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?

Sometimes, though, I get questions that make me laugh.  Today, I feel like I need to share this one because it isn’t the first time I’ve gotten a question like this one.

What is Scorm Compliance?

OK, good question.  I get this one a lot, so I have a sense of where it’s headed.  My answer:

Is this what you’re looking for?  The distinction between compliance and conformance?  Or something more like this, a basic description of SCORM?

The response (slightly rephrased):

Yes both are good.  There is a training specialist job interview question? ”Which of the following best describes your experience with Scorm Compliance?” (Then # years and months choice) So what does experience with Scorm Compliance mean in this context?

Let’s cut to the chase.  The answer is none.  You have no experience if you don’t know what it is.

Funny, yes.  Uncommon?  Not entirely.  People think, or more accurately hope, that their products are SCORM conformant.  Let me put it simply… if you haven’t tried, or worked at it, your product simply is not SCORM conformant, or IMS BLTI compliant, or AICC conformant.  These things take effort.  And so does acquiring SCORM experience as an individual.

Let’s take a graphical look at some of the interesting conclusions I’ve drawn. The following graphs only include traditional products that can implement standards (Authoring Tools, LMSs, LCMSs and Content Libraries). Here we can see the haves and the have-nots:

eLearning Atlas Products That Support At Least One Standard:

A look at the Haves:

So, what does this all mean? For the majority of the industry, SCORM works, but there are lots of eLearning products out there that don’t play nicely with one another. The creation and delivery of content is a hard problem to solve, without a common standard or model… it’s really hard to solve. When developers try to fit a unique course into a unique learning system… things get complicated. When eLearning gets complicated, things get expensive.

The eLearning Atlas proves that there are thousands of possible companies who can create, manage and deliver eLearning, some doing it without any claimed support for standardization. For some companies, the expense of stepping outside their branded box of solutions, locks a customer in for life. We think SCORM frees people to choose the best fit. The eLearning Atlas can help users easily filter out the noise of companies who are not interested in playing nicely with one another, and make connections with products that want to work together.

To look at it another way, we’ve currently found 219 Authoring Tools, some being used by 360 Custom Content Creators to make training that will be delivered using 655 LMS/LCMSs… that’s 51,640,200 possible combinations. Trying to fit all those pieces together, each time, is a daunting task and the exact pain ADL created SCORM to solve. SCORM (and other standards) help eLearning providers play nicely with one another; the eLearning Atlas can help users find the products and services that will play nicely with the systems they already use.

How do car specs relate to eLearning standards? SCORM 2004 comes in three flavors, 2nd edition, 3rd edition and 4th edition… it can be confusing. Nearly 75% of the products in our eLearning Atlas that support SCORM 2004, don’t specify which edition is implemented. While I’m sure the development team behind these companies understands the differences in the standard, the customer-facing side generally has no clue. Most don’t even bother to guess or publish it on their website. SCORM 2004 is powerful, but all editions are not created equal, most editions do not play nicely with one another.

The generalization of SCORM 2004 sometimes creates compatibility issues that can be a source of frustration for customers. In order to truly understand if a piece of content and a LMS will easily work together, it’s crucial to know that they speak the same language, er, SCORM edition. I’ll quietly challenge those that generalize to express the details they support, even it’s not presented prominently. The eLearning Atlas provides an easy way to find the companies that know exactly which edition of SCORM 2004 they support. However, if a generalization of the standard is all that a user really needs, the eLearning Atlas has that covered as well.

We’ve been gathering information from the entire e-learning community about what you’d like to see in the next specification. Many of you already know about this, and many of you have participated.

We have our solution — it’s the Tin Can API.

The Tin Can API solves a lot of problems that older specifications suffered from, but it also adds new capabilities, new business cases, and new ways of handling content. The Tin Can API fuses a decade of collective e-learning experiences with a decade of technological advances.

We’ve created a place for you to go and tell us what we got right and what we missed. Click on the video below to learn more about the Tin Can API.

Let’s take a look at SCORM then and now.

SCORM Versions

Then: SCORM 2004 made up about 50% of the content that was being uploaded into Test Track.

Now: SCORM 2004 makes up about 30-35% of the content uploaded into SCORM Cloud.

Conclusion: SCORM 2004 remains relevant for a significant population, but it’s adoption and usage has not increased over the years. Adoption appears to be flat. The decrease since 2007 is probably related to the more mainstream adoption of SCORM Cloud vs the early adopters using SCORM Test Track in 2007.

SCORM Versions By User

Then: About 40% of users were uploading SCORM 2004 content.

Now: About 40% of users are uploading SCORM 2004 content.

Conclusion: SCORM 2004 adoption remains flat.

Users

Then: About 3000 people cared enough about SCORM to try out our little application.

Now: 21,000 people have given SCORM Cloud a whirl.

Conclusion: Our little SCORM Test Track experiment was a hit. That’s nice for us, but for the broader SCORM community it show just how widespread SCORM’s adoption is. Twenty-one THOUSAND people are deep enough into SCORM to use an application like SCORM Cloud, with 500 more signing up every month. SCORM’s adoption is broader than I think anybody realizes. It is the industry workhorse.

Some other stats in that vein:

About 20,000 unique visitors visit scorm.com every month…that’s 20,000 more people every month who are interested in SCORM enough to go read about it.

About 12,000 courses are imported into SCORM Cloud every month. Twelve thousand courses, that is a lot of SCORM content being tested!

Realizing the -ilities (multiple SCOs)?

Then: About 35% of SCORM 2004 content took advantage of multiple-SCO functionality.

Now: The percentage of content using more than one SCO has increased dramatically with each new edition of SCORM 2004.

Conclusion: The improvements in each SCORM 2004 Edition have been useful in making sequencing easier to use and more effective. Or, conversely, the people who use sequencing most heavily tend to gravitate to the latest edition with the most robust functionality.

Realizing the -ilities (use of sequencing)?

Conclusion: The use of sequencing remains similar, but it increases with the later SCORM 2004 Editions….consistent with the conclusions above.

• SCORM 1.1
• SCORM 1.2
• SCORM 1.3 (“first edition” of SCORM 2004)
• SCORM 2004 2nd Edition
• AICC HACP
• AICC PENS
• IMS Content Packaging
• IMS Common Cartridge
• MedBiquitous Healthcare LOM

Some of our customers prefer to tuck their use of our products away, and we’re fine with that. But others want to scream from the mountaintop that they’re using the best SCORM conformance software available. If you’re a screamer, then we want you to let the world know that you’re using our stuff. We’ve waded through all the legalese and created a way for you to do just that.
 

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The Brand

To serve their many masters, the ADL leadership has decided to move away from the SCORM brand. From a business, marketing and adoption perspective, I don’t think it’s a good decision. SCORM is what people know and pay attention to in this industry. Moving away from it requires re-building a brand from scratch…never an easy thing to do. But, the government does what the government does…business, marketing and adoption aren’t really a bureaucracy’s strong suits….bosses, financiers and lawyers are their bigger concerns.

There’s actually really good news coming out of ADL though if you read the messages closely and understand the nuance. Here’s some translation of the messages:

“We’re doing more to support SCORM”

Supporting a standard is a lot of work. ADL maintains a SCORM help desk. They help vendors and organizations understand and adopt SCORM (especially within the government). They maintain a conformance test suite and associated certification programs. They publish best practice guides, example implementations and other documentation. This isn’t a tremendous amount of work, but it isn’t trivial either.

Over the past few years, ADL has been in a transitional phase and frankly a bit of a mess. During that time, these sustaining support activities started to fall through the cracks. When ADL says they are going to do more to support SCORM, they are recommitting to continue to do what they have always done. They are also shifting policy to continue support for SCORM 1.2 (they had previously tried to sunset 1.2 support to encourage 2004 adoption).

When you consider ADL’s color of money concerns, this commitment is actually a rather significant development.

“SCORM isn’t being evolved”

Often re-tweeted as “SCORM is dead” or “SCORM is done”, this the most nefarious of the misinterpreted messages.

SCORM as it is meets the needs of its initial intended use. By and large SCORM-conformant content works in SCORM-conformant LMSs. It isn’t perfect…nothing is…but with the exception of sequencing, it’s pretty darn good. There are a few places where it could be polished, but the changes that would have significant impact require significant additions.

Bearing in mind that the legal concerns over IMS’ intellectual property require that sequencing and content packaging not change, it makes sense to stop putting out new editions of SCORM 2004 and start to focus on SCORM-Next.

“We’re updating the SCORM books”

The SCORM 2004 4th Edition spec manuals need some cleaning up. There are a few inconsistencies, ambiguous statements and diagrams which don’t meet Section 508 requirements. ADL is cleaning up these mistakes and re-publishing the books. Think of this as fixing typos.

There are no changes of substance, they just need to please the English teachers and standards geeks.

“SCORM is going to ISO”

SCORM is an international standard, and believe it or not, it’s not just the US that has annoying bureaucratic rules. In many countries, a standard must be approved by ISO before it can be adopted (imagine that, they want international agreement, not just the dictate of the US DoD!). SCORM 2004 3rd Edition is already published by ISO as a technical report.

ADL will be submitting 4th Edition to ISO to facilitate further international adoption….thus the need to please the English teachers and standards geeks.

“Introducing the Future Learning Experience Project (FLEX)”

And, here we have “SCORM-Next”, only bigger. The FLEX project is ADL’s technology path to achieving the 2025 vision. It is big and has grand aspirations, but it starts with a few small steps. Those first steps build upon SCORM to establish the next generation of learning experience tracking. In other words, let’s build upon the traditional CMI tracking that SCORM enables and track the modern learning experiences that happen in games, simulations, virtual worlds, mobile devices, social networks, etc.

“Participate in Project Tin Can”

Here’s where we come in. Through its BAA program, ADL has funded us to conduct a research program to define the initial experience tracking API. Project Tin Can is an open effort that seeks input from anybody and everybody. Since December we’ve been trying to talk to as many people as we can about what the future of learning looks like. The output of Project Tin Can will be a recommendation for the technology that will be the foundation of FLEX. It is the first piece of the puzzle: the Experience API.

“AICC CMI 5 is defining a new data model”

Somewhere along the way, we left out the good part of the ADL-SCORM history. AICC is another standards organization that contributed IP to SCORM, namely the CMI data model and concepts for the run-time communication. Unlike the ADL-IMS relationship, the ADL-AICC relationship is alive and well.

CMI 5 is another early piece of the FLEX puzzle. AICC is revamping its original CMI data model to enable more generalized and modern tracking. CMI 5 will be an extensible model that adds support for all the new training modalities being considered in Project Tin Can. Its extensibility should also make it a good candidate for tying in new things like performance support data, industry specific extensions, etc.

“Check out LETSI RTWS”

ADL knows that the industry is clamoring for solutions to problems they face today. Many of the shortcomings of SCORM are addressed by the LETSI RTWS SCORM extension. RTWS is a web services communication framework that can be layered on top of SCORM. ADL is currently developing prototypes with RTWS and intends to recommend it as an immediately available solution while FLEX matures.

Some Final Thoughts

Again, these words are my own. These opinions are my own. There is no official ADL opinion, fact or history included herein.

In fairness to ADL, many of these same ideas are clearly articulated on the FLEX project site, here and here.

I think the origin of much of this confusion lies in the fact that for the last couple years ADL has been in a state of flux without a clear public direction. My understanding is that their course is now charted and from here on out the path will be clear.

Like so many organizations in and around Washington DC, ADL serves many masters.

Like so many organizations in and around Washington DC, ADL’s messages are best understood through the filter of a trained professional.

Call me SCORM’s James Carville, if you please.

The Noise

If you read every comment from ADL’s people and the responses to them, you get noise.

“We’re doing more to support SCORM”…
“SCORM isn’t being evolved”…
“We’re updating the SCORM books”…
“SCORM is going to ISO”…
“Introducing the Future Learning Experience Project”…
“Participate in Project Tin Can”…
“AICC CMI 5 is defining a new data model”…
“Check out LETSI RTWS”.

Without context, that looks like a big fat mess. It looks a bit directionless. But don’t despair, ye fans of SCORM. It’s actually laced with a lot of good news.

The Signal

ADL is doing the right things to support SCORM in its current form going forward, in the best ways it can as governed by its many masters.

ADL is pushing SCORM forward in leaps small and large (short term and long), but its many masters make continued use of the name SCORM difficult.

ADL hopes to work with willing collaborators to create the best learning standards.

Context and Background: The Noise Source

“If you serve too many masters, you’ll soon suffer.”
– Homer

As a government organization, ADL’s masters are many and their interests all impact ADL’s ability to maneuver.

Master 1: The Boss, er, the Pentagon

From Day 1, ADL has existed to better prepare the warfighter. Give credit to the folks at the Pentagon, they take a broad view of preparing the warfighter, and the eLearning community has benefited from that in the shape of SCORM as it is today. Rightly so, the Pentagon leadership doesn’t want to support a static standard, so they’ve asked for what comes next.

ADL has laid out the “Future Learning Experience Project”, and it will build upon the platform laid by SCORM to further the support of the warfighter as we move toward 2025. I have no doubt that “FLEX” will also support learners around the world effectively.

Our work with Project Tin Can gives us an early look at this work. FLEX builds upon the core concepts that led to the creation of SCORM 10 years ago, while adjusting for the inevitable changes in technology. This is good news of the highest order for those who care about SCORM. SCORM, “the name”, may or may not move forward, but the concepts and the platform inevitably will. And it will do so with ADL’s financial and technical support.

Master 2: The Financiers

Government agencies can’t just spend their budgets however they deem appropriate; they have to spend money on exactly what it was allocated for. People refer to this financial allocation as the “color of money”. ADL is funded using dollars allocated for “research” purposes. Maintaining an existing specification is classified as “sustainment”. You can’t spend “research” dollars on “sustainment”.

If you wonder why the SCORM brand may or may not survive, please consider the phrases research and sustainment. (Trust us, we benefit as much as anyone from the continued use of the word “SCORM”. It may or may not make it, but that doesn’t mean that the standard or work has been lost. It’s continuing.)

Master 3: The Lawyers

There are a lot of us, reasonable, plainspoken people, who really wish that ADL were able to pass SCORM off to an open group like LETSI. There are many people within ADL who wish this. SCORM would likely flourish if set free.

Put simply, the lawyers won’t let it happen. Well, the lawyers and the good folks at IMS. IMS, didn’t like the fact that ADL was handing over SCORM (with embedded IMS IP) to yet another standards organization so they brought lawyers into the equation. There are two sides to every story, but the relevant outcome is once lawyers got involved it turned into a very messy divorce.

Unfortunately, this means that SCORM stewardship remains locked up within ADL. And further, it means that any evolution of SCORM is further complicated, particularly as it relates to anything originally contributed by IMS.

Again, we reasonable, plainspoken people (including learning tech people from both IMS and elsewhere) would be best served by reconciliation and collaboration. For now, though, it seems that we’ll have to do without. As long as the relationship between IMS and ADL remains dysfunctional, the two significant parts of SCORM contributed by IMS (packaging and sequencing) are effectively frozen. ADL can’t evolve them without more legal sword-fighting.

What Next?

Well, check back here tomorrow for a line-by-line interpretation of ADL-SCORM-Evolution Speak.

Highlights to include:

• LETSI-RTWS
• AICC-CMI-Evolution
• ISO-FLEXification

These words are my own. These opinions are my own. There is no official ADL opinion, fact or history included herein.

Part 2: SCORM Ain’t Dead: Where We Will Head