About two weeks ago, we reached out to some SCORM Cloud users, asking them a few questions about how they use SCORM Cloud. You see, we built SCORM Cloud in such a way that people can really use it how they want to. The problem, though, is that we want to make sure we’re supporting our users in the way they need us to, and that requires us knowing a bit about how they use our products.
[Personal disclosure: My hate for spam and survey emails makes it incredibly hard for me to actually send these out, even to our customers. We're going to do a bit more of that this year, so accept my apologies... And definitely opt out if you're not interested in participating.]
This is what we learned:
- Our customers are incredibly kind. Even those who had complaints had clearly gone to a class on how to offer constructive criticism. Great ideas were layered with respectful comments. We definitely came away appreciating the way you guys go about your business.
- Our customers and trialists are using SCORM Cloud in several distinct ways:
- Test Track, redux. Many of you came to us in the days when we offered Test Track as the simplest way to test SCORM content, and those bones are still at the core of SCORM Cloud.
- The API. More of you are building applications against SCORM Cloud than we realized, and we love that. Hopefully, that speaks well of the API documentation we’ve enhanced over the course of the year. Some of you rightfully complained about the early state of that documentation, and I think we’ve come a long way. If there are other things we could be doing to make building apps on top of SCORM Cloud easier, tell us.
- A training delivery system. This is definitely something less than an LMS, but it lets small organizations get content out to their constituents simply. Simple seems to be good.
- A public URL. It seems this simple, public URL option works well from you. The people who need to learn aren’t always in an LMS, but that doesn’t meant they shouldn’t be offered great content.
- In an application we helped build, like Sakai, or Moodle, or WordPress.
- As a trial for our ever popular SCORM Engine.
- To deploy your content to other LMSs as a SCORM Dispatch. Even within Dispatch, we’re seeing different uses. Some take advantage of how tolerant our technology is (when their LMS’s isn’t). Others want a layer of protection and tracking placed around their valuable content. And we’ve got ideas about other ways we could dispatch content on your behalf. Has anyone heard of AICC PENS or LETSI RTWS?
- We’ve got a bunch of functionality that we’ve not done enough to tell you about. People are asking for things that they can already do, or that we know how to do already. We need to be sure that we’re properly exposing those things.
- Did you know you can use tags to organize your courses and learners?
- Did you know that those tags can be used to do some pretty sophisticated reporting?
- Did you know that you could do some reporting?!
- We really want to hear more from all of you, but without bothering you in the least. As we reach out to you more over the course of this year, please tell us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. And don’t feel like you have to wait for us to ask… we want to hear from you all the time.
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Have you heard we’re hiring? ’Cause we are, and I think you might want to work here.
In the process of our interviews and the emails I exchange with people, I’ve tried to give a short explanation of our benefits, and I’ve failed every time. So, instead, I’m going to lay out our current benefits, as of January 2011, and just send a link to people! Also, I thought y’all might like to see that there are companies out there that really do have good benefits…
Note: I’m going to post this publicly, at which point the people who work here will read it and tell me what I’ve misstated. Please don’t take this as gospel. But I think it’s pretty close.
- Health Care
- Our primary plan is an HSA. We really like the concept of an HSA, and the fact that the lower cost allows us to offer some of the other benefits. I’ll lay out some key points for you, but you’re welcome to ask for details if you like.
- Our plan is through Blue Cross Blue Shield of TN, and is the P plan.
- For single people, doubles, or families, we pay the full premium for the HSA.
- The deductible (which has to be high for an HSA) is $2500 (max) per individual and $5000 for a family.
- We contribute $125 every month to each employee’s HSA account.
- If any employee exceeds $1500 in insurable expenses during the year, we have an HRA that kicks in for the next $1000. That means that a single person has a $0 exposure in a year that they work here full time.
- The max exposure for a family is $2500 out of pocket, and there are plenty of occasions where they come out well ahead of this. (In 2010, my family came out ~$750 ahead.)
- This year, we offered an alternate plan wherein families that were uncomfortable with the HSA setup could opt for a more traditional PPO plan. The premiums we pay for the HSA plan were simply applied across to the PPO and the remaining cost was passed on to the family.
- Our primary plan is an HSA. We really like the concept of an HSA, and the fact that the lower cost allows us to offer some of the other benefits. I’ll lay out some key points for you, but you’re welcome to ask for details if you like.
- Dental
- We pay for dental care for families that want it. Our coverage is through Guardian, and it’s called DentalGuard Preferred.
- It doesn’t include orthodontia, but remember, you can pay for your kids’ braces out of your HSA.
- Vision
- We pay for vision care for families as well. Our coverage is again through Guardian, and it’s called the Davis Vision plan.
- I’m told that you can get glasses or contacts through it, but you have to be sure to go to the right place and stuff. Never tried it though.
- Disability
- We pay for this too. You get 60% of your monthly income, provided you meet the requirements found in the big pile of paper.
- Accidental Death and Dismemberment
- Yes. We provide $25,000 worth, and there are piles of paper that explain the parameters.
- Life Insurance
- See AD&D above. $25,000 worth, and even more paper.
- 401k/Retirement
- Yes, even though we’re a small company, we do offer 401k benefits.
- Both traditional and ROTH options are available, with a collection of investment options.
- We do match, at 100% up to 4% of you salary.
- Vacation
- It’s pretty loose, honestly. We don’t count the days you’re here. If you’re taking so much vacation that we notice, you probably aren’t the right person for the job.
- If you’re the kind of person who likes parameters and guidelines, 5 weeks out of the office over the course of the year might seem about right, but that would include the partial days, the full days, whatever you’re doing.
- Again, though, I don’t count days, and I won’t count days. Be awesome, be part of what we’re doing, and we’ll never notice.
- “Profit Sharing”
- Yup, we share in the profits. Of late, we’ve been taking 20 – 25% of the profits and distributing them amongst the people who work here based on the quality of their work.
- [Note: Added this bullet after publication when Jean yelled at me.] This is not a formal profit sharing plan (or so our HR department/office mom tells me). We give bonuses, and they are based on our profitability and the respective performance of the people who work here.
- This serves as all the more reason to be awesome.
These things are subject to change, of course. So, if you’re reading this post in 2014 assuming it’s all fact, be sure to ask.
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Editor’s Note: April 8: We found the people we’re looking for in this version of the hiring journey. If you think you’re the perfect fit, you’re still welcome to send us a note. Frankly, we’ll always read a message from a prospective employee, whether we’re “hiring” or not.
2010 was good to us. We’ve built a great team of technical people, and they’ve built a great set of products. In fact, we’ve built so many cool products, we feel like we’re not doing a great job of telling the world about them. It’s time to fix that, so we’re ready to hire.
Mind you, when we go looking for new people, we aren’t just looking for someone who’s done this before. In fact, that might be a bad thing. What we always want is simple… brilliance. We want someone who can do this job at an exceptional level.
We believe that great people will all fit the following mold:
- Highly energetic and creative. Don’t just skip past this and assume you are. We actually care.
- Well written and well spoken. You’ll be representing the company publicly. We care a lot about how you do that. You need to be able to express complicated things simply. Language and other forms of communication need to come easily to you, so that you can add a layer of flair and humor on top of them.
- Obsessed with finishing. Tasks must be completed, and projects must be completed. Not almost. Just like our developers have to ship great products that are complete, you’ll have to ship great work all the time. Finished work.
- More than willing to learn… The opportunity to take on new tasks and learn our approach to them while injecting your own flavor.
- Web and tech aware. We can’t be spending all of our time explaining Twitter to you, or what a web server is. We need you to know some things, and to care enough that you’ll go figure out the things you don’t know.
- Smart. No, really, if you don’t feel like you can keep up in any conversation, you’re probably not the right person. We want you to have a lot of mental horsepower and believe in yourself and your ideas.
This time around, we’re looking for two slightly different people, and their highly technical, very precise descriptions look like this:
- Evangelist. Communicator-in-chief. ”Marketer”. Preacher. We need this person to tell the world-writ-large about what we’re doing and why it’s useful to them. It is, frankly, a challenge of communication. The right person will be able to speak clearly about complicated things.
- Seller. Hunter. Educator. Pursuer. We don’t sell like other organizations, and we don’t want to. But we want to make sure that everyone who would benefit from the use of our products knows about them personally.
If you are a seriously energetic and persistent person who finishes things, please get in touch and tell us why you want this job. Please take the time to understand what we do and how we do it. Understand how selling and marketing on our behalf might be different from selling cars or marketing a law firm. And be prepared to demonstrate your level of competence and interest to us.
You can reach us at jobs+blog@scorm.com right now. If you just forward a resume to me, I’ll forward it to my trash can. Make me notice you
Tim
PS I’ve included longer form descriptions of the work you’ll be doing here below, in case you’re interested in knowing just a bit more.
Evangelist and Communicator-In-Chief
Can you explain Twitter to your grandparents? If so, we want to talk to you.
We’re looking for somebody to explain our uber-nerdy products to the merely somewhat geeky.
Rustici Software develops products that help companies adhere to a niche software standard called SCORM. You’ve probably never heard of us, but our little industry holds us in the highest regard.
As we continue to expand our product offerings, we need somebody who can explain them to the world faster than our world-class development team can turn them out. This position is something like a marketer, social media coordinator, product evangelist, or perhaps tweeter-in-chief.
We’re not hung up on a particular education or level of experience, but some thing we are looking for include:
- Energy and creativity
- Communication skills (written and spoken) – Can you clearly explain technical concepts in an accessible way and with some personality? Are you engaging, intelligent and insightful?
- Tone – The tone and personality of our communication is just as important as the content. Spend a few minutes on our website and you’ll see what we mean.
- Intelligence, talent, adaptability, intuition, persistence – basically the raw ability to excel at whatever you do.
- “Web awareness” – Are you a bit of a geek at heart? Do you keep up with the latest advances in technology and how they affect how people access information? Can you navigate social networks and make virtual friends?
- Marketing strategy and technique – We don’t require marketing experience out of the gate, but you’re going to have to learn quickly. You’ll probably want to become familiar with things like SEO, funnels, inbound marketing, Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
Seller. Educator. Pursuer.
In our niche, people call us wanting to buy our products. We don’t go out knocking on doors. We don’t cold call people. They, literally, call us. This is a great place to be, and we’re succeeding, but we believe that we could do more. We could sell more, but we need some help in order to do it right.
We think that there are companies, and even industries, that could make great use of our software, but they don’t know how or what to ask for. We’re looking for someone who can seek out those companies, and thosepeople, and teach them about what we do in such a way that they want to work with us.
You will be asked to find the right set of people to reach out to, and to craft the right kind of message, and to determine if the people you talk to are the right kind of people for Rustici Software to work with. You’ll be asked to act intelligently on behalf of the company as a whole, not simply on behalf of a quota.
We don’t care about eduction or experience per se. The perfect fit will be:
- Creative and energetic
- Willing to learn and do things differently
- Smart
- Technically competent… selling our stuff requires an understanding of the technical details of what we do. You don’t have to know SCORM on day 1, but you have to be willing to fight to learn it.
- Persistent. You won’t make a sale your first day. You’ll probably try the wrong things. Your first idea may well get shot down. But you have to keep firing away. And learning.
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Blackboard is big time. Blackboard Learn™ leads the higher education learning management world. Blackboard Learn serves more than 20 million learners.
And starting in 2011 (or thereabouts), Blackboard is going to be rocking the SCORM Engine in Blackboard Learn.
We are nothing short of thrilled to announce that Blackboard has signed a long term agreement with Rustici Software to deliver all SCORM and AICC based material in Blackboard Learn, their flagship product.
Ultimately, we’ll let Blackboard tell their story of why they opted to go with the SCORM Engine, but this is what we know.
- Blackboard had a prior SCORM delivery setup based on an open source SCORM implementation, and they found it to be inadequate in supporting their customers.
- Blackboard considered building their own SCORM implementation, but realized they could do it better and more cost effectively by working with us.
- Blackboard considered other commercial SCORM technology… briefly.
Blackboard’s adoption of our rock solid SCORM technology will make things better for Blackboard learners and those people who provide content to Blackboard. This is a huge step for us as well toward one of our long term goals:
Rustici Software would like to provide the technology that makes every SCORM transaction go.
Consider this an invitation to all of the big LMS providers. Each LMS provider that adopts the SCORM Engine reduces the pain associated with eLearning for the industry as a whole. Blackboard’s adoption of the SCORM Engine is a big step toward our goal.
For more on Blackboard’s commitment to SCORM and open standards in general, check out today’s blog posts by Ray Henderson and John Fontaine.
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4 Things Every SCORM Test Should Do When Reporting Interactions
Categories: SCORM 2004, SCORM Driver
5 Nov 2010
A year ago, we talked about 5 things every piece of SCORM content should do. Today, I wanted to mention 4 things every SCORM test should do… Keep in mind, SCORM tests are a subset of SCORM content, so they should be doing those same 5 things I mentioned a year ago. Take that as a given. This is just a further set of details.
1. Record your interactions with full detail
SCORM provides a way for content to record the learner’s answers (and the questions) to the LMS. Put simply, do it. We see content all the time that elects not to report these interactions, and it’s a waste. Even if the LMS doesn’t report well on this information today, it could do so ultimately. And from a learning/remediation perspective, it’s crucial that the administrators of the LMS be able to see how their learners are progressing. Just do it. Nike would be proud.
Now for the details. Recording interactions can be done well or done poorly. If you want to do it really well, and your LMS supports it, opt to use SCORM 2004, rather than SCORM 1.2. SCORM 2004 allows content to be far more expressive in reporting interactions.
Next, understand the data model elements. I’ll spare you all the details here, but here are some highlights. For the purpose of examples, pretend like we’re working with this question:
What is my name?
A. Tim Martin
B. Reggie Benes
C. Dan Stook
D. Keith Bolliger
- Record the result (correct/incorrect) in cmi.interactions.n.result
- Record the learner response and correct response using a human readable identifier (or collection of them). Better to record “Tim_Martin” than “A” if the learner answered the question correctly. This gives the LMS an opportunity to share that data with the administrator in a useful fashion. And in SCORM 2004, “Tim_Martin” is now a valid response pattern. (In SCORM 1.2, “A” was the best you could do.)
- Use cmi.interactions.n.description. Frankly, this is one of the best additions in SCORM 2004, allowing you to record that the question was, in fact, “What is my name?” From a reporting perspective, this a vast improvement.
- If you’re going to go this far, you might as well complete the data model and record the following:
- cmi.interactions.n.type
- cmi.interactions.n.weighting
- cmi.interactions.n.latency
- cmi.interactions.n.timestamp
2. Understand the difference between state and journaling
First things first… interactions are recorded in an array. Take note of cmi.interactions.N.whatever. That array is sequential, and each time a SCO wants to record something to it, it has to ask for the next available space (via cmi.interactions._count). Separate from the N I’ve just mentioned, though, is the identifier of the interaction… cmi.interactions.n.ID.
If a piece of content wants to record a 10 question test and have a slot for each of the 10 questions, it can do that, even if they allow the user to update their answers. It would do so by cycling through the existing interactions and examining their cmi.interactions.n.ID to see if it matches the one that needs to be updated. This technique of updating a given interactions values by cycling through the array and resetting those values is called “state” or “stateful”. The recorded interaction indicates the current state of those values. It also eliminates any prior values that may have been recorded. State is a valid approach to recording interactions.
On the other hand, the array allows for you to simply add another value to the interactions array rather than seeking out the old array location and overwriting it. In this case, the content would simply request the cmi.interactions._count value and record the new interaction data in that slot of the array. In using this journaling technique, all of the historical values for that interaction are maintained. If the content wishes to retrieve those values, say on relaunch of the content, though, it has to be more intelligent about discerning which of the answers was most recently given.
Note, both journaling and state are valid option. It’s crucial, though, that the content manage it’s concept of cmi.interactions.n.ID well though. A piece of content that uses a new ID each time it reports and interaction is not properly journaling, because the association between multiple answers of the same question is lost.
3. Set completion status and success status
In SCORM 1.2, completion status and success status were rolled up into a single entity, cmi.core.lesson_status. It had six potential values, including completed, incomplete, passed, failed. In this world, it was impossible for the content to tell the LMS if a failed status meant that the user should be allowed to take the content again or not. Was it failed because they hadn’t finished? Who knew?
SCORM 2004, though, separates the concepts of passing and completing using two distinct data model elements:
- cmi.complete_status (completed, incomplete, or unknown)
- cmi.success_status (passed, failed, unknown)
This allows the content to be more expressive about whether a failure was final. Each content vendor is welcome to their own interpretation here, but making use of both completion_status and success_status is important in SCORM 2004.
4. Post a score
Lastly, be sure to post a score. It’s such a simple thing to do, and it’s hugely useful to the LMS. Take note, in SCORM 2004, the posting of a score should look like this for a 10 question test on which you got 8 right.
- Set cmi.score.raw to 8
- Set cmi.score.min to 0
- Set cmi.score.max to 10
- Set cmi.score.scaled to 0.8
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