There are many organizations that have multiple LMSs, and many of them have the same problem—they wish they had just one LMS, with all of their data in one place. With Watershed LRS and SCORM Engine (or SCORM Cloud), we now have an easy solution for this, and it works for SCORM and Tin Can courses. It doesn’t even require any custom integration work. SCORM Engine (the best SCORM conformance available) is now capable of using Dispatch, and that’s one of the things that makes this possible. You can now use SCORM Engine as your SCORM and Tin Can package player, use Dispatch to play courses in any (or all) of your LMSs, and have the learning data all come back to one central location (while still recording learning data in each LMS, too). Which central location? Watershed LRS (the flagship LRS from the company that wrote the original draft of the Tin Can API, us!) has a beautiful visualization layer. It’s a great interface that allows for many different types of data reporting and visualizations. It works with "the big 4" that SCORM handles (completion, success, score, and total time), but it also works with all of the types of data that the Tin Can API enables us to use. See the diagram for how the flow of the data works, and let us know if you want to learn more about consolidating all of your different LMSs data into one place. The post If you’re working in a multi-LMS environment, you should read this. appeared first on SCORM - .

A while back, we introduced some new software development kits that work with mobile apps and SCORM Engine to allow you deliver and track SCORM content from your mobile app—even when it’s offline. We’ve just taken it a step further, with a new SDK that lets users download and take SCORM courses from their desktop/laptop, even when a network connection isn’t available. Whether you have a Windows or OSX app, our new SDK works with your App, LMS, and the SCORM Engine to download SCORM courses, play and track them (online or offline), and send the results back to the LMS once a network connection is available again. Click here to learn more about desktop/offline SCORM, or get in touch if you’d like to have a conversation about it. The post Offline SCORM, it’s not just for mobile anymore! appeared first on SCORM - .

The 2014.1 SCORM Engine release will be out in the next couple of weeks. And it‘s going to blow your mind. We’ve been working on some major (awesome) overhauls. With over 28 improvements and enhancements, you might want to schedule your upgrade ASAP. ** Here are just a few of the highlights: Upgraded Player UI Responsive design for enhanced user experience on mobile devices The Modern version is optional, in case you like to stick with the Classic version Supports RECIPES! ← this is a big deal Making Tin Can even simpler Automatically indexes incoming statements using Recipes specifications Engine is set up to support new Recipes as they are added to the Registry Database Improvements Increased speed and robustness PostgreSQL V3 support This is just a taste of what you can expect from Engine 2014.1. Complete documentation for the new release will be available when it launches next week. Some of the heartier features will have a deeper shoutout on the blog over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. In the meanwhile, feel free to reach out to us if you have questions or want to schedule your upgrade. **This work, "Engine 2014.1 Coming Soon", is a derivative of "Premade Background" by rubyblossom, used under CC BY. "Engine 2014.1 Coming Soon" is licensed under CC BY by Rustici Software. The post COMING THIS SUMMER: SCORM Engine 2014.1 Release appeared first on SCORM - .

  It’s a lot of fun working with both hosted and locally installed platforms. Yes, technically the deployments vary a lot (and I’m thankful for our super talented developers who manage both worlds), but it gives us the chance to work with many types of companies and products. Some folks gravitate towards the flexibility of SCORM Cloud as a hosted solution that scales with them as their business grows. Other folks require a more controlled, locally installed solution and need our Engine player for those very reasons. Recently we’ve noticed another benefit of offering both deployment options— migrating from one deployment method to the other as business models change. Case in point? Atomic Learning. Check out their story: Atomic Learning was a SCORM Cloud customer from the early days. They leveraged the SCORM Cloud API to integrate SCORM functionality into their K-12 Assessment platform. The flexibility of SCORM Cloud licensing worked great with their initial business model where usage spiked dramatically in May and September, coinciding with the start and end of the school year. Atomic Learning could simply scale their account size up and down to align with that usage pattern. Last year, Atomic Learning shifted their content strategy—going from two assessments per user annually to delivering smaller bites of learning more frequently. It quickly became apparent that the registration-based licensing would not be feasible with this new business model. The SCORM Engine Web Services option provided a way for Atomic Learning to move to an annual user based licensing model that better supported the fact that users who previously only took 2 courses per year could now generate as many as 20-30 registrations. And, because they had built an integration against the SCORM Cloud API, the transition to the locally installed version was fairly seamless. Once they had the server configuration set up on their end, they simply redirected the Cloud API calls to local calls and they were off and running. Need help figuring out which deployment method is right for you? This chart should help- and you can always ask us. The post What happens when your business model changes? appeared first on SCORM - .

Well, not really, but it’s the closest thing that the e-learning industry has to offer in the area of "prestigious awards for doing awesome things". The Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards Program is the most prestigious awards program in the e-learning industry, and was the first awards program put in place in the e-learning industry (back in 1994). So what cool things have we been doing and what did we win? ADL released the official 1.0 version of the Tin Can API in April of 2013, and the e-learning world was then able to do amazing new things that weren’t possible with SCORM alone. SCORM serves its purpose, but the really exciting things happen when you start using the Tin Can API. LifeWay Christian Resources wanted to deliver and track video content in a way that would produce metrics that SCORM alone couldn’t produce, so we outfitted their systems with the Tin Can API, and tracked all the metrics they wanted to track with the Learning Record Store that’s built into SCORM Engine. What did that get us? A Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! You can read a lot of the details here. AT&T wanted to do things with their training program that they couldn’t do in a traditional SCORM environment, so we set them up with the Watershed LRS and they began learning what motivated their employees to learn and how various types of learning affected employees’ real-world performance. And yep, another Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! While we’re talking about awards, we’d like to acknowledge our friends and customers that also won Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards: Accenture American Red Cross BizLibrary CA Technologies, Inc. Convergys Corporation CypherWorx KFC-US (Yum! Brands, Inc.) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory NogginLabs, Inc. PANDORA A/S Tata Consultancy Services Ltd Tribridge Triple Creek Workplace Answers We’re happy to see so much innovation happening in the e-learning industry, and proud to know that Tin Can is at the heart of revolutionizing a fair bit of it. Click here to see a full list of this year’s winners. If you have any questions or would like to talk to us about how you can use the Tin Can API in your organization, please get in touch. We love talking about this stuff! The post We won two Grammys! appeared first on SCORM - .

Working in the Cloud is supposed to make things easier. Well, if you’re working with the SCORM Cloud API, we’ve made it even easier. SCORM Cloud is built to be integrated into other applications. To let SCORM Cloud communicate with these applications, we use identifiers called "app IDs" for each of them. THEN: Lots of applications = lots of manual work. Previously, adding a new app ID required API users to log in and use the Cloud interface. Many of our API users segment their usage across their customers, so this manual step created some serious extra work for them. NOW: NO MORE MANUAL WORK! You can now use the API to create a new app ID for each new customer you bring on board. We’ve added this functionality into the API. API users, take a moment to rejoice! To ensure that managing your service is easy and safe, we’ve added a security precaution. API users will have a dedicated set of credentials (app ID and secret) for adding new app IDs. This "Master" App ID is reserved for managing your service while other app IDs are used for managing your customers. You asked, we listened. This is in response to a customer request we get quite often. And when enough people are asking for a feature, it’s important for us to deliver! The new App Management feature for the SCORM Cloud API is available today. To read more about how it works and where to get it, go here. The post Easier App Management with SCORM Cloud API appeared first on SCORM - .

With over 28 improvements and enhancements, this is the most robust upgrade for SCORM Engine since, well, ever. We’ve been working hard over the past few months to prepare for seamless installs and upgrades. We’re excited to announce that we’re ready for you, so come and get it! Here are my favorite improvements: It’s SCORM and Tin Can conformant! The new Tin Can (xAPI) Conformance Test Suite from ADL includes hundreds of tests to assess LRS conformance. Rest assured, SCORM Engine 2014 passes them all. Engine supports Recipes! It automatically indexes incoming Tin Can API statements using these Recipes’ specifications, making Tin Can even simpler. It’s even faster than before. We’ve made database improvements for increased speed and robustness. How/when can you get it? New installs and upgrades are available now! Contact us to secure your spot in line. Where can you find more information? For more top-level technical details on the new release, visit the Documentation page or contact us. The post SCORM Engine 2014.1 is Now Available! appeared first on SCORM - .

Just having a great product is not enough. Many people forget that exceptional customer support is one of the most important parts of an organization’s ongoing success. Why? It’s most often the only contact a customer has with your company. Receiving the help they need (while interacting with awesome people) encourages customers to stick around. Further, it reinforces the lifetime value of your products and increases customer loyalty. Why does it matter? We’ve had continuous, award-winning growth over the past 10 years. That’s because we love to delight our customers with excellent products and exceptional support. We hold ourselves accountable with a running tab of how our customers rate our support for SCORM Cloud and SCORM Engine. All 2517 tickets that have been opened this year are followed up with a satisfaction survey that is posted around the office and on the website. That’s why we get really excited when the Delight-o-Meter has 100 smiling Jenas in a row: What qualifies as exceptional? We looked at the global benchmark analytics from Zendesk, the help desk tool we use. The average global satisfaction rate for all Zendesk users is 83 percent. But, average is not exceptional, so we try to shoot higher. Here’s a quick look at where we stack up next to the industries in which we operate:So how do we keep our numbers close to 100 percent? 1. Giving the right help: We shoot to give customers the best answer, not just the fastest one. And when we can’t help them, at the very least, we provide a path forward. 2. Being real: "We’re two dudes in an office. You can call us on the phone, you can see our photos on the website—you can find us. We’re accessible and we want to help. People often call us and are surprised: ‘Oh, there really is a Joe?’" -Ryan Donnelly, half of the Donnelly Support Team It’s okay to want people to like you A previous boss used to tell me "people don’t have to like you, as long as they respect you." Good advice. But wouldn’t you rather have customers who respect AND like your company? A delighted customer is a heck of a lot easier to work with than one who hates your guts. So why not shoot for both? Continue to celebrate in the delight of your customers—it pays off. This is a repost from the Rustici Software Blog. The post Measure your success by the delight of your customers appeared first on SCORM - .

A few months ago, we sent out a survey to ask customers to tell us more about how they use SCORM Cloud and what other features they’d like to see. One request we heard from the survey and other conversations with Cloud customers is the ability to set an expiration date for an Invitation or a Dispatch. Well, the wait is over! We just updated SCORM Cloud so now you can set up expiration dates for any invites or dispatches. Why is this so cool? Using invitations to connect users to your courses from a link or email? Now you can set up how long they can access that course, which helps you control your costs and enforce due dates. When you create your invitations, simply add an expiration date. And if you already have invitations created, you can now add expiration dates to those existing invites. If you’re using Dispatch, you care about controlling access to your content, which might mean how many people can take your course or how long they have access to that course. Now you can set that up on the front end when creating a Dispatch so access is automatically disabled on a specific date. You can even go back to Dispatches you’ve already created and set that expiration date. No more managing this manually! Click here to get step by step instructions to get started. Still have questions? Just drop us a line and we’ll help you out. The post SCORM Cloud Feature Update - Expiration Dates Now Available! appeared first on SCORM - .

  On August 13th, 2015, we launched a heavily revised version of tincanapi.com. Andrew Downes has been working away, as he does, creating new content. Rather than direct it all at the blog, though, he’s been rethinking and restructuring the core site and sharing his insights for first-timers, learning designers, learning product vendors, and organizations. There are countless other updates laid out below. Please spend some time with them. Many readers of the site, though, will likely notice a significant change to our handling of the name… tincanapi.com. Years ago, Mike shared our perspective on the name, that we were going to call it Tin Can API. For some, this has been a contentious issue. With the new site, we’ve made the site behave as we have been personally for a long time. We call it whatever you call it. On the site, you’ll notice a toggle in the upper left. If you prefer to call it Tin Can, do so. If you prefer xAPI, that’s great too. Whether you visit tincanapi.com or experienceapi.com, the site will present everything to you using your prefered name. It comes down to this: arguing about an API’s name simply isn’t productive. We have far more important things to accomplish together. So please, enjoy the new content. Go build a brilliant activity provider. Make some statements. Or ask us for help if you need it.     Here are the new sections of the site: Understand   The existing Tin Can Explained page gives a really helpful introduction to Tin Can if you’ve never heard of it.  We’ve brought this section up to date a little and added some pages around the different components of the new enterprise learning ecosystem that Tin Can enables. We’ve also added pages targeted specifically at organizations, learning product vendors and vendors of products outside L&D. Get Started   By now, if you haven’t heard of Tin Can and got a basic understanding, you’ve probably been living on mars. These days, the question we get asked most isn’t "what’s Tin Can?" but "how do I get started?" If that’s your question, then good news - we’ve created a new section just for you! The get startedsection includes pages targeted at product vendors, content authors and organizations. It includes guides to help you see Tin Can in action, get a Learning Record Store (LRS) and run a pilot project in your organization. There’s a collection of pages to help you think about moving on from SCORM, too. Design   We already had a bunch of resources for developers, but not much really aimed at learning designers. We’ve added a page outlining the impact of Tin Can on learning design, including reflections on a handful of learning models and theories in the light of Tin Can. If you’re thinking more at the strategy level, we’ve got a page on incorporating Tin Can into your learning strategy, too. At a practical level, there’s a guide on statement design, an introduction to recipes for learning designers, and an assignment for you to try out what you learn from the new pages we’ve written. Developers   The developers section was already crammed full of resources. We’ve tidied these up to make them easier to find and created an interactive statement explorer page to help you understand the structure of the statement. The statement generator we created a few years ago was due for an update and ADL recently published a new more comprehensive statement generator. We don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, so we’ve taken the ADL tool, made it orange and included it on the site. To help you put all these resources into practice, we’ve created a series of challenges for developers to try out writing code for Tin Can. Webinars   The previous webinar list contained embedded YouTube videos for all our webinars. We’ve got so many webinar recordings now that it was getting hard to find webinars on specific topics so we’ve created a new categorized webinar list. Each of the webinars is now on its own page, making it easier to share the recording with other people. The post We call it, "I call it" appeared first on SCORM - .