Virtual Materials Toolset: Tutorial 6: Customizing Client Preferences – UnitusTI Help Center

Introduction

The example

Accessing the User Preferences screen

Customizing Slide Preferences

Trying Slide Preferences

Customizing Deck Preferences

Trying Deck Preferences

Final Considerations

Additional resources

Introduction

Packs can contain up to 400 Cards and Slides. With the help of Decks and Random Cards, the total number of visually different slides can multiply that limit easily.

But sometimes there may be situations where it is desired to work with a subset of the Pack’s content during a session with a specific Learner. For example:

You want to implement a progressive approach with each learner, presenting basic content and in future sessions enabling slides and cards intended for advanced usage while hiding the basic ones.
A Learner may be sensitive to some content. For example, a phobia of cats may require that we hide all cards with pictures of cats for this specific Learner.

One possible way to approach these needs may be to clone the original Pack and get rid of unwanted content. But this approach doesn’t solve the need of enabling previously erased content at a later step.

Also, it leads to the problem of a growing collection of similar packs, hard to maintain.

Wouldn’t it be better if we can specify for each Learner what Cards and Slides we want to hide, without the need to cloning Packs for each particular case? That is a feature existing in VM and the objective of this tutorial.

The example

In the Tutorial 5 we created four slides related to animal classification. Two of them were intended for basic learners, asking them to classify the animals in five general categories: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish; and the other two slides were designed for advanced learners in mind, allowing them to select subcategories based on scientific names like “mammals - marsupials” for a kangaroo.

Assuming we have a Basic Learner and an Advanced Learner (let’s say user rosita1 is the Basic and rosita2 is the Advanced Learner for this example), what we finally want is the Basic learner only having access to slides 1 and 2, while advanced learner should have access only to slides 3 and 4:

Accessing the User Preferences screen

In order to access the Session’s User Preferences options, we need to launch a Session for the given client; once the session is ready, we should open the Pack that we want to customize (in our case, it is “Tutorial 5”):

Now, we can go to “Client - Recent Packs” to obtain a list with all the packs that we had used with the Learner “rosita1”. In this case, “tutorial 5” is the only pack used with this particular Learner:

By selecting the “Tutorial 5” Pack, the button “Preferences” should become active. Please click on it. Now, we should be at the “Pack Preferences” screen:

Customizing Slide Preferences

By default, the “User Preferences” screen presents the list of slides (we will see how to customize decks later). Search in the list of Available Slides on the left for the slides 1 and 2, and move them to the list on the right (“Preferred Slides”) by using the arrows buttons in the middle of the Screen:

Now press “Save”. By doing this, we are saying that only slide 1 and slide 2 should be available when using this Pack with the user Rosita1.

Trying Slide Preferences

Changes in the Slide’s Client Preferences are applied immediately if the Pack is open or when it is open the next time.

We are going to close the Session for Rosita1, and repeat the same steps for Rosita2:

Open a Local Session for Rosita2.
Open the Pack “Tutorial 5”.
Open the Client Preferences.
Select slides 3 and 4 as “Preferred Slides”.

This is a comparison of how a Local Session should look for a Test User, for Rosita1 (Basic Learner) and for Rosita 2 (Advanced Learner):

Customizing Deck Preferences

We already learned how to customize Slides for specific users, but we mentioned at the start of the tutorial another case that may require customizing the list of Cards associated with a Deck (to be displayed in a Random Card ).

We mentioned the example of a Learner that has a phobia of dogs. It would be desirable to avoid the use of Cards with dog pictures or names, but only for this particular learner.

The Tutorial 3 will be useful for this example. In that tutorial, we have a single Slide that makes use of Random Cards to pick Cards with names of animals on them:

This is the list of Cards associated with the Deck “Animal Names”:

Notice that we have a card with the word “Dog” on it. Our goal is to hide that specific Card from our Basic Learner (rosita1).

Launch a Local Session for your Basic Learner (in this case, rosita1).
Once in the Local Session Window, open the Pack “Tutorial 3”.
Click on Client - Recent Packs.
Select the Pack “Tutorial 3”.
Click on the button “Preferences”
Select the “Decks” tab.

The Decks Preferences Screen has three columns.

At the left, there is a list of Decks. We select our “Animal Names” deck.

The middle list is the Available Cards.

The list on the right should contain the Cards that we want to be visible for the Learner.

What we want is to move to “Preferred Cards” all the cards with the exception of “Dog”. That card should stay in the “Available Cards” list in the middle:

Note: You can move all the cards to the right with the button “All >”, and then select Dog and move it back to the left with the button “<”.

Remember to save your changes before closing this window.

Trying Deck Preferences

We can try our new settings by loading multiple times the slide. Each time you click on the Slide thumbnail in the bottom bar, it will be reloaded with new content. Check that the card “Dog” never is displayed:

Final Considerations

The goal of Slide and Deck Preferences is to adapt the content to the need of specific learners, without the need of creating multiple copies of the Pack that will become hard to mantain.
Slide and Deck Preferences work both in Local and Remote Sessions.