General resources is a new feature that works behind the scenes to reduce the amount of storage needed for content, and to enhance the performance of certain operations. As a result of upgrading to Release 3.2 this feature will largely be used without those involved in course development needing to make any explicit changes to what they are currently doing.
In Realizeit content is stored in packages. Essentially each package can contain a number of files, and the contents of these files are delivered to the student as part of the learning experience. The actual content is stored in physical files which is stored at a location that we refer to as the ‘file store’. Resources can be uploaded to these files as part of the authoring process (or during ingestion), and the size of the resources will vary; for example content may contain large video files, images, audio files etc. As more and more content is added the amount of storage needed for these files is naturally growing.
In addition, when a product is versioned a copy is made of each package, and this leads to copies of the resources being created. If there are large resource files than this can use a lot of storage. In addition the copying of large files will slow down the versioning process.
The introduction of general resources addresses this issue. When resources are uploaded they can now be created as ‘general resources’, meaning that they are not part of the individual package, but are held at a location that can be accessed by any package. This means that, when a new version is created, a copy of the resources does not need to be made, provided the resource has not been changed.
An additional benefit is that, if a resource that has been uploaded already needs to be used in a different package, there is no need to upload it again. The author just needs to search for it and reference the existing resource.