A few months ago, we asked our support staff (which is made up of project managers, and developers, and others) to focus on one word: delight. Ultimately, we feel like making customers happy is the most important thing we can do as a company. So we reminded the crew that delight was important, and encouraged them to find a way to watch that.

Through our help desk software, we’re able to ask our customers how we’re doing as we close out tickets. This was an interruption that we didn’t want to impose on our customers, but it’s pretty light, and it’s pretty important, so we went ahead with it. The data from this feedback shows up on our big board in our gathering room constantly. In a competitive office (OK, I’m competitive), scoreboards help us know how we’re doing.

Of late, I’ve heard a few of the folks who work on support walking around muttering about “getting one more happy face”. Why the muttering?

This is our scoreboard. Every time someone answers the question, “How did we do?” it adds a new face to the top of the queue, and pushes one off the bottom. And now you, too, can see why the obsession is cranked up right now. The team is on the verge of pushing their approval rating from 98% to 99%. 

Speaking generally, SCORM professionals are probably as beloved as say, tax professionals. People don’t usually get happy about SCORM. But our support crew (which includes most of the people who work here in one way or another) is killing it. 

So, thanks to Joe, and Jena, and Troy, and the Thomases, and all of the other folks who work with tickets for being obsessed enough to push from 98% to 99%, even though 98% would be good enough. Thanks for being delightful.

Oh, and thanks to the 100 people who have rated our support since my last ticket was rated. The blame for keeping us at 97% for a while was crushing me.

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Birthdays are fun around Rustici Software. We all get ice cream- and not just a scoop from a big bucket of vanilla or chocolate. Each person gets to order their very own combination from Cold Stone Creamery (shameless product placement for free ice cream). Given the choice, we each end up with a cup custom made just for each of us. Whether it’s Mike’s Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some™ with Cake Batter ice cream, or Jena’s choice (which usually entails her picking out some of the toppings she ordered), it’s a personalized cup that has the flavors and toppings for each taste.

We like to offer the same choices to our customers too. We understand that one platform does not suit everyone. That’s why we built many SCORM Cloud integrations- to meet different tastes and needs. Some flavors we offer include WordPress, Google Apps, Moodle, and now Drupal.

The newest addition to the line up, the SCORM Cloud Drupal integration, is one that we are particularly excited about. The module is the result of a collaborative effort between a driven client, a knowledgeable developer within the Drupal community, and our own SCORM Cloud experts. Much like Cold Stone, Drupal offers endless customization options with over 2,000 modules to pick from, letting you build a site that meets all of your needs. You have probably seen Drupal in action as it runs millions of sites, including my favorite, The Onion.

Looking for a way to sell access to your courses hosted on SCORM Cloud? The Ubercart module in Drupal offers shopping cart capabilities that now make this a reality. Want to customize the SCORM Cloud player? You can apply your own style sheet through the Content Creation Kit (CCK). Don’t see what you’re looking for? Reach out to the active Drupal community to develop even more functionality.

Since we can’t share our ice cream tradition with you (as much as we’d love to), we can offer more flavors of SCORM Cloud. Don’t see your flavor listed here? Just ask us- the combinations are endless.

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When SCORM Cloud outages happen, we drop everything until service is restored. A few of us go into “let the world know that we’re working on it” mode, and the SCORM Cloud developers glue their eyes to their screens and wrists to their desks until the outage is resolved. That’s what happened yesterday.

SCORM Cloud relies on a few third-party systems to do what it does. Yesterday, a problem was exposed by an outage of one of these systems and SCORM Cloud services were unreliable for about an hour.

Typically if a server is unavailable, it will send a “server unavailable” message that we handle appropriately and with no SCORM Cloud outages. Yesterday, the server wasn’t sending anything to SCORM Cloud, not even a “server unavailable” message.

We didn’t have anything in place to handle this particular instance, so SCORM Cloud kept trying to connect to the server, opening too many connections and causing failures.

We now have code in place so that if the server ever stops responding again, SCORM Cloud will handle it as a “server unavailable” situation — one that we can handle with no problems at all.

Our developers don’t have any direct control over how others handle their servers and systems so we can’t directly prevent errors. What we can do (and what we’ve done) is make it so that SCORM Cloud is able to handle a wider range of errors. This translates to more SCORM Cloud up time.

If you ever need to see the status of SCORM Cloud (including up time data,) check out our Cloud Status page. You can also follow @SCORMCloud on Twitter for SCORM Cloud news and updates.

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It’s the start of a new year and almost impossible to escape the idea of resolving to do something different (travel more!), better (exercise everyday!), or not at all (no more pizza!). Given our love of cookies and ice cream, chances are slim that diets are high on anyone’s list around here. So rather than focus on deleting things from our daily lives, we’ll take the ‘do something better’ angle.

First up in 2012 is adding some new features to SCORM Cloud.

SCORM Cloud does many things, but at its core, it delivers training. Until now, you could import courses, share them with learners and track the results. SCORM Cloud even lets you send your content to another LMS (but that’s another story).

We thought it would be kind of cool to include a couple of tools that let you add SCORM content within SCORM Cloud. Check out what we came up with:

ScoTube- -Want to use video in your training? ScoTube automagically wraps your video with all of the SCORMy stuff needed. You can use a video from YouTube, or upload your own video file. Either way, one click delivers a SCORM course that’s ready to play in SCORM Cloud. We’ll even let you export it to use outside of SCORM Cloud, if you really want to.

Quizzage- Need an easy-to-use tool that creates simple quizzes and surveys? Quizzage is just that. Create your questions (there are 5 types to pick from), set your scoring and learner feedback options, and you’re ready to go. You can deliver your quizzes right from SCORM Cloud. Or even export them from SCORM Cloud if you must.

So far, I have created quite a training curriculum for my friends and family- “How to Wash a Cat”, “Cha Cha Slide 101”, “Playing the Ukelele” and “Mastering Flip Turns”. Feel free to check them- just click on any of the titles, to go right to the training.

I also thought it might be fun to build a quiz to test your knowledge on some of the cool things SCORM Cloud can do. Try it here and see what you know.

Want to give it a try? Just go over to SCORM Cloud. In less than 5 minutes you can build your courses and even share them with your learners. And since it’s through SCORM Cloud, you can even build your own and try it out for free.

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When looking through the eLearning Atlas, I wondered if the versions of SCORM that companies claim to support are closely matched to what we see being used in reality, via SCORM Cloud. Let’s check it out:

Versions of Claimed SCORM Support in the eLearning Atlas vs. Use in SCORM Cloud:


When I last reviewed our SCORM Cloud stats, I noticed just how closely the actual use of different standards mapped to the claimed support. Obviously SCORM 1.2 is the most popular and has nearly identical use in our SCORM Cloud. However, many may claim to support SCORM 2004 4th edition, but few actually generate courses using it. I realize SCORM 2004 isn’t always easy and it can create some confusion, could this be the reason for the difference? Maybe the 3rd edition was widely implemented and some became weary of another upgrade. It’s also possible that some of the 4th edition experts out there have no need to test content on SCORM Cloud. I’ll continue to pick at this, but the exact answer is unknown to me.

Whatever the reason for 4th’s variance, it’s comforting to know that the standards we mapped in the eLearning Atlas closely match the real-world behavior in the SCORM Cloud. As we continue to develop both tools, what other correlations or discrepancies do you expect to find?

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If you’ve been paying close attention, you may have noticed a prerelease of our latest SCORM Cloud feature, support for IMS BLTI plus Simple Outcomes.

BLTI provides a simple way for LMS users to incorporate remote tools into their system. Think of it as a super-simple plugin architecture.

Used mostly by academically-oriented LMS’s, BLTI provides a way to authenticate users from an LMS into a tool offered by another vendor. Simple Outcomes is an informal extension to BLTI that allows for very basic results reporting from the tool back to the LMS.

People love SCORM Cloud for it’s ease of integration, but we’re constantly looking for ways to make integration even simpler. BLTI is step along that path.

SCORM is underutilized in the education market. This is partly because academically-oriented LMSs have historically had weak SCORM support and partly because the tracking that SCORM provides hasn’t always been valued in academic circles the way it is in corporate circles.

With greater emphasis on assessment and measurement in education, we believe that detailed tracking will be increasingly important. We hope SCORM Cloud’s BLTI integration will help bring the power of SCORM and the vast quantity of SCORM conformant content to this important segment.

The BLTI export can be found in the SCORM Dispatch section of Cloud. To expose a SCORM course as a BLTI tool, simply create a Dispatch, click on the BLTI button and then copy the provided credentials into your BLTI LMS. That’s it. Your LMS will now be able to launch the SCORM Course. SCORM Cloud will maintain all of the detailed tracking data on the course and report back a score to the host LMS.

Special thanks to Dr. Chuck for helping us put this together. To see a list of other products that support BLTI, check out the LTI list on eLearning Atlas.

Brought to you by SCORM.com, the e-learning standards experts.

“we made this chart and it just looked dumb so we changed it”

-Mike Rustici

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We get asked all the time, “What is an LMS?” So, here’s a challenge… express it as simply, as elementally as you can. Here’s my effort:

A tool that authenticates students, connects them to a topic, as well as each other, and provides the tools to efficiently deliver, track and assess the learning process.

- (Think you can do it better using only 140 characters? Step up and leave a comment…)

We’ve been pondering different applications and how they apply to that definition. And I can’t stop coming back to Facebook as a great candidate for an LMS of the future.

A tool that authenticates students…

 
…connects them to a topic…

 
…as well as each other…

 

This is where SCORM Cloud comes in. Courses could be hosted on SCORM Cloud and delivered via Facebook.

…and provides the tools to efficiently deliver, track and assess the learning process.

Assessments and tracking could also be integrated:
 

 

Thinking about what could be is something we do a lot… Lately several of us have often discussed what SCORM Cloud + Facebook could be. I thought it’d be a good idea to expand the discussion and bring our followers into the mix.

Apps in Facebook are nothing new, and they’re the future of the platform:

The next five years will be defined by apps and the depth of social engagement.

-Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2011

The social learning platform has created thousands of successful virtual farms and Vills. While many of the popular apps currently on Facebook are games, the Facebook population seems to be underutilized for eLearning. Students and Facebook have a healthy relationship — the site’s popularity was born from college students. I’m willing to make the argument that the blend of eLearning and the Facebook environment would be a useful marriage.

Facebook advantages:

• 800+ million users (and growing)
• Easy to manage people and groups
• Users are loyal, familiar and comfortable with Facebook
• Streamlined registration and management process
• Frequent log-ins, easily accessible across platforms and devices
• Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites
• More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook

By using Facebook to facilitate learning with students and instructors, developers could create a fast and intuitive way to group students and deploy courses. Learning within Facebook provides a platform students are comfortable and familiar with. Relationships formed via a Facebook-based experience could continue past the life of the course, creating a more genuine social experience than traditional eLearning has been able to give. The possibilities of a Learning App within Facebook are exciting to imagine and one I think could become the next big movement of eLearning.

Arguably, this rush to manage learners within Facebook will start soon, and I’m excited to see it begin. We’ve built our SCORM Cloud to be flexible and adaptable with this scenario in mind. We’ve seen several integrations of our SCORM Cloud. So far it has been blended into Moodle, Sakai, Dokeos, Ilias, WordPress and Google Apps. Instead of reinventing the learning platform, just plug our SCORM Cloud into Facebook and move on.

Facebook is the next step, and one we’re excited to see someone take. Our SCORM Cloud can relieve the pain of hosting content, managing courses, tracking assessments and reporting grades. Facebook will manage students — all a developer needs to do is plug the two together. We’re open to ideas on how we can make this process easier.

Group discussions, wall posts, notifications, real-time chat with classmates, leader boards… the Facebook platform offers plenty of elements that can be combined to create something cool. What could be within this solution keeps my mind racing. I hope that some momentum for this develops soon.

So the logical question is, “If an e-learning Facebook app is such a great idea, why not do it yourself?” We have built the toolkit that can make this app possible… we’ve got a lot of development projects in cue. We’ve made it obvious we’re hiring, great ideas like SCORM Cloud + Facebook are why. If this sounds cool and you’d like to jump in and create a Facebook integration, go for it. Where it goes from here is up to you. Are you willing to take the leap and become the first to navigate these waters?

We know this process takes time and effort. We’re willing to lend a hand, let’s discuss what that could look like by dropping a comment. If you’re interested in working with us to make this happen, email me — chris.tompkins@scorm.com.

Some images from: benstein & FindYourSearch

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