We’re a family here at Rustici Software. We look out for each other, and we tease each other, just like brothers and sisters do. We even call Mike "Dad" and Tim "Mom" — but it wasn’t until our latest hire that we really were a "family affair." Ryan Donnelly joined us about a week ago. Does the name Donnelly ring a bell? Ryan is Joe’s younger brother! How cool is that!? …and we couldn’t be happier to have him. Ryan will be teaming up with Joe on the support side of our business. He’ll be working directly with customers to help them troubleshoot issues and help them find which of our products work best for them. If you’re curious about what else Ryan is in to, check out his bio. We’re excited to have Ryan here at Rustici Software, and we can’t wait for him to start giving up brotherly secrets about Joe. Welcome to our family, Ryan! The post It’s all in the family appeared first on SCORM - .

You don’t have to wait for content players to catch up! If you’re creating Tin Can courses but getting frustrated by the limited number of players that can actually launch and report on them, here’s some great news: SCORM Cloud’s Dispatch service has a new feature that enables a SCORM-only LMS to handle Tin Can packages—without losing reporting data. How is that possible? First, you have to understand how SCORM Cloud Dispatch works. Tin Can data is collected throughout the activity experience and stored in your CLOUD LRS. Once the user exits out of the course, the Dispatch updates the client LMS with the user progress in the form of SCORM data. Why would I want to use this? While the number of Tin Can conformant LMSs is growing, many LMSs are still in transition. Dispatch allows for an immediate way to launch Tin Can activities in LMSs that only support SCORM. You don’t have to be limited to SCORM-only courses while you wait for LMSs to catch up! Content Creator Benefits: There are now more types of courses you can distribute to customers You can now maintain detailed Tin Can statements in Cloud while still satisfying clients’ SCORM reporting needs LMS/Client Benefits: You’re no longer limited to SCORM-only courses You can continue to receive SCORM-conformant reporting data Where do I sign up? It’s available now, so try it out! We even have free trial accounts to help you get started. To learn how to create a Tin Can Dispatch, go here. The post How to Distribute Tin Can Content Through a SCORM-only LMS appeared first on SCORM - .

We love finding ways to use technology to make things better and easier, and we’ve done it again! SCORM Cloud has a pretty nifty feature called Dispatch. It lets you remain in control of your content by doing some pretty clever behind-the-scenes things, and more control over your content is awesome! Well, we’ve decided to add Dispatch to SCORM Engine (the Web Services version of it, at least.) This is a big deal for content vendors. Dispatch lets you manage all of your content in one place, but allows you more distribution. No more handing your valuable content packages off to clients—now you can manage them all from one place. What other kinds of things does it let you do? Update your content in your Engine-powered LMS, and everybody that has your content will automatically receive the update. Play your content through any LMS, while keeping it on your own servers. Cut off access to your content for clients that aren’t paying their bills. Track how often clients are accessing your content. Delivering your content as a Dispatch means that it’s using the best SCORM player in the known universe. You can play SCORM 2004 courses and Tin Can API packages in a SCORM 1.2 LMS. People have been doing these things for years in SCORM Cloud, except for one important part: playing content on any LMS while keeping it on their own servers. Using SCORM Cloud, the content is hosted on our servers. That’s no longer a limitation using SCORM Engine and Dispatch. If you want to learn more about using Dispatch with SCORM Engine, get in touch. You know we love talking about this stuff. The post This is a big deal for content vendors. appeared first on SCORM - .

SCORM Cloud Reportage provides a simple snapshot of your learners’ activities, but sometimes you don’t want a picture of ALL your learners. Want to know the completions of a specific department? The average score of learners within a specific geography? The amount of time new learners are spending per course? By using the tagging feature in SCORM Cloud, you can pull customized reports in the Reportage screen. This allows you to exclude certain criteria and to pull data about isolated groups. With SCORM Cloud tagging, you can do this with only a few clicks. The key is to add appropriate tags to your learners and then filter by those tags in Reportage. Take a look: Manual Adding .CSV Upload If you want to import tags across a large list of learners, you can also import a .CSV file. Just format your .CSV file as shown below: When adding tags to users, you have the freedom to filter data down to the specifics. To get even fancier, next time we’ll take a look at adding tags to registrations and invitations. The post SCORM Cloud What Now?! Using Tags for Custom Reports appeared first on SCORM - .

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 - .

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 - .

  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 - .

Do you need to make 3 trips a day to the Post Office to keep your course delegates informed? No, of course not. It is now 2015, the age of email, mobile and social media, communication channels are so simple and easily accessible that it is alarming that so many organisations are getting it wrong!