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Research

OB3 is an ongoing project by our world-class R&D team. It draws on our many years’ experience supporting educators to deliver quality online medical education.

Design

Design lies at the heart of OB3. We employ visual, educational, and interaction design processes to identify the problems to be addressed through application functionality and then apply a consistent approach across everything we implement. 

Research

Evidence drives our product development.  We have formed strong R&D relationships with external partners and university research groups.

OB3 is the first web application to employ the advanced ATIRE search engine developed by the Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Otago.

Behind OB3’s advanced functionality lies a novel data model.  OB3 documents are constructed from elements (sentences, paragraphs, URLs, images, list items) which are assembled via linked lists into a document.  This allows us to capture the semantic richness of content, and build complex editing and learning functionality such as collaboration, annotation, and the study summary view.  We'd like to acknowledge help from the Database Systems group at the University of Otago Dept. of Information Science.

Technologies we like

OB3 leverages mature commercial and open-source technologies.  On the backend, we build on Sapphire, the core library of Silverstripe.   Silverstripe is based in Wellington, New Zealand and we have a close working relationship with them. We like Sapphire's ability to scale: Silverstripe built the site for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In the browser, we use Ext-JS4, from Sencha who like us are committed to the role of testing to ensure critical web apps can handle the heat.  Here's a video from the recent SenchCon providing an overview of Ext-JS4.

We believe educators who develop their own resources should be able to easily rmove these online.  To do this, we work closely with RunRev; OB3 contains deep support for LiveCode web, and we were profiled at their global conference recently.  We’re also using LiveCode to develop a mobile application for collaboration around OB3 content (more to come on this soon).

I have worked with Oceanbrowser for 10 years, and they are the engine room of our international education enterpriseDr Robin Griffiths, University of Otago

I have never worked with an IT company like Oceanbrowser before. Imagine the power of Apple with the smell of the girl next door, and customer service you never had? I have worked with Oceanbrowser for 10 years, and they are the engine room of our international education enterprise.

Dr Robin GriffithsDirector
Occupational and Aviation Medicine
University of Otago, Wellington
expand/collapse testimonial

OB3 beta 4 released

We're excited to announce the release of OB3 beta 4, the web application for online study. OB3 is the result of over 3 years of research and development, we're ...

OB3 beta 4 released

We're excited to announce the release of OB3 beta 4, the web application for online study. OB3 is the result of over 3 years of research and development, we're committed to improving the way graduate and professional education is delivered online.

Significant features of this release include:

  • Document sharing: share OB3 files or folders with colleagues, or publish to groups & courses with options to control what people can do within your content.
  • Discussions: all  OB3 documents now support discussions which are attached to any element within a document.
  • OB3 Powerpoint (PPT) converter (Windows) - Migrate your PPT content into OB3 with a single click converter. Supports multimedia presentations with video, audio, annotated images. Flexible options control how your presentation is converted. Perfect for converting Medical PPT presentations to OB3.
  • Export/Import: backup your OB3 documents for an offline copy of your work (saves as XML).
  • Document history: all changes to documents are recorded. Use the history menu to review changes or undo mistakes. History is available on each element within a document (e.g. a paragraph) as well as the whole document.
  • In-browser audio recording. From the element control bar select More -> Audio, then click the Microphone tab. Record audio and upload directly into OB3 without any additional software (other than Flash).
  • Many minor enhancements (such as support for superscript and subscript), layout improments, help message improvements, printing, linking between OB3 documents.
  • Support for Chrome Frame for older Internet Explorer browsers.

Earlier releases of OB3 provided:

  • A fully featured multimedia document authoring editor.
  • Intuitive editing features: click on anything in your document to edit, your changes are saved as you work.
  • Copy and paste compatability between web pages, MS Word documents and OB3. Use copy and paste to import text with ease.
  • Support for a wide variety of modern web browsers.
  • Drag and drop integration between the desktop and OB3 in your browser: add files, images, videos etc to your documents via drag and drop.

Rodney Tamblyn | CEO & Founder | oceanbrowser.com  email: rodney at oceanbrowser.com
18 Feb 2012 browse all posts expand/collapse post