Getting Started with Smart Sparrow
Smart Sparrow is an adaptive authoring platform for e-learning. Smart Sparrow provides both the authoring tools and the learning management system for enrolling learners, navigating through lessons, and viewing completion analytics.
Learning designers can use Smart Sparrow to create a single quiz to test learner comprehension or design a full multi-module course for online distribution. Smart Sparrow provides a library of drag-and-drop components including matching, list-sorting, fill-in-the-blanks, grouping, flashcards, and written answers to build learning experiences. The authoring tool also includes graph components for displaying data, tables for data entry, and a poll widget for the learner to explore how their responses rank among their peers.
Assessment with each of these components is evident in the analytics. The analytics engine dissects the user’s actions into time spent on a question, how the student answered, and the number of attempts toward a correct answer. Adaptive learning uses variable feedback to direct learners onto different paths to reinforce concepts. Through branching analytics, the instructor can see exactly where students are having difficulties and how the program is re-directing learners through the lesson based on their responses to assessment questions.
Our Roadmap
In this Getting Started Series, we will be delving into the tools and the magic to author your first Smart Sparrow lesson. This first section will present how to get started, help you become familiar with using the authoring tools and components and get you on your way to building your own lessons. As an educator, I have explored much of the Smart Sparrow platform, and I would like to share my knowledge and tips that I have learned building adaptive courses.
Later, we will uncover the thinking behind designing for adaptive lessons, cover the methods for deploying your lessons into classes, and of course, exploring the powerful insights in the analytics. So, let’s get started with Smart Sparrow.
Getting Started:
Logging in and first look:
After signup, you can see the home section of the platform. This area will show your recent changes to lessons and is the launch point for beginning Smart Sparrow’s interactive training, titled, Journey. These guided tutorials are built on Smart Sparrow’s learning platform and allow you to see how the platform could be used in your own lessons.
Six modules cover the breadth of Smart Sparrow’s core features. Click Begin Journey to view these tutorials. There are also links to the Knowledge Base, the widget Component Library, and best practices in pedagogy. These lessons are a good place to start, but our designers did not find them thorough enough to become proficient in building our own lessons. That’s why we started this guide, to fill that knowledge gap with what we’ve learned building courses.
Themes
Before we jump into lesson building, there is one important notation. Prior to building a more responsive interface, Smart Sparrow used an older lesson editor. This lesson editor is still active for compatibility with older courses and is the default editor when opening a new lesson. To update the lesson to the new theme, click on Lesson in the Menu and choose the Lesson Appearance button (Lesson > Lesson Appearance).
Then uncheck the “Use legacy viewer theme,” and the lesson will render in the updated theme. Nothing will appear to have changed in the authoring tool, but the lesson output will look different in preview mode.
Both legacy and updated themes can be used; the functionality of the lesson builder is mostly the same. Many lesson authors choose to replace the legacy theme for a cleaner, more modern lesson interface. Unchecking that box will activate the updated theme for your lesson.
Preview
To view a lesson as a learner seed it, use the lesson preview button. Located at the top-right side of the authoring tool, this green button with the play icon will open your lesson so you can interact with it as a learner would.
This is great for testing the look and feel of your lesson. I recommend using the preview mode frequently to evaluate everything as you move along.
Creating your first lesson
To create a new lesson, select “Lessons” from the top menu.
Select the “Create a Lesson” button on the top-left. Smart Sparrow will generate a lesson and launch the authoring editor. Although the output is in HTML, Smart Sparrow’s current authoring tool is built with Flash. You may be prompted to allow Flash to continue.
It is a good practice to name your lesson as soon as it is created. This lesson name can be changed later, but naming it at the start can save you from the quickly confusing state of having several “Untitled Lessons” in your lesson library. To name a lesson, look to the top left of the screen. A new lesson will have the default lesson name of Untitled Lesson. Click within this title field and change the name to something meaningful. Your lesson name will automatically be saved.
The Authoring Tool
Smart Sparrow’s authoring tool is composed of a main menu ribbon, a sidebar, and a stage. The stage is the white rectangle in the center of the screen. It functions much like a PowerPoint slide. This is your artboard or canvas for composing your content.
Along the top of the authoring tool is the main menu ribbon. Let’s briefly talk about each of these menu options:
New: New shows the menu items for adding a new screen, a new layer, or choosing from a selection of layout templates.
Insert: For adding photos, text, or media, use the Insert tab. This option is also used to insert other basic inputs such as form fields for written responses, variations in assessment questions, and creating a popup window.
Components: Components are Smart Sparrow’s widget library. These units add additional functionality to your lesson including drag-and-drop, matching, fill-in-the-blanks, flashcards, tables, and buttons.
Lesson: Lesson controls the global settings for the lesson, including the lesson’s theme, media assets used on the screens, and variables for advanced operations.
Screen: The Screen tab provides fine-tuning options for each stage screen. You can configure the screen’s size, scoring options, and user interface elements.
The Sidebar
Let’s move to the sidebar. Like a PowerPoint slide deck, the sidebar designates the order of the lesson’s slides. With adaptive pathways, learners can take multiple paths through a lesson and this is designated in the lower portion of the sidebar.
The upper portion of the sidebar, under the heading SCREENS is the slide editor. A new slide can be added or duplicated using the blue Add button and slides can be copied and reordered.
The lower section though is where the magic happens. These are your trapstates, the recipes for adaptive lesson interaction. Trapstates are Smart Sparrow’s term for setting a condition and a response for a user’s screen behavior. Although Smart Sparrow’s slides can be configured like a PowerPoint presentation, with an adaptive lesson, the user’s path through the lesson does not need to be a linear progression. Some users can travel right through; other learners will benefit from alternate, branching routes that reinforce concepts.
Trapstates are actions that trigger when a user’s on-slide activity matches a recipe of cause and response. It is the recipe for the response to the learner’s actions. Here you can program what happens when a user gets an assessment question correct or incorrect, what feedback to provide in response to a user struggling on a slide, and where to set the number of attempts for question scoring. Trapstates may be an area of confusion, but writing a trapstate recipe does get easier with practice. Next, we’ll get a simple lesson set up so you can get started navigating the slide authoring tools.
Getting Started with Text
Most slides will contain some text and possibly an image. We will start with learning how to add text and images to a slide. A new lesson opens with one blank, untitled slide. To give the slide a name, click in the area just above the slide and change “Untitled” to something meaningful.
To add text to the screen on that slide, click Insert on the top menu and then select “Text.” The cursor changes into a crosshair for drawing a text box. Clicking anywhere on the screen will create a text box. The two blue squares on either side enable fine-toothed control of the text box width and position.
When a text box is selected, the editing toolset will become visible. Smart Sparrow has five font options: Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana. Additional fonts can be loaded into the lesson with CSS. The text in the text box (and not just the text box) should be highlighted when editing. The authoring tool provides several heading options to simplify font sizes, or you can fine-tune the text manually, with the familiar font-size dropdown, bold, italics, underline, and alignment buttons.
Adding Images
Select the Insert option in the menu and then click on the Image button. A file selection window will open, and you can choose the image you want to upload. The authoring tool supports uploads of .jpg, .png, and .gif image formats. Like many online authoring tools, for effective image loading, it is better to maintain a low file size for the image graphic. In my experience, a few hundred kilobytes is the highest picture file size I use with Smart Sparrow. The quality is not degraded and the image loads quickly. An image with a megabyte size or higher may pause the lesson as it loads.
When an image is selected, the image editor becomes active. To the left of the editor tab, you can see x and y values, width and height values, and a field to place screen reader descriptive text. The x and y values correspond to the top-left corner of the image. To align an image with the screen, enter 0 for x and 0 for y to position the image flush with the left and top screen borders.
The height and width fields provide the values to set the image’s dimensions. One item to note is that the values cannot be set to control for aspect ratio. If you know your graphic’s dimensions, you can enter them here. Otherwise, you will need to click the image and drag out the anchor points to change the image’s size.
Layering
Using the mouse to right-click on screen items shows additional menu options. Perhaps the most useful of these is setting the front-to-back layer order. An overlapping text and image can be resolved by either selecting the image and sending it backward or bringing the text toward the foreground.
With this same right-click selection, you can also lock layers in place, which is useful when selecting specific assets from several on a screen.
Now that we have an initial screen with text and a graphic, let’s add our next screen. Use the blue Add button on the sidebar to create a new screen.
I usually name my new slide something even if I know I will need to change it later. It is better than hunting through a sidebar filled with unnamed slides.
This is a blank slide, so if you are following along, practice by adding text or an image. Then we will learn how to create a basic trapstate.
Adding feedback
One of the trapstate’s most common usage areas is providing feedback to the learner. Before we get into building assessment questions, let’s start with something simple. See the next button at the bottom right of the screen? When the user clicks on that button while on the first screen in the lesson, we are going to show feedback, saying “Great job, you’ve created your first feedback!”
To add a trapstate recipe to your first screen, select the first screen in the sidebar menu. Then, in the lower sidebar area labeled Adaptivity, click on the Correct State text.
You can add both correct and incorrect feedback as well as a host of other recipes , but to get started, we are just going to add a response to a correct statement. For this example, a correct statement is if the next button is selected and there are no incorrect trapstate recipes to check. Since we won’t have any other trapstates, the program evaluates the condition of the Correct State as correct.
In the Correct State dialog panel, there are two blue buttons; the one on top is Condition, and the button below is Action.
This dialog is where you set your cause-and-effect relationships. Selecting the Condition button expands a set of options for Current Actions, Previous Actions, Learning Path, Performance, and Other. Since our user will be selecting the next button at the present time, we could set the condition to current actions. But without any additional interactive elements on the screen (quizzes or widgets), clicking the next button is the default action and a condition does not need to be set.
Next, click on the Action button. There are three options available here: Give some feedback, Go to another screen, and Change an object on the screen. For this example, we want to choose to give some feedback. Clicking on the “Give some feedback” text will provide a place to enter feedback.
Click in the “Enter Feedback Here” field to edit the feedback. Below the green bar, the Enter Feedback Here field will hold the contents of your message.
Replace the Enter Feedback Here text with the feedback of your choice, such as “Great job, you’ve created your first feedback!” When you are finished, click the blue close button to save your feedback message.
Now back on the Correct State dialog panel, below the edit feedback option, there is an option to Go to the next available screen. Since we only have two screens, we will leave it like that. To test our first feedback, select the Preview button at the top right of the authoring tool. Then click the “Next” button at the bottom right and your feedback will appear in the bottom right-hand corner.
Good work today! Next time we will expand on our knowledge of trapstates and the recipes that activate them. Trapstates are important in adaptive lesson building because they catch a learner’s actions and can redirect a learner to a different learning path. In the meantime, I would recommend beginning Smart Sparrow’s Journey training. It’s a good start to begin thinking in Smart Sparrow’s platform and you can practice with the authoring tool editor to reinforce what you learned today.
