- Okay.
Hello, everybody!
This is Anna Sabramowicz and today I'm talking to Chris.
And I think the best way for us to get to know Chris
is for Chris to tell us who he is, what he does,
and basically the driving force behind his life.
- (chuckles) Thanks.
So yeah, I'm Chris Tompkins, I work at Rustici Software.
I'm a Director of Sales and I've been spending
many, many years now helping e-Learning providers
play nicely with one another.
We have deep expertise in things like SCORM, AICC, xAPI,
you might have heard it called TinCan.
And we spend all day helping tools like Adobe's Captivate,
Articulate Storyline build courses and save them out.
We help learning management systems like Blackboard,
and Structures, Canvas, and Bridge,
Desire2Learn, Paycom, Workday, and hundreds of others,
properly bring those courses into their environment,
play and track them the way they should.
And we have a lot of solutions for everybody in between.
We're small.
We're in Nashville, Tennessee and there's
about 30 of us here, but we're supporting
the e-Learning industry across the world
all at the same time.
So instructional designers, people building content
can save it so it plays and tracks the same way
in many of the environments that the end learners
probably live in.
- Cool.
- Yeah, it's a neat little niche that we serve really well.
- Yes, and if you want to see how much fun
these guys have at work because from past conversations
I've heard that SCORM isn't that exciting
then check out their website 'cause it's pretty awesome.
It's very warm, I like it.
It humanizes the software aspect, that's awesome.
Okay, so I just want to give everybody,
'cause I think we have a gamut of people who subscribed
to this channel, and some of them are just like
hot off the press,
some of them are people who maybe have been training
for like years and years and all of a sudden
their company has moved to this new platform
or they have this new mandate
to make things online accessible.
And they're getting into this world with all these things
in the background that they now have to think about.
So I think what you can do for us is add this,
the perspective of what are some things that a novice
and even an expert should be considering
when they're publishing their e-Learning
or when they're thinking what the intent
that they want to achieve.
So maybe first let's talk about what all these things
mean and where do they come from.
Why did you make them?
- Right, so when I go and attend e-Learning events,
often SCORM, MICC, xAPI become buzzwords.
The next thing.
Really they all come from the same design
and that's to help somebody publish an e-Learning experience
so that it plays the same way, babysits the learner
the same way in a variety
of different learning applications.
I'll probably call them all an LMS going forward
because that's simple for me, but I've heard them
called management systems and talent development systems
and a whole wide range of things.
- Yeah. - To me
it's a platform that manages learnings,
gives them a username and a password,
can manage content, assign it to the right person,
play it, and stress some importance on the other side.
And we can certainly argue about the pedagogical approach
of learning and the right way to help somebody learn.
But those things aside, you've gotta be able to make it
portable and move between things.
So the oldest and most well worn path is called SCORM,
the Sharable Content Object Reference Model.
- Nobody has to memorize that by the way.
- Never.
No, I think I'm probably the only person that's gonna say
these words out.
- Yeah, you are.
- So essentially at the end of the day
SCORM helps this in a very fundamental way.
So I'm actually not smart enough to explain it
at the abstract level, but instead if we just look at
how does this actually work.
What's a real world tangible story?
So if you imagine that you are a mechanic in the Army
which is where all of these standards began,
you are faced with a unique challenge 15 years ago.
The Military at large, the Department of Defense
is launching more e-Learning courses in a day
than most corporations launch in an entire year.
It is profound.
And 15 years ago, they found themselves in a weird situation
where a mechanic would have to go to all of these
different unrelated websites to train on different topics.
So to keep our example easy, a mechanic needs to repair
Jeeps, Humvees, and tanks in order
to know how to do their job.
So back in the day you'd have jeeptraining.com
set up by Chrysler who owns the Jeep.
You'd have AM General set up the Humvee training portal
and you'd have whoever builds tanks,
set up tanktraining.com.
And that's all well and good.
The learner could log into this portal
with an individual name and password at any time.
The could train where the first modules
had a change of flat tire
and the most advanced ones how to swap out the engine.
But they would then exit and have to go to an entirely
different platform in order to learn the next vehicle
and on we go.
When we start to look at that soldiers' entire training
catalog, it's massive.
And so when a General, let's call him their boss,
needs to deploy a mechanic who's an expert in Jeeps,
Humvees, and tanks, well, they were having to go
into three different portals, download reports,
try to mung them together in a way that this one calls it
"Chris completed a course",
this one calls it "Chris finished a course".
The data and recording was really hard.
And so the DOD at large said, no more,
we're not going to do this and instead we're going to fund
this group called ADL, advanced distributive learning.
Their website is adlnet.gov if you're interested
in learning more about them.
And they are essentially a tax-payer-supported think tank
that ultimately solves these type
of interoperability problems, because it's really hard
to bring the entire e-Learning industry together at once
and say what you guys wanna do.
So ADL then mandates these things.
They cooked up SCORM.
And at the end of the day SCORM is an open stand.
Anybody in the world can go to adlnet.gov,
download the phone book-sized stack of paper
to learn how to develop it.
- Tempting.
- There are rules on the road there essentially
that we can all benefit from.
So if we fast forward to today, the Army has one
learning management system to rule them all.
And on day one of your career in the Army
you are placed into that portal and you can do whatever
you want to do so long as you are taking it
in that learning management system.
So all of these subject matter experts, Jeep training,
Humvee training, tank training can build
whatever they want so long as the deliverable
to the federal government is the SCOMS of file.
And this allows us to then have a learning management system
and have many different content providers
all feeding the same platform.
That structure has made its way around the world
in every vertical I can think of.
Private organizations, NGOs, non-profits,
government bodies, regulatory agencies.
I've worked with a wide variety of different clients
who need that type of interoperability to suit
their learning and training goals.
So SCORM has evolved over the years.
If somebody casually comes to me and says,
hey, I'm working with SCORM, I assume that they're
probably talking about SCORM 1.2.
Inside of our SCORM cloud we support all types
of different content but anywhere on a month
from 70 to 80% of all of the new content we see
uploaded to the platform is SCORM 1.2.
It does the basics really well.
It bundles the course up so that it's portable
and can play the same way everywhere
and it babysits the learner with the big four.
It's a concept I use a lot.
I totally just made it up but it's total time,
completion status, pass/fail status, and score.
And whether I'm giving you a knowledge check
in the hallway, an old school Scantron sheet,
a modern e-Learning course or a paper quiz,
I've gotta know are you still working on it or are you done,
did you pass or did you fail, what was your score.
And if I took two hours and two minutes,
well, that's certainly interesting too.
And so SCORM 1.2 does these things really, really well.
Does that make sense to you?
- Oh, it totally does.
Yeah.
I'm hoping it makes sense to everybody else
who's listening too.
So one of the things I'm wondering then is
the SCORM capability as far as this packaging it,
do you have to have special software?
Can you wrap up, what can you actually wrap up in SCORM?
If that makes--
- That's a great question.
Yeah, so the anatomy of the SCORM course
I think is the best way to talk about that concept.
And at its core, a SCORM package is a zip file.
It's the same archive we've used everywhere else.
Everything inside it is organized in a really strategic
and prescriptive way.
So SCORM can be any web deliverable multimedia
that will run in an active modern web browser session.
So if you're using images, that's great.
Video is fine.
Interactivity, flashback in the day it was a big part
of a SCORM course. - It's a hogwash.
- HTML5 is starting to replace that
and it works fine with SCORM.
So as you think about what could I do with learning
experiences, anything that's in a web browser
is probably fine.
A bunch of asterisks around it.
We can also do some things that aren't in a web browser,
but it gets a little rocky and a little more difficult
to begin to plan out how that works.
But generally speaking you will see a slide-based nature
to a SCORM course, how a beginning, a middle, an end
and likely an assessment that's very common.
And SCORM does it all really, really well.
As you begin to build on the type of concepts
in that course, that's where the differentiation
between the versions of SCORM.
There's a more advanced version called SCORM 2004
which on its own is an incomplete statement,
because SCORM 2004 comes in three different additions,
second, third, and fourth,
all which fundamentally hate one another
and has no backwards compatibility with SCORM 1.2.
So SCORM 2004 provides what I call
sequencing and navigation.
It is a choose your own adventure style to learning
that is really reminiscent of these paperback novels
I read as a kid, where if you wanna go into the cave,
turn to page 23, but if the road looks safer,
go to page 95.
It gives the learner the ability to pick a path
even though the content creator had to lay out
all of these options. - Yeah.
- SCORM 2004 can do some more pedantic things.
It has larger interactions, data store,
some other technical issues,
but my guidance as a guy who knows a little more
than most about SCORM is stick to SCORM 1.2
unless you're trying to leverage the value of SCORM 2004
for a specific reason.
- Okay.
- And the biggest reason that I say that is that
the whole goal of these standards
is around interoperability.
So anytime you're trying to get software around the world
across many different businesses to play nicely together,
Interoperability becomes the core of that
different type of strategy.
And often the latest and greatest isn't the right fit
when we think about trying to get people to play along.
So an easy example of this, the MP3 is remarkable to me
in a few different ways.
First, it's the only piece of software on my modern
iPhone X that I carry around every day that I bothered
to put on every other phone I've ever had.
It was on all of my iPods and my iPod Shuffle.
And I had Zune, I was super proud of it.
And these little MP3s have made their way off Napster
in the early '90s into my phone now.
And I don't think there's any other piece of software
that is stuck with me as long as the MP3 has.
And it's because the MP3 is a package
that can move between devices very easily.
When you hit the triangle button,
it plays the same way every time
and some basic data comes out of that package,
artist name, song title.
And it doesn't have to be fancier than that.
If the MP3 standard was changing fundamentally every year,
year after year, you wouldn't be able to use that file
in as many places as you can.
I rented a car not long ago and it had a thumb drive
that you can just shove in and play an MP3.
That's a big deal.
And so SCORM 1.2 is that for the e-Learning industry.
It is the one and rare time where when you're imagining
what type of software will best suit your learning program,
it might not be the latest and greatest.
If the name of the game is interoperability,
the standard that is old, stable, and used everywhere
is the most common.
There's some large open source learning management systems,
Moodle comes to mind.
Moodle supports the basics of SCORM 1.2 really well.
If you wanna do advanced SCORM 2004,
if you wanna do xAPI inside a Moodle,
it's a lot of work.
And if you just use the latest and greatest standard
for the sake of doing it as an instructional designer,
you've potentially saved your file down in a format
that won't work with your clients in a way
that SCORM 1.2 would have let you leap over
all of those hurdles without any additional effort.
And so just be sure as you reach into the toolbox
that you're grabbing the right tool for the job.
I'm a car guy and I like to rent on cars for fun.
And I could easily, to a layman, say a screwdriver,
a socket, and a wrench all do the exact same thing.
They all turn a threaded bolt.
But in reality when you find yourself in those situations,
one tool is far more useful than the other.
And I care very little about which one's newest,
which one's shiniest, which one I'm most proud of.
Let's just grab the tool that does the job that we needed
to do and let's move on.
Because these interoperability standards aren't the thing
that really differentiate something from another thing.
It is the features and the functionality
in the interoperability that really differentiate
which one you grab out of the toolbox,
this situation you're in and how it's designed for.
- I love that.
I love that approach,
because they say if you have a hammer
then everything looks like a nail
and then that gets you in trouble.
- Yeah.
xAPI is something I'm super happy about.
We help to write it, the 0.95 version is 100% of us
to see softwares work.
And we spent four, five years researching,
talking to the industry, crafting this thing
for ADL who we've turned that research over.
We called it Project TinCan at the beginning
'cause it was a two-way communication
between the (audio trails off) the standards body.
It's turned into the Experience API, also known as xAPI
in its more mature stage.
It turns out that cans and strings in tree houses
is a uniquely American concept.
And then we put that out to the global population,
people went, what?
I don't understand what you're doing.
- It's so funny.
- We didn't know either.
So the training and learning architecture Experience API,
the TLA, xAPI is what the Department of Defense
is calling the 1.0 version of this big effort.
So if you hear 10K and then you hear xAPI,
they are somewhat interchangeable there.
- Okay.
- But ultimately it is a tool,
and the toolbox for stepping outside
of what SCORM can do.
So if you imagine a nurse taking, continuing education
credits to maintain their certification for CPR,
they probably log in to their hospital's LMS,
they sit in front of a computer screen,
and they take a feeling like a PowerPoint thing
with a quiz at the end.
SCORM does that really well.
And SCORM helps that CPR course designer deploy it globally
and it just works.
And everybody can track it in their system.
Sure, xAPI can do that but you're creating new work,
you are creating a package that might not be supported
in every learning management systems throughout the world.
And so you need to be sure that there's reasons,
compelling reasons to go do that type of effort.
xAPI is most valuable in the second step
of that nurse's training,
where we go, sure, you spent 63 of the required
60 minutes in that course.
You passed it with the score of 95,
but show me you know how to do CPR.
And we make them practice on their ACSM dummy.
Redo chest compressions and breathing on that apparatus.
And most hospitals today come up a little short of,
I think, an ideal situation.
They print out a paper certificate,
they hand it to the nurse and it has their name on it,
and you completed CPR on this date with this trainer.
Ta-da!
And so I don't think that's the best way to track that.
And so xAPI is designed to create a noun,
a verb, and an object:
Chris likes this, Christ posted a picture
and he wrote on wall.
It's the same data model behind Facebook.
And it allows us to be more expressive about the things
that are happening outside of a web browser experience.
We get, say, things like Chris revives the dummy.
Chris used this volume of breath,
this forcefulness of chest compression.
The xAPI standard can even have attachments
where you could print out the PDF certificate
and attach it to that statement and move it
between different databases known
as an xAPI learning record store or LRS.
The last step of that nurse's journey,
and I think this is the part that is actually
really exciting is that hospitals track
the nurse's interactions on live patients all the time.
And so to be able to take whatever application
is the source of truth for that hospital,
a billing application, a patient interaction portal,
triaging systems, I'm a little ignorant when it comes
to exactly--
- They all sound really good, yes (laughs).
- We could use xAPI to be a light touch
or instead of having all these double data entry
into the LMS, it could say, today, Chris revived a patient.
And when you start putting real world job performance,
light hands on training and traditional e-Learning data
in the same database, the learning record store
and having them in the same context now in verb and object
gives us the magic moment to say, ooh,
this particular nurse is 30% more effective
at actually saving lives.
Why is that?
Show us the training and learning experiences
that differentiate your top performer from the rest
of your population.
Is it that you're the only ones that took the additional
optional CPR course that taught some newfangled hippie
skill that no one knew about?
Are they the only ones that push down hard enough
on the dummy to break ribs but save lives?
Are they working a different cohort or different shift
or different time of day or with a different coworker?
Organizations can't possibly know the efficacy
of their learning and training program
unless they measure outcomes.
And so xAPI is that thread that ties together
traditional learning and real world outcomes.
And there are a lot of systems
that we enable around the world that can just translate
a SCORM course into xAPI.
And so maybe for an instructional designer,
you should just keep using SCORM for now,
but understand that grabbing the right tool
for the right job is important,
because if everybody tomorrow just switched to using xAPI,
I think you'll find that many learning management systems
aren't quite ready to play and track that package
in the way that SCORM really works well for them today.
And so finding that right fit for the right job
is important because if you're just going to continue
to learn in a modern web browser, please use SCORM.
But if you have a costumer that has all three
of those things mingling together,
there's a lot of value there that might be worth
the extra effort.
- Wow!
I'm thinking right now that it's just the application
of just xAPI how a lot of companies are really trying
to leverage that 70/20/10 model of learning.
And it seems like this is, this would be,
and if your organization's actually committed to that
and has structures in place that are working
like the mentorship and things like that
and then this would be the move,
because it would string all those things together.
- It will.
The easiest way is start to capture what's actually
happening in our full-featured learning record stores
out there like watershed LRS.
Like Rustici, of our company's name sake
left for us to see software to go manage watershed.
It was a startup here inside of our company
and now we are sister.
And so they are providing that type of value.
The challenge, I think, you'll find is that
when you start tracking that much data
being able to manage it, warehouse it,
report on it, solve interoperability problems
begins to compound itself. - Yeah.
- And so by caution there is go into those projects
with an end in mind.
Don't try to track everything,
instead say this year we want to be able to see
this pi chart.
- Yeah. - Okay.
And if I understand the pi chart you're trying to build,
we can then argue about the ingredients necessary
and the order of operations to cook it up.
If you go into it in that approach,
I think it works really well.
I've seen a lot of people step up and start tracking
everything and then really struggle to understand
what's in the stew.
- It's kinda funny because the way that you design
good scenarios, branching scenarios is you never start
with the start and then just branch out
with the infinite possibilities.
The way to do it is to always figure out which
a pi chart is actually gonna be basically your outcome--
- That's absolutely right. - That need to happen
to get there.
That's totally awesome.
Backwards design rocks.
- It has to happen in order for xAPI to use it.
- Most people get, like, get in touch with me
with questions saying, how do I manage all the branches?
And I'm thinking, oh, man,
that's getting lost in the weeds, right?
Because now the possibilities are endless,
so I totally get that.
That's really cool.
So it's kind of neat because I was thinking about
there's this platform I was working with
for an NGO, it was called Kaya.
It's a humanitarian academy.
(mumbles) academy.
Anyways, kaya.org, but what they do is
it's awesome that it's almost like SCORM has allowed
for a lot of good things to happen that way
because they're able to leverage these little SCORM
pieces from the entire world because humanitarian
efforts are, they happen everywhere and everybody's
building training so now you're able to kind of
pull from this huge pull of all these resources
and actually create learning streams for people
because everything talks to everything else.
It's so cool actually. - Yeah.
- You're like saving lives.
- We try.
We're also putting people
through a lot of compliance training, so it,
SCORM has a lot of spectrum and it has
a lot of exciting things to do in the future,
but tactically for instructional designers,
often your biggest interaction is just at the end
of building it in Adobe's Captivate, Articulate Storyline,
(mumbles) like Tora, dominKnow's Claro, Camtasia.
There are hundreds of authoring tools out there.
And at the end you can save at SCORM,
specifically same as SCORM 1.2,
SCORM 2004 or the fourth edition, AICC, TinCan, xAPI,
and understanding what's in that dropdown menu
becomes really valuable for the day to day operations.
The big picture is certainly something to keep in mind,
but often that exporting function or that publishing
function is the thing that is your product
at the end of the day that can go to different
learning management systems, different organizations,
and have an impact.
And so I think understanding that full picture
is really where instructional designers
begin to realize the value of these standards
and understand the right and wrong time
to pull the tool out of the toolbox.
- Yeah, and what's really cool I think
everybody will be excited about this,
I'm going to go into my Articulate Rise Courses
and show the export screen and have Chris basically
walk me through what all of those little options mean
so I can make better decisions (laughs).
- Yeah, let's do that.
- But do you wanna do that first or do you wanna,
we actually had some people send in questions,
what do you think?
- Yeah, either way.
- Cool, let me get to those questions.
And the first one is from Zoa.
Okay, what aspects and to what depth of knowledge
of these standardization tools are beneficial
for a designer to know.
This is to assume that the designer
is not also the e-Developer,
in which case I'd say we probably need to know more.
However, I strictly do the designing.
So this person is coming to it from that end
that they had off this technical aspect.
So they do the story boarding, script writing,
content analysis, and scoping, and learning theory.
So what do you think?
- So I think your biggest challenge will be
fitting it into what SCORM 1.2's expectations are.
- Who?
Okay. - And so,
as you begin to story boarding things,
I think trying to design a course that will work
in the most possible places
is the first big thing to consider.
If you wanna do more advanced things,
I think that's great but we then need to ask questions
like can this learning management system handle SCORM 2004.
So from the concept of designing, story boarding,
script writing, it's the difference between
a linear course beginning, middle, end,
slide-based on nature.
A typical SCORM 1.2 course will have slides
where here's your intro, how long it's gonna take,
who built it, what's your expectations are.
Slide two is typically table of contents
and where we're gonna go.
Slide three then can embed a video,
embed a piece of interactivity,
have some things on the screen.
It's like a really interactive and compelling version
of a PowerPoint presentation.
- I know how you said that and you were, like meant it.
- Yeah, it's true, right?
And the advantage there though is that in between slides,
SCORM is dropping a bookmark,
so that if your learner losses their Internet connection
or has to stop right here,
if you put a four-hour video on that slide,
that might not be as compelling as cutting that video
into 10 slides so that if they make it through some things,
you could have some knowledge checks in between
that remind them of the four key concepts
they learned in the last 20 minutes that they launched it
and then start the next section of video.
But moreover from a workflow standpoint
if I were to leave and come back,
I at least get put back where I left off.
Not all video players can handle bookmarking
within the video itself, and so cutting it up
into smaller chunks helps you help your learners
come and go and say please stay engaged
and reinforce different key concepts.
- Okay, so just do say what you're,
kinda reiterate what you're saying
or maybe that I understand it correctly.
If somebody is wanting a course or planning a storyboard,
they have to think about these little,
each slide almost like a discreet moment
that SCORM is going to tap in to,
so you're saying make those maybe pieces
more meaningful or smaller.
- That's right. - okay.
- Smaller always helps with the bookmarking
if that's the concern we're trying to design against.
And it also helps make it more interactive.
Anytime that they're clicking and being engaged
with the course, it's my opinion,
that at least they're not staring at the ceiling
and just watching a video go by.
Often you'll see at the bottom of the screen
in the SCORM course a slider that's showing the progress
and what the key moments are.
That's a SCORMy thing that you'll often run in to.
Those type of features help.
And from a story boarding perspective,
from a design perspective, understanding what's SCORM
is expecting will prevent you from architecting this grand
thing and then go oh, SCORM hates this.
Like I can't watch an executable file from here
and track some things.
Keeping it in a web browser experience,
multimedia that works well on a browser,
and then chunking it up so that bookmarking works
as it should is really powerful.
I think the other important piece is understanding
what SCORM can track with respect to assessments.
SCORM provides the ability to do multiple choice,
multiple select, to have fill in the blank,
to have almost essays.
There's some character limits.
I don't know them off top of my head,
but like 50,000 characters per answer--
- Oh, for goodness sakes!
- Is important.
SCORM 2004 does more if you need them.
But that type of interactivity, SCORM can help you
assign a wait so that not all questions are worth the same
out of a 10 question multiple choice test.
Maybe you don't want it, design it
where they are all worth 10%.
SCORM can handle those type of things.
And SCORM can also help the educator understand
the individual answers to each question
and whether they were right or wrong
often called an all interactions report.
And so if you were to want to grab more data,
it is possible to trick score 'em into capturing
first name, last name, pet's name, favorite color,
and wait those as a zero value and then have a quiz
at the end that is actually an assessment.
So those are the tools and toolbox as you begin to design
and consider those things.
- Awesome.
- If you start designing a non-linear path
where everything's normal but at slide three
you let them pick different learning objects
or have a pretest or a post test and bring it back together,
that's where SCORM 2004 comes into play.
And if you wanna do those type of things,
that's great.
Let's look at the MLS before we go too far down that road
to ensure that it's going to be able play and track that
the way that you want.
There's some subtle differences between SCORM 2004 third
and fourth edition and what the LMS is going to expect
and I can help cheat our way around a lot of these problems
should you run into them down the road
but understand that you might be creating work
that just isn't reasonable for a customer using Moodle
or something more simple.
- So it sounds like what you're doing is you're almost
balancing the experience you want your learner to have,
like how self-directed almost you wanted to be
but then you're maybe trying to be also realistic
with the kind of data you're going to be able
to pull as first results.
- That's right. - Okay.
- SCORM has some limitations.
I don't think that they're overly burdensome
but in the way that you're designing things
to meet the spirit of that question,
understanding that SCORM is expecting this linear
progression, it's gonna be slide-based.
Those are the rules of the road.
And you should build something, you should storyboard
on a slide-based nature essentially as you begin to design
what you want this thing to be knowing that the e-Learning
developer is gonna be using these tools on your behalf
is going to be designing your storyboards
and putting your materials into that similar format.
- Okay, cool.
Okay, so next question.
When we think about standardization of authoring tools,
how do you think marketing plays into that.
We all know the name brands: Storyline, Articulate,
Captivate, BlackBoard, Desire2Learn, yeah, Desire2Learn.
Do you think there are dangers in the branding aspects
and the growth of how e-Developers or e-Learning designers
might purchase or use the current standards.
- Yeah.
So all the names you just rattled off there are Rustici
software customers in one way or another,
and so they are all my babies and I love them all equally.
At the end of the day marketing and features
and functionality are very important.
I think they help you understand what these tools
are capable of, help you design
the right e-learning experience
and then go find the right tool.
And I think you see these stratifications
in many other areas with respect to interoperability
which is the only thing I know anything about.
There are plenty of photo editing programs
out in the world.
Adobe's Photoshop is by far the premier.
And you can almost go to college to learn
how to use every button in Photoshop.
But I can Instagram on my phone and take a picture
of my food and turn it brown and make it a square
and they both say that's a JPG at end or a PNG
or whatever the file format might be.
So when you think about what you wanna do,
understanding the tools that they have,
understanding how they position themselves,
how they license themselves, how they end up
positioning themselves relative to ease of use
and functionality, Photoshop is really, really impressive,
but to somebody who just needs to crop a picture
and remove red eye, Photoshop can make that
far harder than what comes standard
with a lot of digital cameras.
- Yeah. - And so
when I think about some of the products that you just
listed there, the cool thing about it is that
at the end of the day, the question you should ask is
do you support SCORM, can I have a SCORM 1.2 sample
from your thing and test it in a neutral sandbox,
which I'm sure we'll talk about later,
but that becomes the baseline.
SCORM is the output of all of those tools or the input.
So Articulate and Captivate, two of the industry leading
authoring tools that you just mentioned.
They both save that SCORM.
And I'm intimately familiar with what comes out
of these tools 'cause both of them are running
our SCORM driver behind the scenes
to do the technical heavy lifting,
the bundle that project up as a SCORM course
so that it plays the same way and tracks the learner
the same way with respect to the big four.
Blackboard, Desire2Learn, two customers running the exact
same SCORM player behind the scenes.
And that's a value add to both of those categories
when I talk to those of vendors.
Hey, do you want your authoring tool to save
that SCORM differently than everybody?
Do you want your stuff to play differently
in somebody's LMS like everybody else?
Hm-mm.
Then it's probably advantageous to license the same tool
to save that SCORM as your competitors.
And that's the same argument that we can use
with a learning management system.
The big learning management system players
don't want their player to handle SCORM content differently
than their competitors.
There's real value to having these things save the same way
and having these things play and track the same way.
And that's what Rustici software kinda does
for the industry at the end of the day.
So buy in to whatever marketing you need,
find the right tool for the job,
find the one that I think is most important,
you're comfortable using.
No one wants a really fancy tool with tons of options
around the side that gets lost and cluttered.
They're intentionally marketing their message
to attract the certain type of user.
And if you feel like they're speaking to you,
that's great, know that you can always save that SCORM
and more importantly, you can always switch tools.
Because at the end of the day all of your files
are a SCORM package, your library's pretty dynamic.
- Awesome.
So is there, like usually if I'm working as a,
let's say an instructional designer and there's an LMS
that the company that I'm moving my thing in to,
they should tell me what works best with theirs, right?
- Yeah, you need to understand what that LMS is.
You need to understand with respect to e-Learning standards
what do you support.
Is it SCORM 1.2?
Is it nothing?
That's also an option, and there are plenty of great
learning platforms that don't support standards at all.
I often see these where they have their own bespoke
authoring environment and so you'll be designing
and building inside of the tool that's delivering.
And that might not be bad.
I talk people out of using SCORM all the time.
SCORM is the thing that would allow you to switch
between authoring tools, grab content off the shelves,
which between instructional designers and always have
these little files that can move
into your learning management system.
But if you're in an environment that doesn't support
standards at all, that's probably fine.
The disadvantages there are you might get locked in.
So if you ever decide to switch down the road,
your stuff's bespoke.
It doesn't play nicely anywhere else and you're gonna have
some switching pain.
You won't be able to pick from the pool of existing
resources, off the shelf content
bringing into that environment.
It will be bespoke.
But thats not bad for every group
and there are certainly plenty of arguments to make
for not using standards.
And technically I'm the right guy to talk you
through these things so.
(laughter)
- Yeah, what comes to mind for me is like Teachable
where they have their own course development
but there is no way to port all that stuff.
Yeah, it's a little different.
It is like I never thought about that
that actually all the courses in Teachable
are built on their platform and therefore
you can't really take them away.
- Can't take them away.
(mumbles) things in.
But Teachable has built a very large library
and has a very great user base and I think that's fine
as long as you don't have to move the twin platforms.
SCORM's unnecessary unless you need two different
e-Learning applications to play nicely together.
If you're only playing in one big environment
SCORM's likely not the thing.
- Mm-hmm, cool.
So, okay, we have this last question
before we go on to the publishing piece.
And I don't know if I understand this question correctly.
It was from Rick.
It says, I've always been tempted to do SCORM compliant
e-Learning in PowerPoint or Excel because it seems possible.
- Yeah.
My response is that SCORM's expectation is that
those type of materials will be played in a modern
active web browser session.
And so PowerPoint to SCORM in conversion exists.
At SCORM.com we've built a helpful guide
that helps you find the right tool for the job.
There are a bunch of authoring tools out there
that can change a PPT to a SCORM package
because PowerPoint really fits well into the SCORM dynamic.
iSpring Pro used to kinda build their value on that.
I think that's great.
Candidly, I think it's really easy to just copy and paste
assets out of a PowerPoint and into an authoring tool
in a way that gives you more control than just
have these static slides, but that's great.
When it comes to Excel, ooh, that's a whole other ballgame.
Excel isn't well suited to SCORM in my opinion.
You certainly can't link it
to the Excel executable application.
Maybe there's a world if you have this web hosted
Microsoft Office thing where you could mung Excel
into a SCORM course but I think you're living
the reservation at that point.
It's gotta be something that's easily played
in a web browser for it to work if you will.
- So I suggest build it out in PowerPoint,
get a free trial of something for 30 days
and built it out in there.
Whatever's needed.
Yeah, cool.
Thank you.
I was like, what?
Really? - Yeah.
- You can actually do that.
And yeah, totally.
The iSpring suits and even Articulate Presenter, right?
That was all those plug-ins for PowerPoint, cool.
- I think there's one last question we skipped here.
Would there ever be something other than SCORM xAPI,
AICC, and compliance norms?
I just wonder how we design for future grassroots
exchanges and any of these changing that's impacting tools.
That's a great question.
I think that that is a fear that's healthy to have
but kind of unfounded.
e-Learning standards come and go all the time.
And they move at glacial speeds.
I really wish that they came faster.
If you wanna keep your finger on that pulse,
I think it's great.
There is a lot of work coming out of iTripoli right now
to help normalize xAPI
and we're watching that really closely.
Here at Rustici,
they do the standardizations for things like USB
and a lot of industry standards so that plugs fit in sockets
a certain way. - Okay.
- iTripoli is an inoperability group
and it makes a lot of sense for them to take a closer look
at e-Learning standards and hopefully adopt a lot
of what's going on there.
That said, anytime you're debating by committee
in that way, I have no ability to call that type of stuff.
I don't know how that works.
So we're participating in that as much as we can.
We're tracking that closely as much as we can.
I think IMS does some really great things.
The IMS consortium, we're paid members of that organization.
And they have standards like LTI, QTI,
Common Cartridge, Caliper.
They're doing amazing work and I'm always excited
by what they're doing.
They played really heavily in the K through 12 space
for the most parts, college as well.
That said, watching what Rustici software is doing
is always kind of a good method.
The core of our business every day
is helping people play nicely.
And we're going to gravitate to whatever tools
people agree for the best.
So I don't think I'd be worrying too much day to day
and understand that there's such a groundswell with SCORM.
There's such a large library of content and courses
that corporations use that if you play in that big pile,
if something were to change,
we're going to have to figure out how to
reformat that stuff in a way that makes sense
and doesn't drastically change the world.
So we're already doing that.
I can translate a SCORM course on the fly,
play it as SCORM and then just track it as aXPI
for customers that need to make that migration.
So if you use something niche and on its own
without a lot of attention, I think you've got
some risk of it going away or not being useful.
But if you play in the mainstream,
you can focus on building really excellent courses,
really excellent content knowing that,
hey, if we ever need to change this stuff,
you are one of many with that pain.
And when you share pain with a lot of people,
we'll go solve it broadly.
So that's kind of my opinion there.
- Cool.
Okay, and thanks for catching that question.
I just didn't number it or something.
- It's all right. - And it's really important.
Yay, two minds are better than one.
All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share
my screen now and just show you my,
where are we?
Here we go.
There.
So this is Articulate Rise.
And the courses in Articulate Rise, I think, are very good.
I'm just gonna let you walk me through it,
but they really, I mean, it's linear, right?
There is some interlinking but it's very much
a linear type course.
So basically a linear progression through
a bunch of topics, and that's all these are,
and they have just embedded multimedia.
So very simple.
All text and GIF based, funny GIFs.
So I'm gonna go to Export.
And there's my Export Type.
So we have the LMS.
We have other things which I've tried
and they work, they're fun.
But as far as LMS.
I've got all these different options here.
- That's right.
- SCORM 2004, AICC, xAPI which has in quotes
or brackets TinCan for those who understand what that means.
So walk me through these options and when I should be
really thinking about using each one.
Like, what's the question I should ask that would be like,
that's de facto, I should be using that.
- So I think for almost everybody
building the type of course that you
just quickly showed us,
SCORM 1.2 is the default answer and the right answer.
- Okay.
- SCORM 2004 will be useful in two ways:
if you have built a course that is non-linear,
it has sequencing and navigational rules.
SCORM 2004 is how you must save it
in order for that behavior to come into play.
It may also be useful in SCORM 2004 if you've built
some really interactive fill in the blank or essay questions
back to that, I don't know if off the top of my head,
but SCORM 2004 gives you a bigger bucket per question
to put characters into.
That is a technical reason why you should use SCORM 2004.
Beyond that the only other way I could see you
needing SCORM 2004 is if the client's RFP mandates it.
A lot of times people writing the RFPs
don't fully understand what they're asking for
and they look at SCORM and say what's the latest,
let's give it a SCORM 2004.
Give your customer what they want.
But moreover you're not going to notice
much of a different between SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004
with respect to what I see on the screen here
unless you need those two things.
- So, would you say, and I don't know if
you're intimately familiar with this,
but let's say I'm building a branching scenario
in branch track.
Would that be a 2004 or would that be still a 1.2?
- So there would be some under the hood details
inside Articulate that I'm not well versed on.
It's been a minute since I've built
an e-learning course myself.
I would encourage you to test.
We provide a free testing sandbox
that we'll talk about in a minute.
And that is where, I don't know,
I would save it as 1.2 and see what it does,
and then save it as SCORM 2004 and see what it does.
- Cool.
- Our website at scorm.com says "Ask us anything really",
and we mean that.
And so if you start to get into that type of branching
and need a little help,
support at scorm.com is gonna go to Joe or Ryan Donnelly.
They're brothers and these are the type of questions
we answer for free all the time.
Rather than let me guess, ask the guys that actually know.
- That's awesome.
And I really appreciate that.
I think people will now be way more willing to ask questions
now that they know how friendly (mumbles) going there.
Okay, so now when I choose 2004,
then this Edition button comes up.
Oh, I don't know. - Right.
So this answer will be most dependent on
what the LMS can support because
each one of these different editions
has to have a different runtime environment,
a different player.
It's almost like the VCR battle had Betamas and VCR
and HD DVD versus Blu-Ray.
These different editions matter that much.
Most LMSs support some flavor of 3rd or 4th edition.
But I would ask the LMS which edition they support
in order to target that.
There are some technical details between 3rd and 4th
that probably aren't interesting in the context
of this discussion.
And if you really get into those weeds,
ask us anything really.
We'll tell you which one to use in the right time.
- Okay, so the difference between, let's say,
if I picked a second edition
and the LMS uses a third edition,
the difference might be that
you said those four criteria that are being,
the outputs, it might be that I'm only getting one or?
Because I put it in the wrong format.
- That's right.
So there's a lot of LMSs out there with a player running
our SCORM engine behind the scenes that doesn't care.
It's agnostic.
You can upload any form of 1.2, 2004, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th,
and it's gonna handle them all and no one has to worry.
But there are plenty of LMSs out there
that don't support them all well.
And you have to know specifically which edition
it's expecting in order to make it go.
- Okay, cool.
So everybody needs to do that little bit of homework
to make sure that they're packaged.
And also we talked about the idea of that
backward design is whatever you want
that experience to be,
you have to figure out however it's gonna be packaged
so that it optimizes that experience.
And even if you're not a part of the publish.
Okay, cool, so I think that explains that.
And then what is AICC?
- AICC is a really cool standard.
It was an original creation by the aviation industry.
Its stewardship has been transferred over to ADL now,
so ADL is the keeper of it.
It's been sunset for the most part.
I feel comfortable saying that.
- That's a very gentle.
- I work in a really pedantic world and there may in fact
be AICC things going on that I'm just not
aware of sitting here at my desk.
But ultimately it really is elegant
with what's known as the cross-domain browser
security restrictions problem.
AICC was intended to be easier to remote host
a package and just connect to an LMS,
is the fastest way to explain it.
There have since been industry solutions
that handle that even more elegantly
than AICC did.
You might bump into it from time to time
with a specific customer asking for a specific thing.
But it's really achieving parity with SCORM 1.2.
It's a package that can move between platforms,
play and track roughly the same way.
There's not a whole lot of difference
between their in result even though technically
they are very different standards.
- So if I accidentally publish something as AICC,
then it probably, will it work with things that
accepts SCORM 1.2?
- No.
The LMS must have its own AICC conformant
runtime environment in order to take that.
You are saving it as an entirely different format
with entirely different guidance.
And so it has to be compatible.
I don't think AICC is an option for most.
I think you should just use SCORM 1.2
if you have a choice between the two.
- I mean, I don't even know what they put in there.
Anyways, it's okay.
And by the way every time I do a recording
or a podcast, either there's like a howling dog,
also a truck's outside or somebody grinds coffee,
and I'm always like, here's my coffee.
So, okay, now we get to the juicy buzzword,
everybody's talking about xAPI TinCan.
Yes.
Oh my gosh, look at this.
I get a special identifier. - That's right.
xAPI, also known as TinCan, can make this package.
If we're being pedantic, what this is going to create
is a launch spec TinCan API package following
the 0.95 version of the specification.
- I hurt my brain.
- This is designed to achieve parity with SCORM.
So we wanted something that the industry
could grab on to and start to use immediately.
If you have an environment that can play
an xAPI package, this is the right option for you.
Most of those environments also support SCORM 1.2,
and I think that that's probably
a better option for right now.
I love xAPI, I love TinCan, I think it's really powerful.
This identifier helps you do some
more complex structuring.
And for the sake of this conversation,
let's leave it at this is another package type,
and your biggest limitation to using it
will be a learning management system
that knows how to import that
TinCan API launch spec zip file.
You should check with your LMS administrators,
see if they can handle that file.
and if they can't, SCORM 1.2 is going to do
the exact same thing without as much technical work.
So it's probably the right case.
Articulate's content is pretty linear.
It fits really neatly into SCORM.
And trying to do it for the sake of doing it
in the new standard is going to create
more headaches than you wanna deal with right now
in my professional opinion. - Okay.
So thank you for that.
I think that a lot of us just, like you've mentioned,
we see these different options and you think
what's the latest and greatest without really considering
are we able to leverage all of these resources?
There's so many pieces that need to work together
to make this effective.
Now the way that this is set up here is
that I can only use,
when I do this, like, track using course completion,
you said that there's four parameters, really,
that SCORM kind of helps you to measure.
So am I now, with this choice,
am I just limiting that feedback that I can get from SCORM?
- SCORM's intent is to allow the instructional designer
to choose what it means to attempt a course,
to pass a course, to fail a course, to track time
in the course. - Yeah.
- And there are more detailed resources
than me on this call to kinda walk you through
the right time to do it.
But storyline can publish as a 1.2,
or Articulate Rise can publish as a 1.2
that can do many different things.
And I would encourage you to go
into the user groups to really understand
how you get the tracking you want.
But as you can see here on the screen,
you're saying how much you must finish
in order to be marked as complete.
And I don't know enough about
what you've built to say, but I would say
because you didn't put an assessment in the course
that it's grayed out your other options
because you're not actually asking questions there.
But if you were to go back and build
an interactive type of quiz or essay
you'd be able to do more.
- There we go, okay, that makes total sense.
All right, so I did want to show everybody,
like, after I publish this maybe
and it generates basically a quiz or a zip file, right?
As it does that, then I go over to this magical space.
Did you wanna share your screen and then show us around?
- Yeah, I'm happy to do that.
- Okay, cool.
- What we have here is called our SCORM Cloud,
and it's a fantastic tool for instructional designers
who want to quality check their work
before they send it out into the world.
So you can sign up for a free SCORM Cloud account,
you and everyone you work with can have one,
and it's become the de facto way to just see
if a course plays and tracks
the way that it should before delivering it to an LMS.
Content that plays in a learning management system
should play in SCORM Cloud exactly the same way.
And so if you are ever delivering a course
that doesn't play or doesn't track the way
that you thought it should,
putting it in SCORM Cloud is a neutral playground.
If it plays and tracks in SCORM Cloud
it should be the same way everywhere else.
And if it doesn't, ask us anything, really,
and we'll help you figure out why.
So once you're in SCORM Cloud,
you click the Add Content button, hit Import Course,
find the file from your Articulate story line,
Rise, Captivate, whatever you're using,
click the Import Course and it will add it to your library.
I've not put myself in the right realm, there we go.
SCORM Cloud can have realms so you can
subdivide your projects and keep everybody separate.
- Learning realms.
- And then surely once the course is in your library,
we give you some options to come in here
and play and track it.
So we can click the Launch button.
This is the Golf Course.
This is the most boring course on the Internet,
but we use it to benchmark and to test things.
So it's just some simple rules of golf.
We've cut it in every form of SCORM and AICC and xAPI
you can imagine.
We can answer some questions
and we can botch SCORM, score it,
show you the individual answers, roll it up, and exit back.
So if that happens in SCORM Cloud,
it should happen the same way in any other LMS,
and it helps us really understand where problems lie.
If you're super technical and wanna get into the weeds,
this is a called a debug log.
This is one of the only places in the industry
where you can actually watch the two-way communication
between the course and the LMS.
We've designed this to be pretty useful
so that you can start getting into the weeds.
We also have the decoder ring.
So the Ovaltine Decoder Ring can show you
based on which version of SCORM you're using,
what all of these different calls that you see
in the debug log actually mean.
And so if you're really wanting to understand
the SCORM communication, hey,
we've given you two tools right here that make it
really easy to look under the hood and understand
how the data flows back and forth.
For the most part, you don't need to know this,
and if you notice at the bottom, ask us anything really.
You can share this debug log with us and we'll help you
understand what's going on for free.
- Why isn't that on your t-shirt?
(laughs)
- We do have some cool t-shirts here at Rustici.
- I bet you do.
- That's a whole other conversation.
We also have this magical box called Course Properties.
And so this can really be useful
for showing navigational bars.
I'll just turn everything on for the sake of a demo.
And we can also change the launch behavior
so that if you felt like this course
needs to be in a frameset frameset
or if you wanna kick it out to a new window
with specific dimensions, we can do that too.
And we can also change a ton of compatibility settings.
So if you're ever in a situation where you're inheriting
some SCORM content that you don't know much about,
hey, that's not a problem.
There's a little mouse over that'll show you
what each one of these does.
We can solve a lot of really complex SCORM problems
without having to rewrite your course
or change the LMS,
and this is how we're able to do this magic
even down to forcing it way back
into a different IE7 mode or something.
You'll notice I've changed some things,
and when I relaunch this course I'm going
to be able to now see it in a new window.
I've added some buttons at the top.
If you imagine having a course without
a previous and next button,
exiting would be super hard.
You might lose data.
So we can force that button into the learner's purview.
There's a lot we can do here.
It's not really worth going into too much detail on.
We can also search some reports.
We call it reportergets, a word we made up.
But we make it really easy to understand
what's going on there.
And finally the last tool that I think
is really interesting is that we can help you share.
So if you don't have an LMS or if you just
wanna put this course in front of a colleague,
our invitations make it easy to email it
directly to them or share a link.
And we also have dispatch which will help us
cheat our way into somebody else's LMS.
Using dispatch you can essentially
create a link between the course
that you have in SCORM Cloud
and another third party LMS.
So you'll notice I have one version of this course
shared out with all of these different clients
or learning management systems.
And this allows us to essentially come in
and control whether or not this course can be launched,
it can be available to new learners
or only returning users, there's a cap,
there's an expiration date.
And so if you're working with instructional designers
who wanna be able to own their intellectual property,
even though the learners live in another LMS
and the client might be asking for the full version
of the course, I can help you enforce different licenses.
I can help you play SCORM 2004 or xAPI content
and a SCORM 1.2 only LMS.
We've got a lot of tricks up our sleeves here
to help you crawl, walk, and run.
Test content, share content, manage content,
and ask a lot of questions along the way.
That's what we're here for.
- That's awesome.
If somebody had, let's say,
this happens quite a bit.
People invest in platforms, let's say,
they're a large organization,
they invested in platform early on let's say early 2000s,
and now they're trying to move those things
and maybe just augment them with some multimedia things
but they need to make all that work with new things.
Is that something you would help with?
- Potentially, I can certainly be a sage source of advice
and I would love to have that conversation
to figure out what are you trying to do
and maybe guide you to the right tool, right platform.
SCORM Cloud's dispatch is a way that we cheat our way
around a million different issues that we run into.
If I can get things working on SCORM Cloud,
I can get them working in nearly any other LMS
around the world.
And so we have a lot of ways to
think differently about some problems
that not all learning management systems
authoring tools are even aware of at the end of the day.
So if you find yourself in weird problems where
your content doesn't play nicely
in somebody else's environment,
that's the right time to reach out,
and we'll give you some sage advice about what to do.
- Now I'm just thinking about,
I really like this question that you ask which is
what do you actually want to achieve?
So tell me more about that.
How do people go wrong?
Are you tight on time?
Do you have to go? - No, we can keep going.
Yeah, it's all right. - Okay, cool.
So just tell me that.
- Yeah, it might be a little jaded.
I've been the guy who answers all inbound questions
unless they're really technical for a long time.
And often customers reach out saying
I specifically want to learn about this product.
And often it's probably a result that we
don't explain it well on our site or whatever.
They don't actually need what they're asking for there.
And so I think it's far easier to consider
these technical highly specific standards
in the context of what are you actually trying to do
than it is to argue about the finer points
about one tool over another or
pigeon hole ourselves down a path.
And so that's the conversation that I start.
What are your goals?
You're an instructional designer.
Okay, that tells me a lot about
who you are and what you're trying to do.
I have SCORM driver where you could
be a developer and wrap a SCORM course by hand
and do all types of really crazy things.
But at the end of the day, the authoring tool
is probably way easier to use than actually what you want.
And so guiding you down my tool will scare people away
and when they just needed the right tool for the job.
And so most of my job is just listening,
asking a lot of questions about the end that's in mind
and helping people find the right path
towards that solution.
- When you think about those goals,
could you, let's say, come up with,
I know I'm putting you on the spot.
Let's say three diagnostic questions
that somebody should ask themselves
in relationship to their goal that would help them
even if they're at the story boarding level
make better decisions.
- Yeah.
So does the content that I have, multimedia,
fit inside of a web browser?
That's step number one.
What is the learning management system
that I'm going to be sending this content to?
'Cause if it supports no standards,
you might be in their environment to author it.
And that first question would still matter.
And then three, what type of reporting or results are
management or the client expecting out of this thing?
Knowing what you wanna teach in the methods,
multimedia that you wanna use,
the system that's gonna be playing and tracking it
and what reports look like should help guide you
towards how complicated this all needs to be.
- Awesome, those are great questions.
I would've never thought of the first one actually
to be honest, laying a web browser.
Wow, that's weird, okay.
- I get a lot of folks that are doing exciting things
with virtual reality and augmented reality.
I get a lot of trainers that are doing blended learning,
classroom-based learning, practicing CPR
on dummies and things.
And those immediately guide us down an entire path
that's not SCORM because none of those assets
really are well suited to SCORM there.
So what are you using?
What type of tools are you trying to use
as you teach somebody can guide a lot of
how do I get it to play nicely in these other systems
and what do they wanna see relatively to reports?
- That's been so useful and so helpful.
Is there anything else that you think that
people commonly make this mistake
and you wish they would just stop and
you could change the world and there's one less thing?
- The speaking I've been doing at like
e-learning guild and ATD and stuff lately
has been stop adding these words to your RFP
without understanding what you're asking for.
And so that's the biggest thing here.
Grabbing xAPI because it's the latest from ADL
and putting it in your RFP can
cost companies a lot of money
because they're adding complexity to the system
that didn't need to be there.
They just want a PowerPoint type course
to play in their LMS,
and they told you xAPI when SCORM 1.2
would've done the job.
So don't automatically understand
or assume you understand these standards.
If it's simple and easy SCORM 1.2's value
is that it just works.
If you're doing complicated and crazy things,
xAPI is the right way to go,
and I'm certainly the right guy to talk you through
what that looks like and to look at
the learning platforms that are going to absorb that
and to understand the reports that are
going to come out on the other side
because xAPI is profound and does some really cool things
when deployed in the right way.
- So my last question is what kind of services
do you guys offer?
I know that there are things that
you definitely answer questions,
and that's, really, that's great.
But if somebody needed that dedicated help,
what are some things that you can help with?
- So we're actually a product-based company,
and we do very little consulting.
We sell products to help authoring tools
and content creators save as SCORM.
That dropdown that you saw inside Articulate, that's us.
And so when you pick those,
we do the technical bits to make sure
that it publishes out right.
If you have a learning platform that authenticates
a user who manages content and has reports,
and you just wanna be able to play SCORM in there,
I can do that, too.
We have SCORM Engine and SCORM Cloud
that can fill the need inside that learning platform.
There are a lot of organizations
around the world that say we don't need an LMS.
We just need something that can play and track
a SCORM course 'cause our employee portal
or our intranet, our website can do everything else.
Cool, I can help you add a SCORM clip
to that environment.
And then in between I have some products like
Dispatch where we took a quick look at,
Content Controller which is its big brother.
If you are an instructional designer
and you wanna be able to license your content,
remotely update it, track usage, continuously improve.
Like, no one answered question three correctly
ever in the world.
Have we taught that wrong or have we
marked the wrong answer as correct?
You don't get that type of insight
as an instructional designer when you're just
handing somebody the full version of your SCORM course.
And so I can help authoring tools
and authoring environments.
I can help learning management systems
and people who need to play content,
and I can help people in between
that want better control and better ownership
of their intellectual property.
- So if you are, let's say, a developer and you'd like
to be able to create, let's say, compliance courses,
and then farm them out, let's say,
to different organizations,
then this would be a great place to keep that?
- Oh absolutely, yeah.
- Without having to invest
like some giant LMS repos, okay, wow.
That's awesome. - That's right.
Yeah, you're using our player, we host it,
we've become really good at playing e-learning content
we're launching millions of courses a month
through the SCORM Cloud.
And we've got a laundry list of really great clients
using our tools behind the scenes.
So the first step though is talking to us.
Let us know what you're working on, what your goals are,
and we can align you with the right off-the-shelf products
or the things that we might be able to offer
or some custom solutions for developers.
It's very common somebody gets told, hey,
go implement SCORM and we're the first place they come.
No one wants to do that any more.
That's really good.
- Wow, well, I learned a lot.
Even that stat you said about the Army
publishing every day more courses than
some organizations do in like a year.
I can't wrap my mind around that,
but they are big beasts. - That's right.
- And innovators, I guess.
Innovators as well. - Absolutely.
They're solving really hard problems every day.
And so ADL's work over the years
has drastically changed the e-learning
industry for the better and we work
really closely with ADL and they're doing
amazing work even as we speak.
So we'll continue to watch that stuff,
and if we need to help e-learning companies
play nicely with one another,
we're a pretty good first stop because
it's the core of our business.
It's the only thing we worry about all day.
We do nothing else.
And so if that's really what you wanna talk about,
we're great, that's fine.
- Thank you so much. - No problem.
- If people want to basically learn more
or get in touch, you recommend?
- info@scorm.com.
It'll come straight to me or Andy
who sits across the hall.
We'll handle you, we'll talk to you,
we'll help find the right tools for the right job.
That's what we're here for. - Fabulous.
Thank you so much for this talk today.
- No problem, yeah, my pleasure.
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