How do you liven up a dull room? You hang a painting or go in for a fresh paint job.  How do you wear a staid-looking dress and not look like a plain Jane? You accessorize it with a colorful scarf, a designer clutch, or a pair of killer heels.  How do you revamp your old eLearning courses so that your learners are not bored to death? You can follow the tips below.

We love visuals. In fact, we are wired to respond more to visuals than to words. That is why, we are so hooked to Pinterest and Instagram. This is also the reason why Facebook posts and tweets with images get liked and are retweeted the most. But as an instructional designer, what should interest you more is the fact that the human brain can process visuals faster than text. So if you care about creating more engaging eLearning, you MUST include visuals (and lots of them) in your courses. Visuals take away from the burden of reading through tomes of text, navigating language ambiguities, and making sense of jargons and complex sentence structures. Learn about the 10 most widely used and effective visual tools that you can incorporate in your eLearning courses:

Whether you are a training manager, learning & talent development consultant or an eLearning designer, it is now time to take a fresh look at your audience. They have changed! The Millennials are everywhere, and they make up the lion's share of your audience.

Learning is mentally taxing. So, why would you assume that your employees want to spend additional time learning something, especially when you’ve labeled it "mandatory"? Here are some synonyms that are dancing through the minds of your employees as soon as they receive your email about the new "mandatory" training course: COMPULSORY; Unavoidable; ENFORCED; Obligatory; and a horde of other disfigured words dancing in the distance, chanting: "THERE IS. No. Escape." Given your position, you may understand the significance of the course and its relation to bigger, strategic organizational goals. Your employees don’t. And your task is to pique their interest, engage them, and continuously compel them to keep on learning. This is only possible if you learn from the one trait that all ads, marketing content, and compelling stories have in common: they value their viewers’ time, their knowledge and capacity to absorb the content. Here are some simple tricks to get learners to buy into mandatory training:

If you are a training manager, you have seen it develop for quite some time now. Your learner profile is slowly but surely changing. You now see many more members of Generation Y at the workplace and taking your training programs. These are the Millennials or the modern learners who are vastly different temperamentally, attitudinally, and psychologically than their predecessors, the Baby Boomers..

In general, passion and anger don’t mix with software standards for me. I believe we’re doing good work, I think SCORM is really effective, and I hope we’re doing our part to further its ongoing success. But… we often find ourselves mired in discussions over semantics or other companies’ arguments about minutiae. Over these things, there is little need for passion and anger. If you develop an LMS or determine its functionality, though, I have a favor to ask of you. Please, please, please… do not implement part of the SCORM standard. I have encouraged many prospective customers to steer away from SCORM. I have no problem with companies that control their content and their platform electing to avoid SCORM completely if they have no use for interoperability. But if you have use for some aspects of SCORM, for your sake and mine, finish the job, complete the implementation, even go so far as getting certified. Why? Why not do just what you need? Do you really know what you need right now? Do you know your target content well enough to say that definitively? [No, you don't... you have no way of knowing for certain which data model elements are important to this piece of content.] Do you know what you’ll need from the next piece of content? What if it comes from another tool or vendor? Side effects. As you have some success with one piece of content, it will give you a false sense of security. Some other piece of content will come along and fail to function, and the reason for its failure won’t be apparent to anyone. These are the kinds of problems that will occupy you and others indefinitely. This is undoubtedly costly to your business, and not just in the short term. Your content vendors will hate you! There’s simply no logical point at which to stop. Do you need to be able to retrieve the learner’s name? Yes. What about the review mode? Well, probably, but does your content use it? What about interaction reporting? No, we have no content that reports interactions… It is a slippery slope in the worst sense. So, I’m begging. Please stop now, stop before you start to implement a part of SCORM. If SCORM is important to you (and it should be in a lot of cases), then do it right. Go all the way. I’d love for you to use our tools to do it. But even if you don’t, please finish the job.

I spent the day today working with the most minute of the SCORM minutiae. The XML Schema Definition files (XSD) that define the structure of the SCORM manifest aren’t something most people give much thought to. Mostly these files, and their associated XML header, are just copied from some other course. I’ll admit it, that’s what I do. If you take a closer look though, you’ll find that different people are copying from different sources and that the files they deliver have slight variations. Today I set out to examine these variations in detail and ensure that the versions we have available for download are the most accurate and compatible files available. I (think I) succeeded, but not without spending the better portion of the day neck deep in XML validators, reference manuals and emails to the don of content packaging, metadata and all things minute in SCORM, Schawn Thropp (many thanks by the way). To give you an idea of the types of minutiae that need to be resolved: The imscp_v1p1.xsd file imports the namespace http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace. In some files, the associated schema location is referenced remotely on the W3C servers. In other files, the schema is referenced locally in an xml.xsd file. Apparently both are valid. But, which is the best to offer for download to somebody who just doesn’t want to think about these things? The remote reference is cleaner and more inline with industry norms. However, if an LMS does strict XML validation on import in an environment where there is no internet connection, the validation could fail. The local reference is a bit ugly and requires 3 extra files to be delivered in every content package, BUT it will always validate properly. Which to choose? In keeping with the spirit of providing completely self-contained PIF files and in order to ensure the broadest possible compatibility, the local reference wins. Sure, the local reference is uglier, but it’s only the uber-SCORM nerds like me who will ever know. The rest is just copying and pasting.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks researching, and parts of the last several months pondering, whether it would make sense for us to open up our licensing. Obviously this is a fundamentally important decision for a small company like ours. When I get into fundamentally important decisions, two of the things I really like to do are… Go to the people I respect on the web and look for relevant thoughts, we’ll call these folks "the anchors". People like Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky often write things that resonate for me, and so I go and "ask" them virtually what their thoughts on the subject are. Put the thought through "the public eye", or at least pretend to do so. Mike and I often ponder how a decision we would make would play out publicly. This isn’t to say we’re unwilling to make unpopular decisions. To the contrary, we’re happy to do so. But we have to feel comfortable enough with our rationale that we’re willing to share that rationale publicly. It is, in some ways, comparable to the "do no evil" edict Google issued upon themselves long ago. [Pausing for a moment to caution the reader... this is a complicated issue for us... I'm sharing a lot here, so this post will undoubtedly be longwinded. I apologize now and offer you the right to bail at any time.] Full Disclosures This is a for profit business. We are in the business of making money. We have no doubt that the SCORM Engine is the best SCORM delivery mechanism in the world, and we believe that broader usage of the SCORM Engine will increase the utility of online learning as a whole. We want as many people and software applications as possible to use the SCORM Engine. By accomplishing the second point, we hope to benefit. See point 1. Why we wouldn’t do it We are here to make money, and I’m not convinced that we can make more money by giving away our software to a portion of the community. The anchor: Jason Fried, 37signals. One of many articles he’s written on the subject of making money relates here. In my words, he’s admitting what I did in the "Full Disclosure" above… we’re in this to make money, and the way you do that is to "charge your customers" for the right to use your product. The open source zealots have failed to convince me that software should be unencumbered. I’ve read a lot of open source propaganda over the last few weeks. Richard Stallman, for example, espouses the virtues of what I prefer to call "unencumbered" software (he calls it free, as in libre). I get that to a degree, but it isn’t compelling to me. I’ve grown up around software that was closed source, admittedly. He makes an argument along these lines, "If your toaster breaks, you are able to make an effort to fix it… You know how it works and can address problems." Well, here’s my thing… if my toaster breaks, I’m the guy who goes out and buys a new one. I don’t care all that much if the innards, the core parts, are inaccessible. Sure, I like certain things to be transparent and direct, but I don’t insist on having diagrams of the inner workings. Why we would do it Greater penetration An open source version of our product would eliminate the cost barrier and allow more, potentially _many more_ applications to make use of the SCORM Engine. Open source is customer friendly… and we are too. Incentives for an open source provider are well aligned with customers’ needs. (Red Hat regularly espouses this virtue.) If an open source provider fails to provide useful, valuable services, then that customer will cease to pay for those services. In the traditional model (term licenses), the software provider can require that payment. Questions we’ve been asking ourselves Q: Would making the SCORM Engine open source (say, GPL), increase adoption significantly? A: Likely. Moodle, Sakai, Dokeos, and any other GPL LMS would likely (or at least should) integrate it at that point. Q: Would open source adoption increase revenue substantially? A: Doubtful. If the SCORM Engine were part of Moodle, for example, would any Moodle user come to us for a support arrangement? Or would they go to a Moodle host? Would we continue to appear to be a distinct entity in the eyes of a user? We don’t think so, and given that, what’s the positive impact for us? (It is, after all, about us, in some respects.) Q: How could we provide this service to Moodle-type products while maintaining our sovereignty? A: We can (and will) offer a pre-built Moodle plugin, in addition to other plugins that integrate out of the box. Pricing and usage options have yet to be determined, but we want to solve the SCORM problem for the open source LMSs, or at least those willing to integrate with a non-GPL product (it would be separate). Q: Do we live up to Red Hat’s definition of providing value? Is the work we’re doing after software delivery important enough to merit the ongoing fees we charge. A: We’re confident that we do. Our willingness to solve problems that may or may not be of our making is valuable. Our contribution to the evolution of the standards is real. And our products continue to evolve and solve a difficult problem. If nothing else, having us on call eliminates the need for our customers to own SCORM expertise. Q: How do you justify costs to someone who has elected to go with an open source software solution? A: For this and other reasons, we intend to offer a hosted solution (the SCORM Cloud), one that will have the SCORM Engine’s fantastic compatibility in addition to pre-established connectivity. Down the road, the ability to share information between LMSs as accepted by our customers could allow this to be the first step toward centralizing best of breed content delivery in a way that many LMSs will use. Conclusions We want to find ways to work with open source software providers. We absolutely recognize the value they provide and their increasing relevance in our industry broadly (software) and specifically (online learning). We believe the SCORM Cloud and associated connectors (plugins or modules for Moodle, et al) will allow us to integrate with these software packages in a way that allows their users to take advantage of our best of breed content delivery. This service, we believe, will be worthy of the associated cost. I hope the snapshot of our approach here is useful. Electing to maintain our current licensing structure was not a trivial decision for us… it was considered carefully. Building a piece of software (SCORM Cloud) that will allow us to service these products (and others) effectively wasn’t trivial either. But as I’ve mentioned on Twitter the last few weeks, I’m feeling pretty good about the approach and the initial levels of interest.

[No, this isn't an accident. I'm intentionally posting about my blender on the work blog.] My wife, Jenn, was making strawberry ice cream today. You see, strawberries are finally in season here in Tennessee, and that means that I seemingly can’t get out from under strawberries these days. This particular ice cream recipe requires using a blender to obliterate a bunch of strawberries with sour cream and heavy cream. As I was shooting the pictures of the blender full of goo for Jenn’s blog, it occurred to me that I love my blender. Jenn was trying to blend two recipes worth at once, and my only thought was, "If that blender breaks, I’m going to buy another one just like it, price be damned." My blender, the oh so fine Kitchen Aid, happens to be an expensive one, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it works well every time. I never have to reach my rubber spatula into that blender to scrape the sides in a manner that terrifies those around me. It works so well that it simply makes it a waste of time to consider another blender, should I ever have to. Last week finished with two validating moments, so I thought I’d share them. First, I demoed the SCORM Engine for a prospective customer, a fairly significant LMS. The sole reason this prospect called us was that two of our customers had strongly encouraged them to do so. Kind words from DominKnow and Articulate had pointed them in our direction. That kind of a recommendation is so valuable to us and so appreciated by us. (And I think more genuine given the fact we don’t do lead referral agreements.) So, thanks to those of you espousing our virtues publicly. Second, and this was my favorite, we extended our agreement with Learning.com. Learning.com has been using the SCORM Engine for more than two years and is a high volume client with more than 1 million learners. They are among the group that occasionally push the limits of the SCORM Engine to see how far it will go, and we love that about them. Learning.com’s agreement with us for the SCORM Engine was coming to a close in about six months, so I shot them an email early last week to let them know that date was coming. By Friday afternoon, we had signatures on an agreement extending our work together three years further. From my point of view, this is the ultimate kind of validation for the work we do and the products we sell. When a customer is willing to extend an agreement without nasty negotiations, wrangling over altered terms, or shopping around one bit, it tells me that we’re a lot like the blender. And I like that a lot.

We spent nearly a year updating our website. It was an arduous process, worked around our daily chores, but let me tell you, it was worth it. We’ve been linking to our own website constantly as people ask us questions we’ve answered before. That in its own right would be enough to make me feel like it was worth it. But check this out… We released the new version of our site on March 20. In the 52 weeks leading up to March 2009, we had never had a week with more than 6200 pageviews (excluding TestTrack entirely). Since the release, we’ve had weeks of 7300, 8700, 9400, 9200, 12,000, 12,300, and 11,400. Unique visits are up as you can see. And not only that, our effectiveness is way up. The average time on site is up from about 1:55 to about 3:20. The bounce rate is down from the mid 50’s to the mid 40’s. These are statistically significant changes. First off, thanks for the interest. We’re thrilled that the site is seemingly more useful for you now. And second, if you’re wondering whether updating your site and sharing information with the public is wise, it is. Go for it. Later: Also of note, people seem remarkably uninterested in SCORM around the holidays. What gives, folks?

A few SCORM Engine customers have asked recently what our plans are for SCORM 2004 4th Edition and how it relates to our release schedule. Must of the SCORM 2004 4th Edition stuff is already complete here in house. We’ve been working with the early versions as they come out and working with ADL in testing the test suites. All of that is going well. Our intent is to hold our release until ADL agrees to start testing/certifying SCORM 2004 4th Edition LMSs. When they do that, we will quickly release and have some version of the SCORM Engine certified. Once we prove that we are certifiable (in the good way), we will release what we’ll call 2009.1. The announcement of that release will be made via the forums here. Our sense from ADL right now is that they will open up that certification sometime in June, but we don’t control their schedule at all. In the mean time, we’re incorporating other functionality into our 2009.1 release. Things like historical attempt logging are likely inclusions. Let us know if you have any questions on the release.

Just following up on yesterday’s post regarding SCORM 2004 4th Edition testing. According to this tweet, it looks as if ADL may be holding off until August for this testing. We will likely follow suit so as to be sure to release a certifiable product right away.

We’re still toiling away on the public release of the SCORM Cloud. A few folks have asked for application_id’s (the token that allows you to interact with the SCORM Cloud,) and we’ve actually shared them. We’re still very much in the alpha stage… although TestTrack has held up quite well under the Cloud so far. Reading Lifehacker this morning, I saw an interesting quote from Avner Rosen, founder of Boxee, that got me thinking about our Cloud work. I think at this stage of Boxee, realistically, when it comes to the big media companies, the big studios, we have to do a lot of the foot work. We’re not at the stage where we can expect (content providers) to be investing in and developing Boxee apps on their own. They need more guidance, and incentives to make apps on their own. We are having discussions with bigger media companies about developing Boxee experiences around their brands. … We’re spending time with them, and trying to make it a hands-on process. As we mature, more and more of those efforts are going to be done by those big companies by themselves … While we’re obviously working in comparative anonymity to Boxee, there are some parallels. The first of you who integrate with the SCORM Cloud will need some assistance. I want to be clear right now that we are willing to provide that assistance. In that vein, we’re working away on a couple of first demonstration/documentation applications for you. Our first application will include the minimal functionality required to deliver training to learners. It will show you how to create the necessary connections to the Cloud via our client libraries and use the functionality embedded in the Cloud (creating courses and registrations). Emails will be generated, and the code will serve as a roadmap for you to extend it into your systems. Our second application will extend upon the prior Moodle proof of concept integration we’ve done. Rather than working against a hosted version of the SCORM Engine, however, the next version will integrate directly against the Cloud (eliminating the .NET dependency we happened to have the first time around). I’m really excited about what this might mean for Moodle folks who wish for better SCORM conformance. So, I implore you to ask for our help as we introduce the Cloud. We want to hear what you’re attempting to do, and we want to help you succeed in that. We understand that we, too, will have to do some of the legwork to get you rolling. If you demonstrate your commitment to the project, we’ll pay it back in kind.

No, unfortunately this post doesn’t mean we’re hiring right now. But the next time we are, it would serve an interested applicant well to read this post from 37 Signals. Plenty of people know how to code and have years of experience to show for it. But, if I get to pick the person I’m going to work with, it has to be somebody I want to spend time with, somebody I look forward to seeing on Monday morning…in addition to somebody with rock star skills. We’ve interviewed a lot of people over the years and we’ve only had one candidate ever "fail" an interview question. The question was "What do you do for fun?", and he had no answer. The guy was an absolute stud when it came to coding skill and even communicating, but I just couldn’t imagine sharing an office with him. Personality matters. Skills are of course hugely important too, but often the least skilled are the best at making themselves sound good on a resume. I’m a big believer the fact that the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. The most talented people I know are also the most modest. In software development (and probably in most endeavors), it is the little things that separate the cream of the crop. The small day to day habits that over time make a big difference are what produce excellent software….but those don’t make for great resume fodder. We’ve found our JavaScript test to be HUGELY indicative of an employee’s eventual performance. Great resumes, not so much. If you want to work here, make an impression. Show us that you have a personality. Show us that you have skills. When we hire, Tim and I hardly even look at resumes. Of course, we want to know something about your background, but a couple paragraph narrative is often much more informing (and easier to digest) than a long detailed resume. When an applicant comes in the door, it is a cover letter and JavaScript test that we are most interested in. Those are the true indicators of skill and personality that lead us to think an applicant might make a good fit. Of all the people we’ve interviewed and hired, I remember virtually nothing about their resumes. I didn’t even remember that Troy has a master’s degree until I was crafting this blog post…but I vividly remember the elegance of his solution to the JavaScript test. I think I have a faint recollection that Jean did some teaching and magazine editing back in the day…but I certainly remember knowing that she was the gal for the job after reading that she was "getting tired of the stay at home Mom gig". I remember that Ells did a cool thesis about something for his master’s degree…but I mostly remember that he once DJ’d at raves and that had the guts to mock Tim and I’s alma mater in his first email.

Countless sites have discussed an important topic in time management… the important/urgent matrix. In my simplistic terms, these folks are encouraging us all to work on important/non-urgent things more than we do. Apparently we are collectively distracted by the less important/more urgent tasks. Email, I suppose, contributes to this with its timely nature. Lately, I’ve been working on a collection of items in both quadrants. Today, though, all of those things were thrown aside to resolve something crucial. Mike was right in that we aren’t hiring any software developers right now, but he didn’t know what I had in the works today. Today, I hired a cookie intern. Miss Hannah Wyatt, formerly employed as the artist of our SCORM comic, has been languishing in her educational career over the last few years. We regularly challenge our prospective employees to impress us with their story. And if your dream, your lifelong dream, is to be come a cookie intern, well, then, your story better be told in cookies. Hannah has wowed us over the last several months with her baked goods, and we decided it was time to make her an offer. She’s accepted, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. If Hannah performs up to the levels we expect she will, we’ll be trying to come up with another offer for her in August… one that will convince her to opt out of her senior year at Franklin High School. The title of "cookie professional" awaits. If any of you faithful readers aspire to a similar position, say, "ice cream intern", please, by all means, tell us your story whenever you’re able. We may well be hiring.

Dear Drupal User. I’m so happy for you… your relationship with Drew Pal has brought so many great things to your life and your work… I couldn’t be more thrilled for you. In every relationship, though, I know tough times come along, and I can sympathize. I recently heard from a mutual friend that you’ve hit a real snag in your relationship. It seems that your dear friend is failing to meet your needs in a very important, very personal way. Drew just doesn’t seem to understand why SCORM is important to you. I know a lot of guys like Drew. They say they care about your needs. Sometimes, they make sincere efforts to be there for you… but do they last? Do they really understand? I know Drew’s been giving you lip service about this for years… wasn’t it back in 2007 when he said he would really work on this SCORM thing? That didn’t work out, did it? So what did Drew do then? Drew thought he could bring in one of his buddies… he thought the two of them together could embrace your needs. The problem, though, is that Mo Dull isn’t all that great with SCORM either. Mo is more of an early 2000’s guy, since he’s yet to embrace SCORM 2004. So then you were stuck with Mo and Drew together, and neither of them really did what you needed them to do. Twice the headache. You’re not ready to throw Drew to the wolves, though, are you? He does great things for you, and you can trust him. You know what you’ve got, and you really kind of like it, you just wish it did this one thing better? I think it’s time for me to introduce you to the Cloud… The SCORM Cloud is the best kind of therapist… he sits between you and Drew and explains what you really mean to each other. With SCORM Cloud serving the content, there are no mixed messages, no disastrous incidents… Your needs are met… you can deliver SCORM content without a headache. And Drew? Drew would be thrilled. Drew wouldn’t have to spend any of his time and energy trying to understand this crazy SCORM stuff. He would get the simple, grunt sized pieces of information that he needed. SCORM Cloud therapy, like most valuable things, does come with a cost. The good doctor spends countless hours in continuing education to keep up with the evolving "illness" that is SCORM, and hosting these pieces of content isn’t a trivial expense. That cost is simply passed on to you, since Drew himself won’t pay. Drupal User, I would love to introduce you to SCORM Cloud. Scheduling that appointment would take a bit of time on both our parts, but your sincere interest in ongoing therapy would make it worth my while. Please, send me a note, and we’ll introduce the two of you. Tim Note: We haven’t put together the connection for Drupal and SCORM Cloud yet. We would love for you to do that yourself. Or, if you’d rather we do it, let us know that it would be useful for you, and we can help out. And if you have another piece of open source software that you’d like us to integrate, let us know that as well… Moodle, Sakai, Wordpress, all of these systems would fit together with the SCORM Cloud beautifully… just give us a good reason.

Last night we released an implementation of SCORM 2004 4th Edition to the public TestTrack server. For all of you chomping at the bit to take advantage of the new features in 4th Edition, now’s your chance to give it a whirl. Ok, so maybe it’s not all that exciting, but we’re happy to have it out there. As far as we know, we are the first to release a 4th Edition conformant LMS product. Our plan is to make 4th Edition available to all of our active SCORM Engine customers as soon as ADL opens up certification for 4th Edition (last indication was that would be in August). Note: Details of the 4th Edition changes are available here.

I wanted to take a moment to thank Dave Evans at AccessPlanIT publicly. They’ve been using the SCORM Engine for content delivery in their Accessplan LMS since November 2008. This, alone, is worthy of thanks. Today, though, I wanted to thank Dave for something else… Last week, Dave got in touch with me with a series of questions. He described, in detail, a number of potential sales scenarios for their product. Yes, we have an existing contract. Yes, the contract states that all users are included. But you know what? With Dave’s proposed sales approach, there was a lack of clarity. Our contracts generally include a per user component that relates directly to the number of licensed users, but Dave was going to be including all of the users from his client in the database, and wanted to know how we would want them counted… Further, Dave wanted to consider how our fees would affect his sales process. I have a little secret to share… we desperately want our customers to be wildly successful. Seriously. When they succeed, our product is out there more, our clients are solvent, and our revenues grow as well. There’s nothing better for our health than our customers’ massive success. So when Dave came to me seeking to simplify his sales process ahead of time, I was agreeable. We do not want to get in the way of your sales! So thank you, Dave. Thanks for being our customer. Thanks for being proactive. Thanks for coming to me seeking permission and interpretation rather than coming to me later asking for forgiveness and claiming ignorance. Your tone, your desire to do right ahead of time, these things make me want to work with you for a long time… they make me want to do right by you. Thanks.

We want creating applications with the SCORM Cloud to be exceptionally easy for you. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to the SCORM Cloud .NET Demonstration Application! (What a great name.) Head on over to our support portal and download the sample application (complete with the .NET client library). While you won’t be able to interact with the cloud until you request an app_id, you can at least check out how simple the code is. And from there, I trust, you’ll go ahead and request an app_id and start messing around with them. (Trust me, the cost for a developer app_id is very low right now…)

SCORM used to be binary, either you had it or you didn’t. But that’s not right. Let’s face it, in reality there are some good SCORM implementations and some, well, really bad SCORM implementations. Our new e-book will help you decide which is which. ADL avoided overly specifying exactly how developers should implement SCORM. This was a wise decision. It led to innovation and wide-spread adoption. But when this freedom was abused, it also led to incompatibilities, headaches and it even led some people to proclaim that SCORM sucks. We are, quite frankly, getting a little tired of people blaming the standard instead of holding their vendors accountable. ADL can’t and shouldn’t recommend specific vendors. Its position is that the market will reward the good and punish the bad. Free markets are great, but they are most effective when coupled with information. For a market to reward the good and punish the bad, its participants need the be able to effectively distinguish between what is good and what is bad. Up until now, there has been very little information to help purchasers distinguish between good SCORM and bad SCORM. That’s where "SCORM for RFPs" comes in. This new e-book provides at least 27 questions you can ask your LMS vendor about their SCORM implementation. It covers everything from the basics ("Are you actually SCORM certified?") to the technically advanced ("How is SCORM data exchanged between the client and server?"). This paper is meant to be a stake in the ground, a starting point to the discussion. It is our opinion of what constitutes a robust SCORM LMS implementation. We hope that others will have additional thoughts to add and we welcome debate about the points we have made. We have enabled comments on the e-book download page, please post your thoughts there for everybody to see. Don’t feel like reading the 33 page e-book, skim over our one page summary, or watch Susan cover the highlights: 7 critical questions to ask your LMS vendor about SCORM from Rustici Software on Vimeo.

We talk about living our company’s life publicly a fair amount… so we’re going to take another step in that regard here. We’re in the early stages of creating an add-on product… something that could sit on top of the SCORM Engine and/or the SCORM Cloud. Mike and I have heard too many times that reporting on SCORM data is "impossible" or "way too hard" or "useless". We don’t believe it for a second. Well, OK, we do acknowledge that it’s pretty difficult, but it seems to be a problem worth solving, so we’ve been putting our collective energies into it for the last couple of months. For the first "arc" of development on it, we’ve been entirely focused on the user experience. We want to be sure we’re creating something that is notably different from LMSs that disappoint and profoundly useful. Short of that, there’s not a lot of reason to commit the energy this will inevitably require. Without further adieu, we’d like to ask you to click around in our completely mocked up "reportage". (You’ll notice that the data doesn’t change and that many of the things that look clickable really aren’t. We’ll ask you for some contact information on the way in, but nothing more. We would love for you to dig into the reports and give us any and all feedback. If it sucks, tell us that. If it would be endlessly valuable to you, tell us that too. What are we missing? Are there views of the suggested data that would be more useful? Should we arrange the data differently? Is there something you want to know that isn’t there? If you’d like to check it out, check it out here.

(I’ve posted this in several places, but I really want all of our customers to see it. My apologies if you’ve already read it.) If you’re having any performance problems with the SCORM Engine, we have good solutions for you. This article in particular gives the details. These fixes are easy, fast, and reliable. And they have a substantial impact on performance for SQL Server customers in particular. Lastly, you may all feel free to mock me for the fact that our "optimized" option is, in fact, slower than our "non-optimized" option in many circumstances. (Whereas the "Ask us anything" invitation on the website is sincere, please be so kind as to restrict your mocking of me to this particular topic. I don’t like to be seen crying at the office.)

Product evolution is a great thing. All of our products evolve, of course, but it takes an effort for our customers to include those evolutions. Yes, we make it very easy. But, successive releases of the SCORM Engine require that our customers download the new version, understand the release notes, apply it to their software, and deploy it to their customers. In reality, this means that some of our customers’ customers are just now seeing the benefit of our SCORM Engine 2008.1 release. It just takes time. The SCORM Cloud, of course, is a different beast. It’s run on a set of servers we control, and we’re able to very quickly evolve the product and release those changes into the wild. Today, we’ve introduced a couple of changes that might be useful for you. (For more specific details, visit our forums.) Skins: If you want the player to look like your own, now you can provide a CSS reference to control the look and feel. Redirection options: You’ve always been able to specify the destination on exit, now you can use a few built in options (like "close the window") Data Export: This is a big one. Your data is, well, your data. We’ve known that all along, we’ve just made it a lot easier for you to export that data. Lastly, we’ve introduced the SCORM Cloud console. As of this moment, you can create your own app_id (FREE for a trial), check on your usage, export your data, just about anything necessary to manage a Cloud account. We hope that you find the SCORM Cloud so useful that the paid accounts are appealing!

We’ve made a couple of changes to the SCORM Cloud Click Through Agreement. Basically, they couldn’t be less interesting, but we feel it’s important to be overt with these sorts of things. If you’re bored already, move right along. If not, the changes are as follows: PAYMENT 2. You will be billed on the day you elect to move to a paid account and subsequently on that day of each month. Why? Well, we didn’t want to charge you for Oct 1 - 27 if you opened your account on Oct 27. So, we just keep up with "your month" instead of "calendar months". 4. Overages will be charged for each registration over your chosen price plan tier in accordance with our pricing set forth on our website. Why? We wanted to offer the option of allowing for overages on your accounts. Some people will elect to block overages, and will receive a message indicating they’ve crossed the limit of their plan and can’t offer training anymore. Others will allow for overages, but they have to pay for the overages at month’s end. 5. All fees are exclusive of all taxes, levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities and you shall be responsible for payment of all such taxes, levies or duties, if applicable. Why? 5 is the old 4. Nothing new here. But now there’s a 4, so this is a 5. Exciting. TERMINATION 2. If you cancel the Service before the end of your current paid up month, your cancellation may take effect immediately and you will not be charged again except for overages for the current month which will be charged at the end of that monthly period. Why? Since we added overages as a concept, we have to have the right to charge them after you cancel. We wouldn’t want you trying to take advantage of us, now would we? So, that’s it. Nothing too exciting here. We’ll continue to fight to keep this thing as short as we possibly can!