When it comes to getting something for free, I’ll do just about anything. Last summer, we had a new ice cream store open in East Nashville. The night before they “officially” opened, they were offering free ice cream. I stood in line for close to 2 hours in 90 plus degree weather in June for two scoops of ice cream. It was by far the most delectable ice cream I had ever eaten, but ice cream none the less. You may think that’s a bit extreme but I like to think of it as getting a good deal. Helps me sleep at night, anyways.

We really like you, so we’ve decided to give you something pretty awesome for FREE and you don’t have to stand in line or do anything crazy for it. All you have to do is agree not to make money from it. Deal?

We’ve recently released SCORM Driver, free for non-commercial use. You heard right! You can now convert your courses to SCORM and AICC for free. That means there will be more really conformant SCORM and AICC content packages in the world, which makes us really happy. Put simply, SCORM Driver wraps your content in SCORM (or AICC) and allows it to work in practically any LMS. The only thing that we ask of you in return is that you only use the free version of SCORM Driver for non-commercial purposes. Wondering what we mean by non-commercial? Check this out.

To get started, check out the Quickstart Guide, and download SCORM Driver from the Add Content page in SCORM Cloud. Then you are on your way making some awesome SCORM conformant courses. If you have questions along the way, let us know. We’ll do our best to answer them. Want to use your courses commercially? No problem, we’ll just need to talk about licensing.

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

Over a year ago, we started working with ADL to figure out where SCORM should go next. There were many roads that ADL could have gone down, and they’ve chosen ours — Project Tin Can.

We’ve been building and refining the Tin Can spec and our prototypes for a while now, and it’s time for you to see what we’ve been doing. It’s also time for you to share your thoughts on Project Tin Can with ADL and find out how you can contribute.

You’re all invited to join ADL on Thursday, April 5 at 2:30pm ET for the Project Tin Can kick off meeting. You can join right from your computer. Sign up here. You can count on hearing our voices there, too.

ADL will be sharing details about Tin Can, the schedule for release, and many other things as well.

If you want to get started before then (or just want to talk shop,) email us at tincan@scorm.com. We’re happy to help you become an early adopter of Project Tin Can.

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

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?

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

I answer a lot of SCORM questions ranging from the basic to the extravagant, and I actually like it.  A huge part of what I do is teaching about SCORM.

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.

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

We created the eLearning Atlas to be an ideal tool to easily find the proper solutions. Jena and I have tried to speak to every company in the Atlas, and we continue to seek those that we’ve missed. This process provides a valuable pool of data. Rather than hoard this information, I thought it would be nice to share.

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.

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

A car salesman’s credibility is quickly lost when he guesses what size engine is under the hood or what the gas mileage could be. Claiming a car has “good” gas mileage is not the same thing as knowing it’s 40 mpg. A 6-cylinder engine can come in a variety of flavors… in-line or V, turbocharged or naturally-aspirated, these details create some machines that are much faster than others. With cars, more is not always better, sweating the details creates vehicles that keep “car guys” debating for hours. People who care nothing for cars will make generalizations that make me cringe, but nobody wants a guessing salesman to help choose the perfect vehicle.

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.

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

SCORM is over 10 years old. A while ago, ADL (the keepers of SCORM) asked us to research what the next-generation e-learning specification could/should look like.

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.

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

Back in 2007, I got curious about SCORM 2004 adoption and pulled some metrics about how people were using SCORM. Well, I got curious again, but this time I took it to the next level. We’ve just published a feed of SCORM Stats that will be updated nightly. For SCORM geeks like us, these stats present a useful snapshot into how the real work is using SCORM. Go ahead and bookmark it and come back every now and then to see how things evolve.

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.

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

Before we bought 30 inch monitors for everybody, we used to print out all of the SCORM specs as they came out. The hard copy made them a whole lot easier to digest even though it meant the slaughter of many innocent trees. In unpacking the last boxes in our new office today I came across all of them. It makes a nice visual for why it makes sense to work with Rustici Software if you’re serious about providing standards support.


What’s in the pile:

• 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

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

You pay for Rustici Software products, and we want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of them.

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.
 

“Powered by” images are now available for you to put to work. Just visit our “powered by” page and grab the HTML or files for print that you need.

We’ve provided 3 sizes for each image, but we understand that there will be exceptions. If you need a different size or format, just email support@scorm.com with your needs and we’ll get a custom image made for you — pronto.

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