Excuse my bad attempt at verse, but I’m quite excited by our new eFront 4.4 update, and I think that after reading this post, you will be too.
More than a mere point release, it’s chock-full with major new features, and, more importantly, it represents a big turning point for the platform; but more on that later.
The Best of eFront 4.4
H5P content creation toolset
H5P is a collection of libraries and tools that empower content creators to create rich HTML5 interactions.
H5P support in eFront 4.4 allows instructors to add rich interactive content, mini-apps, videos, presentations, games and more to their courses, that they can either create themselves from scratch or download and adapt from the community shared projects at H5P.org.
Learning history
eFront 4.4 allows administrators to view the complete training history of a user, including all courses attended and completed, test results, certifications, and more.
What’s more, instructors can even revert a user to a previous learning history state.
Batch Importer
The new Batch Importer plugin provides a quick way of building your course and lesson structure from already existing SCORM content.
Using the batch importer, an eFront administrator just has to import a single zip file containing all of their SCORM content, and the system will automatically create the necessary courses and fill-in the appropriate lesson content for each course.
Two factor authentication
eFront 4.4 introduces 2-factor authentication as an optional security setting.
2-factor authentication improves security by requiring an additional identification key (“factor”) on top of the regular user password. The technology is used to secure highly critical systems such as banking websites and corporate accounts, but has been seeing widespread adoption from popular SaaS providers such as Google, Facebook and Apple too.
2-factor authentication options in eFront 4.4 include SMS tokens, the Google Authenticator mobile app and email.
And the rest of eFront 4.4
While those were our new flagship features, eFront 4.4 goes much deeper than that, with several new capabilities and important workflow improvements. These include:
• Content versioning
As far as minor features go, this one is a biggie: past versions of a unit are saved and can be retrieved for future reference, allowing you to keep a history of your unit edits and changes.
• xAPI 1.0 support
While we already supported previous versions of xAPI (a.k.a. TinCan), we now have support for the standard first stable version too.
• Course prerequisites
You can now indicate that a course is only accessible if the user has completed one or more other courses.
• Clone content
You can now select a unit, test, survey etc, and clone to another lesson (provided that you have access to it).
• Self-assessment tests
A test now may be characterized as “self-assessment”, meaning that it doesn’t count in the overall lesson (and course) score.
• Express interest
End-users may now request a training session to be organized near their preferred area.
• Branch settings
You can now specify at the branch level the site name and motto, as well as the preferred SAML gateway to use for SSO.
Finally, we’ve made new Bookmarks and Glossary plugins available alongside the 4.4 release.
The new release is already available to download / update to, and of course it also comes with the usual assortment of fixes, improvements and fine-tuning to our User Interface from our UX ninjas.
eFront got talent
Starting from right about now, eFront will be rebranded as a Learning and Talent Development Platform. Worry not, this doesn’t mean we’re dropping your favorite eLearning management features, or that we’ll stop adding new LMS functionality — just that we will fine tune and enhance eFront for Talent Development workflows as well.
So think of eFront 4.4 as a super-set of Talent Development and eLearning Management features, in other words even better for modern enterprise needs.