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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re hiring a Juggler. No, we don’t need circus skills, but we do need somebody who can keep a lot of balls in the air.

Project Tin Can is generating an enormous amount of opportunity and we need somebody to help us keep moving it forward. The job involves bits of product management, project management, sales, marketing and entrepreneurship.

We’re also looking for one or two more developers.

Start here if you’re interested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m that kid. When you talk about the new kid around the office, the one with a phone practically glued to her hand, constantly texting (I sent over 1,650 last month alone!), the aptly named “digital native”, you are talking about me.

When it comes to mobile technology, when you aren’t talking about kids like me, you’re talking about mobile learning. But the weird thing is, you all mean different things when you talk about mobile.

Mobile means different things to different people. Instead of spouting out my thoughts about what mobile is and what it does, I will stay neutral and point you to the eLearning Atlas instead. We’ve uncovered a lot of really great companies making waves with mobile learning, so take a look and see what they mean when they say mobile. If you are looking for a mobile solution, this is definitely the place to start. We’ve got over 100 platform providers, authoring tools and content creators working with mobile learning in a variety of ways.

Whether you are creating stellar mobile content or new ways to access it, if you aren’t a part of the Atlas, pretty please let me know. I’m running low on text messages for the month, so get in touch via smoke signal or email me at jena.lawing@scorm.com this time around. Thanks!

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

Most people think buzzwords are annoying, trendy and overused words that pop up everywhere. Buzzwords serve one purpose: to drum up excitement around an idea, product, or event. That’s why people use them.

While Chris and I worked through the Atlas, we kept an eye on words that came up to see if we could find any trends in the industry. I’m not one for graphs and charts, that’s more Chris’s speed. What I’m into are trends and patterns. (If you were wondering, I have an affinity for plaid, houndstooth and ikat patterns).

After months of observation, one of the trends we saw was a move in the industry towards social learning.

Everyone has different meanings for what “social learning” is and what it does. For some, it means collaborating with others while creating or viewing content. For others, social learning means simply the integration of social media, like blogs, wikis, Twitter or Facebook into traditional eLearning. For me, social learning is both of these things.

A few months ago, I added Cookie Intern to my resume here at Rustici Software. A match made in heaven, as I love to bake and the Rusticians love to eat.

All of the sudden, every batch of cookies started tasting like soap. I couldn’t figure it out. I changed pans, mixing bowls, spatulas, everything. I took my questions to Facebook and Twitter, begging my friends to provide suggestions, hints, anything that would vanquish this soapy situation. They posted helpful links and speculations, and finally I got my answer. Baking soda.

Old, old baking soda that began its journey with me as a high school senior, watched me matriculate at Alabama, witnessed the glory of our 2009 National Championship (Roll Tide), smiled at my graduation, and travelled with me to my new home in Nashville. Who knew that old baking soda made cookies taste like soap, right?

Anyways, my point is that I could have Googled the answer myself but I used my community, where my friends and family could brainstorm with me and the group came to the final conclusion, together. This is what social learning is all about: making connections to people and what they know.

Chris and I have been fortunate enough, through working with the Atlas, to discover companies who are integrating different forms of social learning into their solutions. Take a look at all of the different companies in the eLearning Atlas that are making the move towards social learning.

So keep your eyes open, eLearning world. We’ve only scratched the surface of what social learning is capable of.

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.