpages and courses, we are dependent on the HTML / coding structure of that webpage. While we have tried to include and test on many different authoring tools, supporting every authoring tool, where the tech does not have the specific APIs exposed, we are unable to get the tagging to work.

For comments to work in zipBoard directly on the courses or webpages , zipBoard needs the following information:

a unique URL for every page to reflect change in contentor
a Webpage to expose an API in global scope to read/set current locatione.g. window.getPageId, window.setPageId ( this information varies for different authoring tools or webpages- and we have had to engineer this to cover as many as cases as possible )

Annotation positioning relies on element IDs and class names. So it’s required for elements to have unique IDs/class names for correct positioning. i.e. if a course changes content of the page without changing URL or exposing JavaScript API for reading location and elements that don't have unique id/class name annotation might appear on top of the wrong element.

There are courses authored in some authoring tools, which do not give any of this information, in that case, the users have to resort to taking a screenshot manually and then adding annotations.

Status for specific Authoring tools

Courses created in the following authoring tools where annotations work directly:

Rise ( Articulate )
Adobe Captivate
GOMO

Courses created in the following authoring tools, do not work with directly tagging annotations, and require screenshots to be taken:

Articulate 360
Articulate Storyline
Elucidat
Adapt

Please note, these are the authoring tools that we have tested with, if there are any other specific ones that you would like us to test, feel free to share the content.

Requirements for courses to work in zipBoard player:

We do not really mandate having any tracking standards for courses to work in zipBoard. But, sometimes, the published course requires them to be enabled for the course to work properly. If the course engine requires any of these standards to finish a course, our player also requires the same. The following standards have been tested in our player:

*SCORM 1.2 / 2004

*TinCan API

For any other information, please feel free to reach out at [email protected]