Uploading resources

The resources you can directly create and edit in docendo (e.g. courses, sections, questions etc.) are based on text or XML and therefore are suitable to be edited online with your browser. As e-learning needs multi-media content, resources like images, videos, animations, audio files etc. need to be created outside of docendo and uploaded afterwards. These resources are referred to as media resources or assets. docendo also lets you upload files that are not strictly media resources, e.g. PDF files, Slides or Word processing files. These are considered as Office documents and can also be packaged with a learning course.

You can upload media resources either with the button Upload in the top-left New category of the Resource Browser, or when you are editing a section, by pressing the button and choosing Upload resource from local device from the menu. All these options are basically the same, the latter method just additionally adds the resource to the current section after uploading.

You will be presented a file chooser dialog that lets you browse your hard drive for the file you want to upload to docendo. Depending on the type of file you upload, the following steps may vary and thus are marked optional.

This step applies only when uploading an archive file, i.e. as ZIP file. ZIP files may be used to bundle files that logically build a single resource. Examples for this type of resources are:

• Flash files that need to load other files at runtime. This is often the case when extracting text as language specific XML files from a Flash animation.
• Images for which you want to bundle a source file from which the image has been generated.

The anchor file conceptually is the main file in an archive and will be used for rendering. It also determines the resource type that docendo assigns to the resources and will influence the configuration steps that follow.

Choosing the files to export determines the files which will be included when exporting a course to HTML or SCORM. If e.g. you bundled a source file with an image file, you may want to de-select the source file to prevent it from being exported.

This step is only needed when uploading Adobe Flash files in SWF format. The docendo flash control panel provides buttons to play, pause and stop animations or videos. When uploading Flash Video files, the control panel will automatically be used.

When uploading a media resource, you may edit the size in which the resource gets displayed on course pages. This is essential when uploading Flash or audio files as they do not have an inherent size.

For images, please note that docendo does not physically scale the image when you enter a size different from the actual image resolution but rather uses the size in generated HTML image tags to let the browser scale the image when being viewed.

You may also select one of the recommended media sizes. These sizes particularly fit well into the layout of the pages that docendo generates and help ensuring a consistent look and feel of your courses.

When uploading a Flash file, you may enter parameters that get passed to it when being viewed in a browser. Especially the FlashVars parameter may be useful in case the Flash has to be configured this way or needs to load other files at runtime.

Please provide meaningful values for the important fields Title, Description and Keywords. These are being used for the search function and determine how well the resource can be found - and re-used.

After uploading, the complete metadata record of the resource may be edited in the Metadata Editor.