We are moving from [commercial hosted LMS] to [open source LMS] for now. But I really am looking at SCORM Cloud as a way to integrate the serving and tracking of training modules into our customer service portal, website and software. I dislike the concept of the standalone LMS. -A prospect, via email, today Let me say first, I totally understand the value of an LMS. To this point, we’ve built our entire business around LMSs and the content they deliver. I believe they still have a place, and they provide excellent value… for the right organization. I also believe that there are companies, schools, and organizations that simply don’t have a need for a full fledged LMS. This is one great case for the SCORM Cloud… This prospect could easily embed the SCORM Cloud as a part of her HR system. In what system could you embed SCORM delivery? (Now we wait and see if our prospect takes the bait!)

As you may know, SCORM is a reference model that is composed of other underlying standards. Two of the most important parts of SCORM, the CMI data model and the ECMAScript API, are governed by the IEEE. The IEEE is currently soliciting comments on these standards. That means, now is the time for you to speak up if there are things that you want to see changed. Does the data model need more elements (for instance interaction results descriptions)? Do you need more places to store things (perhaps some more storage)? Are things too complicated? Too simple? Should the JavaScript API be changed? Use your imagination and speak up. Now is the time to be heard. The wheels are in motion for the evolution of SCORM. They turn slowly, but they are turning. Request for Comment on IEEE LTSC CMI Standards The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) is issuing this Request for Comment on three of its foundational standards: 1484.11.1: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology - Data Model for Content Object Communication 1484.11.2: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology - ECMAScript Application Programming Interface for Content to Runtime Services 1484.11.3: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology - Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema Binding for Data Model for Content Object Communication These standards were completed between 2003 and 2005 and have been implemented in many different applications around the world. They derive from portions of the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC) CMI Guidelines for Interoperability specification. They have been profiled by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM(R)), and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition has recently been approved as an ISO-IEC Technical Report. They are currently being used in a Web Service interoperability project by the International Federation for Learning, Education, and Training System Interoperability (LETSI). These standards have been in use for over 6 years, so the IEEE LTSC is now deciding whether or not these standards need to be revised. The IEEE LTSC CMI Working group seeks your participation in submitting comments on these standards for consideration in this decision process. All comments should be sent to sthropp@ieee.org. All comments received will be made public on the IEEE LTSC website (www.ieeeltsc.org) and will be discussed at a CMI Working Group meeting in the future. The request for comment review period is scheduled to end on January 22, 2010, at which time the IEEE LTSC CMI Working Group will begin to review and determine the next steps for these standards. Thank you for your participation in this effort. IEEE LTSC Chair - Don Holmes IEEE LTSC CMI Working Group Chair - Schawn Thropp (sthropp@ieee.org)

Lots and lots and lots of blog posts everywhere wrapping up 2009 and making predictions for 2010. A key thing I see popping up frequently on lists from e-learning consultants is the idea of learning moving from the highly controlled environment of the LMS to the less controllable (and more mobile) web. Social/informal/self-directed/ubiquitous learning is about as buzzy as words get these days. Which certainly leaves learning departments in a bit of a bind. They’re trying to show value for what they do and ensure certain specific things are being taught/learned/shared. There’s a push toward interoperability of systems within a company (where’s the LMS fit in?) and sensitivity to the high costs of pretty much everything. Many are attempting to embrace the new social movement, but scrambling to figure out how to show ROI. As an avid life-long self-directed learner and strong believer in weak central control, I’m all for the less rigid future. It’s why the part of our SCORM Cloud product that gets me most excited is the learning anywhere aspect. And as a data geek, I love that SCORM lets you take learning where learners already are and still get the information you need to see what’s happening without an LMS. So I’m interested to see if the e-learning oracles are right on this one for this year. And excited to see how people use SCORM Cloud to make the jump more comfortable.

Well, put simply, we had a bad day on Wednesday. Frankly, I haven’t heard from anyone that they definitively noticed the downtime we had, but we’ve said all along that we would be direct and clear, and so we shall. <AdmissionOfFailure> On Wednesday, we were doing a bit of housekeeping. Frankly, Test Track users upload a lot of content. Periodically, we take the time via a manual process to seek out orphaned courses and those that haven’t been accessed in any way during the last 6 months. In doing this, we’re able to limit the vast quantities of SCORM content we have to keep up with. Well, when we went to hit "delete" on the old, unaccessed courses, things went badly. We run multiple Amazon Webservice Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. First, the failure was noticed by a secondary instance which discovered it could no longer access content, and told us through an email. Second, the instances, in automated coordination, attempted to rectify the problem. Third, we discovered that this self-healing process failed, and that the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume which houses our content could not be remounted, due to an unexpected file system corruption. An instance going down is no problem… we have more. In fact, this happens occasionally, and is handled without human intervention. The EBS volume going down and becoming unmountable… that’s a problem. Ultimately, this meant that people were unable to access any of the content hosted on SCORM Cloud, including all Test Track content, until we intervened and mounted an older volume… one that was known to function. This was done quickly. Old content and new uploads were available in less than 30 minutes. But here’s the kicker… content uploaded between December 10, 2009 and January 6, 2010 wasn’t available. This incident led us to discover a flaw in our backup scheme that meant recovering that content wasn’t a 10 minute job… In fact, it required recovering from a fatal flaw in the file system we use. The reconstruction/recovery process was kicked off right away, and all content was restored some 11 hours later. So, as of 2am CT on January 7, all content was restored, all users were made whole, and all was well, in a manner of speaking. </AdmissionOfFailure> <PostgameAnalysis> Well, once we addressed the symptom and had everyone up and running again, we thought we should do a bit of analysis. We didn’t like how everything played out, we didn’t like that people were down for varying amounts of time, so we thought we’d go digging. It was time for a little game of 5 Whys. To play 5 Whys, we started by asking, "What happened?" We received notification from a secondary machine of an EC2 Failover Event on the primary (a.k.a. "The Sh*t Hit the Fan") WHY? The primary couldn’t access the EBS volume (where the content is stored). WHY? Something caused the EBS volume’s XFS file system to crash/become corrupt. WHY? The EBS volume’s file system had an inconsistency (that we’ve since found dates back months) and series of aggressive deletes were called in succession from a secondary machine. WHY? This why results in many questions… Why was there a series of aggressive deletes? Did we need to be purging courses? Why was there an inconsistency in the file system dating back several months? Why does XFS have trouble freeing space in certain circumstances? Should we continue to use XFS? Here, though, is a more interesting/actionable string of 5 Whys… Content uploaded between Dec 10 and January 5 was unavailable for 11 hours. WHY? The EBS volume’s file system failed and our backup scheme didn’t allow for immediate or near immediate recovery of recently uploaded files. WHY? Our recovery scheme included reconstructing the drive, rather than simply using a more frequent/recent snapshot. WHY? Because we didn’t consider this eventuality sufficiently. We made a mistake. HOW DO YOU REMEDY THAT MISTAKE? We have already changed our scheme to persist remountable EBS content volumes hourly. This means that we can return to a snapshot that is no more than 1 hour old in a matter of minutes. </PostgameAnalysis> So, in total, we had ourselves a bad day on Wednesday. Did we recover completely? Yes. We’re pleased with that. Did we do so as quickly as we feel we should? We did not. Hopefully none of you were actually impacted. If you were, we’re sorry. If you weren’t, we hope we’ve taken the right steps to make you feel comfortable about our approach to mistakes.

People often ask us to recommend an LMS for them. We shy away from doing so because we don’t want to pick favorites amongst our clients and potential clients. More significantly though, we really don’t know all that much about the functionality and utility of a particular LMS beyond its SCORM interface. "Well then," the inquisitor asks, "who has the best SCORM interface?". Well duh, our SCORM Engine clients of course. "Come on," he presses, "who else is good at this stuff?". One of the first names that comes to mind has always been SumTotal. That judgement is far from a scientific; we don’t go out and technically audit the details of every LMS’s SCORM implementation. Rather, it is an empirical judgement based on how many problems our content customers report with an LMS. More than that, though, it is the experience in working with the vendor if a problem is found. Are they receptive and supporting? Do they have a pragmatic attitude that leads to collaboratively fixing the problem rather that just passing blame? Historically, we’ve rarely had to deal with SumTotal problems. That bodes really well for the quality of their implementation. On the few occasions where we have had occasion to iron out a problem, we’ve had the pleasure of working directly with their lead SCORM developer, Ben Clark. SumTotal is closing its Bellevue development office and sending Ben’s job over to India. When we heard the news, we jumped at the chance to bring him onboard. He accepted and will be starting with us next week! The guys here often joke that I am "one of the top ten SCORM professionals", well in my mind, Ben is a fellow "top-tenner". We’ve worked together on the ADL Technical Working Group for several years and Ben has always impressed me with his insight, knowledge and reason. He’s equally adept at seeing the big picture and navigating the technical weeds. SCORM is at a crossroads now. It needs to evolve and needs to be improved. There will be a lot of work done at ADL, LETSI and others over the next couple years. We plan to be heavily involved, contributing our time, energy and vision to ensure SCORM’s successful evolution. Ben will be joining me in this effort and should enable us to provide a lot more bandwidth to standards development activities. We’re looking forward to great things to come.

SCORM isn’t easy. Everywhere you turn, someone’s having a challenge making it work, whether through human, system or developer error. Which is why we make such a big deal about encouraging people to ask us questions. The best way to get SCORM to work is to ask people who know. It helps you get what you need, it helps us because people stop (hopefully) cursing SCORM, and well, we just like talking with you to see how you’re using SCORM. Most of our questions come in via the contact form on the website. Some come from current customers. Some come up in conversations with prospective customers. We try to bring questions and answers together over in our support forum to provide a resource for everyone struggling with SCORM issues. And since I love video, I’ve started turning some questions into video resources over on our YouTube channel. Short answers to quick questions, most of which I had when I started working here and had no clue about SCORM. (I have one solitary clue now.) Look for more videos from me and our fabulous support dude Joe with answers to your SCORM questions.

Photo credit to ivebeenthere! Yes, I know several of you (and not just my mom) are kind of excited to check out the beta of SCORM Cloud and its new interface. Yes, I know I contributed to that by starting my series of stories… things you’ll be able to do in SCORM Cloud. Yes, I made a mistake. And no, the beta is not quite ready for you guys right now. We want to be sure that when we invite you to come and play that you’ll have a good time. And so we’re going to hold onto the beta for just a little bit longer. (I would guess as to the exact schedule, but I would hate to disappoint you again.) Thanks so much for your patience. I’m really sorry for misleading you, and we’ll see you soon. Tim

Ye Olde Switcharoo, from HogueLikeWoah Do you remember the old phone switchboards? They connected a caller to a receiver, and it required some handholding on the part of the operator, right? As much as we’d like for SCORM to work perfectly every time, and without intervention, that just isn’t reality. Some LMSs are great, but others aren’t. Some LMSs support SCORM 2004, but many don’t. One constant is that connections made by our products have always been strong. And so we’re now offering the ability to create a "Dispatch", or a connection, between a piece of content and any LMS that goes through SCORM Cloud. If you have ever found that your content worked in Test Track, but not in your LMS, now is your chance to fix that problem. Upload the course into SCORM Cloud, download a Dispatch, and put that in your LMS. We’re betting that your problems will be solved. Follow along below for step-by-step instructions, we’ll save the technical details for another day. Creating a Dispatch in SCORM Cloud Step 1: Import a SCORM course First of all, you have to have a package that works in SCORM Cloud. Theoretically, this includes any SCORM or AICC course, but it’s definitely worth importing it and testing it via the Launch button in the SCORM Test Track Sandbox. Once you’ve done that, though, you can move on to creating your Dispatch package. Step 2: Push the "Dispatch" button The button Step 3: Choose or create a Destination We’d like to help keep you organized. Some people will be using Dispatch to protect and track their content by creating Dispatches for their customers (that’s another blog post). If you’re just creating a Dispatch to get around some limitation of your LMS, then you can simply create a single Destination and select it each time. (If you don’t already have a Destination created, you’ll need to bounce over and create it.) The tags and notes sections of this page are completely optional. Skip them your first time through, if you like. When you’re content with your Dispatch, hit create. Step 4: Find your Dispatch OK, we know this step is kind of lame. Rather than taking you to your newly created Dispatch, we’re taking you back to a list of them. (Trust me, we’ll fix this before our final release.) For now, though, pick your recently created Dispatch and click on it. Step 5: Export your Dispatch Now that you’re back on your precious Dispatch screen, you can click the Export button. This is the payoff for all of your work. When you push Export, you’ll be given… wait for it… a SCORM zip file! That’s right… you put your SCORM zip file into the Dispatch box, and out the other end comes… a SCORM zip file! I know, it seems like we aren’t doing much, but there’s a little magic going on behind the scenes. Your new zip file will be smaller, and oh so much better. Step 6: Deliver your well-dressed SCORM package to your LMS The rest of this process will depend largely on your LMS. Take the new package and import it into your LMS just like any other piece of content. Your LMS won’t even know the difference. Here, I’m importing my Dispatch into the old version of Test Track Just like any other course From this point, the experience will vary based on the LMS into which the course is imported. But that’s the beauty of it… it should work in any LMS. (Now, as this is a beta at this point, we’d love to hear your feedback on how well it works. Going out into the wild, as we all know, is a different thing than testing yourself.) Step 7: Report on the course’s usage The real power of Dispatches, other than the fact that they just work, is that you can then report on the usage of your content anywhere. Each LMS will point back to SCORM Cloud to deliver the training, and that means that you can see details about who is using your content and when. Further, you have the ability to disable Dispatches. This means that if someone doesn’t pay, or is mean to your mom, or whatever, you can prevent them from launching that content again. This is a massive change for the SCORM world in which most content is delivered complete with all its assets to the LMS server… This gives you something we all like… control. Enough. I know this article is long. Seriously, I do. So I’m going to stop here. There’s a lot of technical detail behind Dispatch. If you care, let me know that in the comments and we can dig into that detail. For now, though, experiment. Give it a shot.

SCORM Cloud is built to allow learners to learn in whatever application makes the most sense. For some, this is a big corporate LMS. For others, the LMS is just too much. If you’ve got a piece of training that you want to share, how are you going to do it? What’s the easiest way to share something online? The Public URL When I go to share a map with someone, I turn to the "Link" button in Google Maps. I set up my map just how I want it, click the link button, and grab the URL. From there, I can do what I need to with it… I can include it in an email, put it on my blog, whatever… URLs have got to be the simplest sharing mechanism on the web. SCORM Cloud’s Public Invitation Now, you can share any course in your library via a public URL. We call this a public invitation, and creating them is pretty simple. The result, too, is powerful. Consider this your invitation to watch my daughter sing "5 Little Pumpkins" via a public invitation. Step 1 :: Upload a course to SCORM Cloud and click "Invite" Step 2 :: Create a public invitation For now, creating a public invitation requires one email address… If you want to send this to a distribution list, for example, you could certainly do that here. In my case, I’m just sending the URL to myself, because then I can post it anywhere I want… You know, like on Facebook? ‘Cause then everyone could see how cool SCORM is, right? You can actually created a formatted email here, if you like Choose your invitation Here’s the URL itself… send it however you like What happens for the learner? With a public invitation, we want the process to be so simple for the learner. We need something by which to identify them, so we ask for their email address… From there? Straight into the learning material. What happened? For some people, knowing how their learners are doing is fundamental. Well, for you folks, you dig right into all of the details about the invitations and who has accepted them and completed them. For those of you who don’t care to know these things, just avert your eyes. A word of caution Lastly, a word of caution. We’ve given you 10 free registrations (well, for the beta, it’s actually unlimited). That means that if 10 folks accept your invite, you’ll be all out… unless you put in your credit card information. We hope you find the public invitations so useful that you sign up for a paying SCORM Cloud account.

I’m gonna take a quick break from the SCORM Cloud beta tour to lay out a decision we’ve just made. In creating the SCORM Cloud user interface, we confronted something every web developer has been dealing with forever… Which browsers are we going to support? This question is a little different for us than most companies in that we have two distinct audiences: the companies that embed our software and those that use it directly. In supporting companies like we do via SCORM Engine and SCORM Driver, we have an obligation to provide them with the support they need. And let me tell you, many of our clients still support IE5.5 (the bane of a designer’s existence). So, we’ve got a particular responsibility to support the lowest common denominator (or something close to it). It is not our place to drag our customers’ customers forward in the browser evolution… We don’t get to make that decision for them, and so we won’t. This decision applies to the following products: SCORM Engine SCORM Driver Embed-able components of SCORM Cloud, accessed via the API For our embed-able, compatibility based products, we support and will continue to support the following browsers. Firefox 1.0+ Internet Explorer 5.5+ Safari 1.0+ Chrome (we’re still phasing this in, but all appears to be working nicely) Our World For our customers and their customers … we have a certain obligation … . But when it comes to the products we offer directly to the customer, we get to make our own choices. And I don’t feel bad about eliminating a potential customer by virtue of an informed decision if it affects only Rustici Software. In designing and implementing SCORM Cloud’s new UI, we went to our usage metrics. In looking at Google Analytics, we’re seeing that just 7% of our total visitors are using IE6. For us, that number is low enough that we’re willing to ask those users to upgrade if they want to fully experience SCORM Cloud (and its Test Track functionality). Our apologies go out to those of you locked into old browsers by your situation or employer, but we’re going to drop our support of IE5.5 and IE6 for our customer facing products.