Nobody could possibly nail a proper SCORM implementation on their first try. Even if the specification were followed to the letter, the industry’s interpretation of the standard would make it literally impossible to have the perfect solution on your first attempt. This collected knowledge, which we’ve embedded in the SCORM Engine, is why buying the Engine is always a better choice than building it yourself.
Below is a brief history of the evolution of the SCORM Engine. Each release contains a combination of a few new features and many compatibility improvements.
SCORM Engine 2011.1
June 2011 – release notes
Features two major new features and a significant investment in robustness.
The “big red button” is a new debug log / information submission feature. “Big red button” creates a package with all of the information commonly needed to troubleshoot a problem and submits it to our support team with the click of a button.
We translated all of the SCORM Engine text into 16 new languages. Supported languages now include:
Full Translations:
- Arabic (ar-AIIC)
- Danish (ad-DK)
- Welsh (cy-GB)
- Chinese-Simplified (zh-Hans)
- Chinese-Traditional (zh-Hant)
- Dutch (nl-NL)
- French (fr-FR)
- German (de-DE)
- Italian (it-IT)
- Japanese (ja-JP)
- Spanish (es-ES)
- Russian (ru-RU)
- Swedish (sv-SE)
- Finnish (fi-FI)
- English-United Kingdom (en-GB)
- Portuguese (pt-BR)
Partial Translations (user interface is translated, but not administrator interface)
- Hungarian (hu)
- Norwegian (no)
As modern browsers have evolved and the complexity of the SCORM Engine has increased, we became aware of a rare but statistically significant problem related to the timing and processing of events during browser unloads. We spent a lot of time investigating these sporadic errors and put a number of improvements in place to minimize their impact. See the release notes for a more thorough explanation.
SCORM Engine 2010.1
December 2010 – release notes
Includes support for two new standards: LETSI RTWS and PENS.
LETSI RTWS is a web services communication framework that alleviates some of the common technical barriers SCORM imposes on content deployments. RTWS is a huge step towards enabling remote content hosting, games, simulations, virtual worlds, offline content, secure communications and mobile delivery.
PENS is a standard that allows for the automatic publishing and import of content. With a PENS enabled authoring tool, you can publish new or updated content to your LMS with a single click.
This release also contains significant improvements to our AICC implementation as well as improvements in the usability of SCORM 1.2. Check out the release notes for a full list of other new improvements, including real-time status updates and a new content time-out feature.
SCORM Engine 2009.1
July 2009 – release notes
Includes support for SCORM 2004 4th Edition to enable robust new sequencing features like shared data, progress data rollup and a new “jump” navigation request. This release also includes thorough attempt history logging and an associated narrative report to show exactly how the learner progressed through the course in an easy-to-understand fashion.
This release includes new capabilities to facilitate deployment to Amazon’s cloud computing environment and a debug log submission feature to remove some friction for the customer support process. Of course, there are also a few dozen new package properties, parser warning and other tweaks to enhance compatibility.
SCORM Engine 2008.1
November 2008 – release notes
Harmonized Java support (achieved via our CS2J product) was the biggest addition, but not the only one. When the standards bodies take a break, we’re able to drive forward other aspects of the product. IMS SSP (shareable state persistence) is now available as an add on, versioning has been enhanced, and an upload progress bar can be exposed.
Integrations are now dramatically simpler, with the amount of code for certain clients coming in under 100 lines.
SCORM Engine 2007.1
July 2007
SCORM 2004 3rd Edition was finally released, and we were the first to be certified against it. Metadata persistence, AICC preview, further availability of debugging data, and further offline support (see SCORM Untethered).
SCORM Engine 2006.1
May 2006
Debugging enhancements for bad content (the nexus for SCORM Test Track), multilingual support, a package properties web control, DB2 and OpenBase support, and a web services integration.
SCORM Engine 2005.3
December 2005 – release notes
We broadened the browser support, added support for Unicode, allowed for disconnected use (see SCORM Untethered), and exposed the earliest form of our reporting object (or API). Package properties were enhanced to allow for common deployment issues.
SCORM Engine 2005.2
November 2005
Web service import, rollup enhancements, preview and review, further metadata usage, optimized Oracle stored procedures and various bug fixes, among other things.
SCORM Engine 2005.1
June 2005
The first release to incorporate both SCORM 2004 and our fundamentally important integration architecture, 2005.1 set the basic path forward to the current version of the SCORM Engine. The core standards related code from 2005.1 is still in use in all subsequent versions of the Engine.
SCORM Content Player
Early 2003
This was our first generation player, and it’s still standing strong in a couple of implementations. The original version had full support for SCORM 1.2 and some support for AICC, but lacked SCORM 2004 (it wasn’t released yet) and was difficult to maintain.
Implementations of the “SCP” required 2 – 3 days of active coding at a client site and the debugging tools were largely non-existent.
Lessons learned from the SCP drove the adoption of the formalized “integration layer” found in all later versions. This integration layer allows us to keep up with evolution of the standard on behalf of our clients today.
