Released 2020-05-06
This is the first release of Engine 20.1. You may notice that with this release, we’ve decided to start using a more typical naming convention for our product versions, and 20 seemed like a nice round number to start with. It’s also pretty close to the actual number of Engine releases that we’ve done since 2005.1 came out 15 years ago. Our hope is that the new convention will make it easier to judge how much has changed between releases, just by comparing the numbers.
Here's what's new in this release:
LTI Support
Starting with Engine 20.1, you now have the ability to import and launch LTI 1.1 and 1.3 tools through the same mechanisms you have for other standards. We currently support LTI 1.1 with Basic Outcomes (score only) and LTI 1.3 with Assignment & Grade Services (score & status).
For customers using our Dispatch product, we also now support dispatching as LTI 1.3. Now you can treat an entire destination as a single LTI 1.3 tool that provides each dispatch as a resource. This greatly simplifies deployment for LMS administrators and instructors.
YouTube
You can now create a course in Engine for a YouTube video by its URL, and deliver it to learners with the same results tracking that we provide with our native MP4 video support.
Subtitles and Closed Captions
Engine’s native MP4 video support has also gained a new feature in 20.1: the ability to display subtitles or closed captions for accessibility. Using the new course assets API resource, you can upload WebVTT files in one or more languages for your videos, and your learners will be able to enable captions for their preferred language.
On-demand xAPI Registrations
Not all learning happens inside an LMS. One of the primary strengths of xAPI is that it can be used to capture those experiences and record them in a learning record store (LRS) like the one built into Engine. A drawback to that approach is that you lose the convenience of Engine’s registration-based, standards-agnostic API for accessing results data. But now with Engine 20.1, you can create new registrations on-demand based on incoming xAPI statements, or map those statements to existing registrations.
Offline Extension Improvements
With this version of Engine we have tried to simplify and improve the way that mobile applications using our Offline libraries interact with the Engine web application. While it will require some changes to the mobile application, it should make apps more resilient to changes in Engine's player going forward.
Note: There are a number of potentially breaking changes in Engine 20.1. If you are upgrading from an older Engine please check out this document for details on those.