e-Learning Software Course Development Version Control in Unison

At BYOL eLearning 2009 conference there was a discussion about e-learning best practices and the topic of version control came up. It's not surprising to find out that many course developers don't understand the need for version control inherently since they usually come from an instructional design or training background and not a software development background. So I constantly preach that from a methodology standpoint, course developers are creating software and can take a lot from software development best practices. Version control is one of those.

As a simple definition, version control means that you have backups of what you just changed so if you don't like the changes you just made you can roll back to that previous version any time. It's reassuring to know you can do that and occasionally version controls can save your project from total disaster.

One of the lesser known features in Rapid Intake Unison is built-in version control. Every time you close a course editing session, Unison saves a full backup of all of your data (precisely all of the XML files in the course). This is done automatically for you so you don't have to worry about it and Unison saves the backup with a date and time stamp. At any time, you can also click the Save a Backup button at the top of the course authoring interface and even give your backup a name.

Once you have a backup (either manual or automatic), you can roll back to that version (if you are an administrator) by finding the project in the Admin tab, then clicking the View link under the Versions column.  This takes you to the version history screen: