There is a trophy here at Rustici — the Donnelly Cup. Reserved for the lowest rung on the ping-pong ladder, the Donnelly Cup serves as a reminder to the owner that there is always room for improvement. The Cup changes hands often, and currently resides in Joe’s office. Joe prominently displays the trophy and will challenge anyone to a duel to share its inspiration. Another trophy also appeared at our offices recently —SCORM Cloud earned a Gold Medal in the Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Technology Awards for Best Advance in Social Learning Technology. When we capture a gold medal we like to celebrate, and we’d like to say "thank you" to Brandon Hall and our fellow winners. We are in good company on a list which includes many of our customers. What’s even more exciting than our new bling are the possibilities that SCORM Cloud offers to advance social learning technology. It allows you to turn virtually any online platform into a track-able learning environment. Whether it’s using the pre-built WordPress plugin to turn your blog into a full blown training source, or developing your own app on top of our API, SCORM Cloud allows you to bring learning to where learners live. So while the Donnelly Cup recognizes the potential for ping pong greatness, we see similar opportunities with SCORM Cloud to inspire new applications within eLearning. If you have an inspiring use of SCORM Cloud, share it with us or let us know what you’d like to see it do next.

These days, with one click, you can buy a song from iTunes and automatically sync it to your iPod. Remember how long it used to take to buy a CD, burn the songs to your computer and transfer them to your MP3 player? Just think about how much time you saved from this one little improvement- more time to listen to your music, which is what you wanted to do in the first place. What if you could do the same thing with your content? It’s not always a simple process to import a SCORM package into an LMS. It may take 3 steps, or in some cases a dozen or more clicks to publish that course into your LMS. Multiply that by a few courses, and this time and effort adds up quickly. Imagine a tool that lets you export a course directly from your authoring tool into your LMS. One click puts that new course directly where it needs to go. Here is where PENS comes in. PENS (Package Exchange Notification System) simplifies the process of content publishing by automating the transfer of content between systems. While SCORM standards make content and systems work together, PENS takes it one step further. Think of it as rocket fuel for delivering content. As standards geeks, we get excited when specs emerge that further improve the efficiency of how content and systems play together. We see great potential with PENS and are eager to see its benefits realized by the larger eLearning community. So, how can you get started? We recently deployed PENS support in two of our products- SCORM Cloud and SCORM Engine. Now you can publish content directly into your Cloud account or SCORM Engine LMS. Check out how it works. If you’re using an Authoring Tool, see if your provider supports PENS. Have you already adopted PENS? If so, tell us about your experience in the comments section below.

The morning started out like any other.  David decided to unwrap a package of Orbit gum.  We’ve been headed down a path toward implementing a bit of BLTI from IMS (Basic Learning Tools Interoperability), and so we have a copy of Dr. Chuck’s book on our island.  (Dr. Chuck’s tattoo has been admired many times, but today, we noticed the back of the bookjacket.) Well, we really started wondering why Chuck was yelling the whole time.  We decided that we would take the opportunity to reenact this important moment.  And if we were going to have that moment, we might as well video it, so that we could share it with you, instead of just the guy who rode by on his bike. Enjoy.  

Back in 2007, I got curious about SCORM 2004 adoption and pulled some metrics about how people were using SCORM. Well, I got curious again, but this time I took it to the next level. We’ve just published a feed of SCORM Stats that will be updated nightly. For SCORM geeks like us, these stats present a useful snapshot into how the real work is using SCORM. Go ahead and bookmark it and come back every now and then to see how things evolve. Let’s take a look at SCORM then and now. SCORM Versions SCORM Versions Then SCORM Versions Now Then: SCORM 2004 made up about 50% of the content that was being uploaded into Test Track. Now: SCORM 2004 makes up about 30-35% of the content uploaded into SCORM Cloud. Conclusion: SCORM 2004 remains relevant for a significant population, but it’s adoption and usage has not increased over the years. Adoption appears to be flat. The decrease since 2007 is probably related to the more mainstream adoption of SCORM Cloud vs the early adopters using SCORM Test Track in 2007. SCORM Versions By User SCORM Versions By User Then SCORM Versions By User Now Then: About 40% of users were uploading SCORM 2004 content. Now: About 40% of users are uploading SCORM 2004 content. Conclusion: SCORM 2004 adoption remains flat. Users SCORM Test Track Users Then SCORM Cloud Users Now Then: About 3000 people cared enough about SCORM to try out our little application. Now: 21,000 people have given SCORM Cloud a whirl. Conclusion: Our little SCORM Test Track experiment was a hit. That’s nice for us, but for the broader SCORM community it show just how widespread SCORM’s adoption is. Twenty-one THOUSAND people are deep enough into SCORM to use an application like SCORM Cloud, with 500 more signing up every month. SCORM’s adoption is broader than I think anybody realizes. It is the industry workhorse. Some other stats in that vein: About 20,000 unique visitors visit scorm.com every month…that’s 20,000 more people every month who are interested in SCORM enough to go read about it. About 12,000 courses are imported into SCORM Cloud every month. Twelve thousand courses, that is a lot of SCORM content being tested! Realizing the -ilities (multiple SCOs)?   Then: Use of Multi-SCO content   Now: The use of multi-SCO content Now: Number of SCOs in Courses Then: About 35% of SCORM 2004 content took advantage of multiple-SCO functionality. Now: The percentage of content using more than one SCO has increased dramatically with each new edition of SCORM 2004. Conclusion: The improvements in each SCORM 2004 Edition have been useful in making sequencing easier to use and more effective. Or, conversely, the people who use sequencing most heavily tend to gravitate to the latest edition with the most robust functionality.   Realizing the -ilities (use of sequencing)? Then: Use of Sequencing Now: Use of Sequencing Conclusion: The use of sequencing remains similar, but it increases with the later SCORM 2004 Editions….consistent with the conclusions above.

We write about working here more often than we ever post that we’re hiring. Small company, only so many slots to fill, yada, yada, yada. Seriously, when you have a great place to work, who wants to leave? So now’s your chance. We’re hiring. Developer types. All sizes. Bonus points if you can beat Tim at ping pong. Why you want to work here. (Well most of why. It doesn’t mention the cookies.) How to make it happen Some background on how we look at hiring.

The Challenge  LINGOs is a consortium of over 60 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations. They provide the latest learning technologies and courses from industry leading partners so their non-profit members can increase the skill levels of their employees, thereby increasing the impact of their programs. While LINGOs provides a robust, hosted platform to administer the courseware, some members have additional needs that require using other LMS solutions. For those organizations, LINGOs needed a way to deliver their course library to the member’s external LMS, while still controlling access to the content. Enter SCORM Cloud with Dispatch LINGOs partnered with Rustici Software to manage the delivery of the content. By using the Dispatch feature within SCORM Cloud, LINGOs member organizations can access the LINGOs course library within their own SCORM-compliant LMS while LINGOs continues to retain control of distribution and access to the content. "Rustici Software has been tremendously supportive of LINGOs and SCORM Dispatch has been an invaluable tool for us. It has enabled us to maintain control of the intellectual property that has been generously made available by our corporate partners, while allowing our members to make independent decisions regarding the LMS that best suits their needs. SCORM Dispatch allows us to accommodate those decisions without costly and time-intensive custom interfaces." — Eric Berg, Executive Director, LINGOs Get the full story on LINGOs and see how their members are using SCORM Dispatch to enhance their learning initiatives. Click here to see how SCORM Cloud and Dispatch can help you manage your content distribution.  

Saw this great info-graphic today from Knewton. There are plenty of reasons to be discouraged by the state of e-learning today, but when you take a look at the bigger picture there are plenty of reasons for exuberant optimism as well. Want to be part of this growing industry? We’re at the center of it and we’re hiring, come join us. Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Moodle has long been a stalwart open source LMS. In fact, they just celebrated their 9th birthday. In that time their platform has matured and progressed from version 1.0 to the most recent release which now starts with a ‘2’. When we launched SCORM Cloud, we pre-built a few integrations we thought made sense, including a Moodle mod. Well that was back in the early days of 1.9.  For those running 1.9, the SCORM Cloud mod allows you to play SCORM 2004 content on your Moodle site. In v2.0 Moodle revised their plugin architecture. Until now, there wasn’t a mod for the 2.0 platform that could support SCORM 2004. You asked (and asked again), and we listened. The updated SCORM Cloud mod for Moodle 2.x is ready and now available. Follow the steps listed here to get started. Can’t stand the wait next time? The SCORM Cloud integrations we’ve created are all open source and freely available on Github.

On Wednesday, we learned of a security vulnerability in the SCORM Cloud WordPress Plugin we developed. WordPress has a code auditor that picked it up and flagged the plugin. Thanks to their quick notification, we were able to fix the vulnerability and have published an updated plugin. If you are using the WordPress SCORM Cloud plugin, we recommend that you get the latest version (1.0.7) ASAP. If you ever notice a security problem in any of our software, please let us know so we can get it patched up. Also, all of the SCORM Cloud Apps we’ve developed are open source and publicly available on Github for you to enhance…don’t feel like you need to wait for us if there is something you need. Details of the vulnerability.

SCORM is over 10 years old. A while ago, ADL (the keepers of SCORM) asked us to research what the next-generation e-learning specification could/should look like. We’ve been gathering information from the entire e-learning community about what you’d like to see in the next specification. Many of you already know about this, and many of you have participated. We have our solution — it’s the Tin Can API. The Tin Can API solves a lot of problems that older specifications suffered from, but it also adds new capabilities, new business cases, and new ways of handling content. The Tin Can API fuses a decade of collective e-learning experiences with a decade of technological advances. We’ve created a place for you to go and tell us what we got right and what we missed. Click on the video below to learn more about the Tin Can API.   See how the Tin Can API works and what it can do.