SCORM isn’t easy. Everywhere you turn, someone’s having a challenge making it work, whether through human, system or developer error.

Which is why we make such a big deal about encouraging people to ask us questions. The best way to get SCORM to work is to ask people who know. It helps you get what you need, it helps us because people stop (hopefully) cursing SCORM, and well, we just like talking with you to see how you’re using SCORM.

Most of our questions come in via the contact form on the website. Some come from current customers. Some come up in conversations with prospective customers. We try to bring questions and answers together over in our support forum to provide a resource for everyone struggling with SCORM issues.

And since I love video, I’ve started turning some questions into video resources over on our YouTube channel. Short answers to quick questions, most of which I had when I started working here and had no clue about SCORM. (I have one solitary clue now.) Look for more videos from me and our fabulous support dude Joe with answers to your SCORM questions.

“Well then,” the inquisitor asks, “who has the best SCORM interface?”. Well duh, our SCORM Engine clients of course.

“Come on,” he presses, “who else is good at this stuff?”. One of the first names that comes to mind has always been SumTotal. That judgement is far from a scientific; we don’t go out and technically audit the details of every LMS’s SCORM implementation. Rather, it is an empirical judgement based on how many problems our content customers report with an LMS. More than that, though, it is the experience in working with the vendor if a problem is found. Are they receptive and supporting? Do they have a pragmatic attitude that leads to collaboratively fixing the problem rather that just passing blame?

Historically, we’ve rarely had to deal with SumTotal problems. That bodes really well for the quality of their implementation. On the few occasions where we have had occasion to iron out a problem, we’ve had the pleasure of working directly with their lead SCORM developer, Ben Clark.

SumTotal is closing its Bellevue development office and sending Ben’s job over to India. When we heard the news, we jumped at the chance to bring him onboard. He accepted and will be starting with us next week!

The guys here often joke that I am “one of the top ten SCORM professionals”, well in my mind, Ben is a fellow “top-tenner”. We’ve worked together on the ADL Technical Working Group for several years and Ben has always impressed me with his insight, knowledge and reason. He’s equally adept at seeing the big picture and navigating the technical weeds.

SCORM is at a crossroads now. It needs to evolve and needs to be improved. There will be a lot of work done at ADL, LETSI and others over the next couple years. We plan to be heavily involved, contributing our time, energy and vision to ensure SCORM’s successful evolution. Ben will be joining me in this effort and should enable us to provide a lot more bandwidth to standards development activities. We’re looking forward to great things to come.

<AdmissionOfFailure>

On Wednesday, we were doing a bit of housekeeping. Frankly, Test Track users upload a lot of content. Periodically, we take the time via a manual process to seek out orphaned courses and those that haven’t been accessed in any way during the last 6 months. In doing this, we’re able to limit the vast quantities of SCORM content we have to keep up with.

Well, when we went to hit “delete” on the old, unaccessed courses, things went badly. We run multiple Amazon Webservice Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. First, the failure was noticed by a secondary instance which discovered it could no longer access content, and told us through an email. Second, the instances, in automated coordination, attempted to rectify the problem. Third, we discovered that this self-healing process failed, and that the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume which houses our content could not be remounted, due to an unexpected file system corruption.

An instance going down is no problem… we have more. In fact, this happens occasionally, and is handled without human intervention. The EBS volume going down and becoming unmountable… that’s a problem. Ultimately, this meant that people were unable to access any of the content hosted on SCORM Cloud, including all Test Track content, until we intervened and mounted an older volume… one that was known to function. This was done quickly. Old content and new uploads were available in less than 30 minutes. But here’s the kicker… content uploaded between December 10, 2009 and January 6, 2010 wasn’t available. This incident led us to discover a flaw in our backup scheme that meant recovering that content wasn’t a 10 minute job… In fact, it required recovering from a fatal flaw in the file system we use. The reconstruction/recovery process was kicked off right away, and all content was restored some 11 hours later. So, as of 2am CT on January 7, all content was restored, all users were made whole, and all was well, in a manner of speaking.

</AdmissionOfFailure>

<PostgameAnalysis>

Well, once we addressed the symptom and had everyone up and running again, we thought we should do a bit of analysis. We didn’t like how everything played out, we didn’t like that people were down for varying amounts of time, so we thought we’d go digging. It was time for a little game of 5 Whys.

To play 5 Whys, we started by asking, “What happened?”

We received notification from a secondary machine of an EC2 Failover Event on the primary (a.k.a. “The Sh*t Hit the Fan”)

WHY?

The primary couldn’t access the EBS volume (where the content is stored).

WHY?

Something caused the EBS volume’s XFS file system to crash/become corrupt.

WHY?

The EBS volume’s file system had an inconsistency (that we’ve since found dates back months) and series of aggressive deletes were called in succession from a secondary machine.

WHY?

This why results in many questions…

• Why was there a series of aggressive deletes? Did we need to be purging courses?
• Why was there an inconsistency in the file system dating back several months?
• Why does XFS have trouble freeing space in certain circumstances? Should we continue to use XFS?

Here, though, is a more interesting/actionable string of 5 Whys…

Content uploaded between Dec 10 and January 5 was unavailable for 11 hours.

WHY?

The EBS volume’s file system failed and our backup scheme didn’t allow for immediate or near immediate recovery of recently uploaded files.

WHY?

Our recovery scheme included reconstructing the drive, rather than simply using a more frequent/recent snapshot.

WHY?

Because we didn’t consider this eventuality sufficiently. We made a mistake.

HOW DO YOU REMEDY THAT MISTAKE?

We have already changed our scheme to persist remountable EBS content volumes hourly. This means that we can return to a snapshot that is no more than 1 hour old in a matter of minutes.

</PostgameAnalysis>

So, in total, we had ourselves a bad day on Wednesday. Did we recover completely? Yes. We’re pleased with that. Did we do so as quickly as we feel we should? We did not. Hopefully none of you were actually impacted. If you were, we’re sorry. If you weren’t, we hope we’ve taken the right steps to make you feel comfortable about our approach to mistakes.

A key thing I see popping up frequently on lists from e-learning consultants is the idea of learning moving from the highly controlled environment of the LMS to the less controllable (and more mobile) web. Social/informal/self-directed/ubiquitous learning is about as buzzy as words get these days.

Which certainly leaves learning departments in a bit of a bind. They’re trying to show value for what they do and ensure certain specific things are being taught/learned/shared. There’s a push toward interoperability of systems within a company (where’s the LMS fit in?) and sensitivity to the high costs of pretty much everything. Many are attempting to embrace the new social movement, but scrambling to figure out how to show ROI.

As an avid life-long self-directed learner and strong believer in weak central control, I’m all for the less rigid future. It’s why the part of our SCORM Cloud product that gets me most excited is the learning anywhere aspect. And as a data geek, I love that SCORM lets you take learning where learners already are and still get the information you need to see what’s happening without an LMS.

So I’m interested to see if the e-learning oracles are right on this one for this year. And excited to see how people use SCORM Cloud to make the jump more comfortable.

• Does the data model need more elements (for instance interaction results descriptions)?
• Do you need more places to store things (perhaps some more storage)?
• Are things too complicated? Too simple?
• Should the JavaScript API be changed?

Use your imagination and speak up. Now is the time to be heard. The wheels are in motion for the evolution of SCORM. They turn slowly, but they are turning.

Request for Comment on IEEE LTSC CMI Standards

The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) is issuing this Request for Comment on three of its foundational standards:

• 1484.11.1: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology – Data Model for Content Object Communication
• 1484.11.2: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology – ECMAScript Application Programming Interface for Content to Runtime Services
• 1484.11.3: IEEE Standard for Learning Technology – Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema Binding for Data Model for Content Object Communication

These standards were completed between 2003 and 2005 and have been implemented in many different applications around the world.

• They derive from portions of the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC) CMI Guidelines for Interoperability specification.
• They have been profiled by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM(R)), and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition has recently been approved as an ISO-IEC Technical Report.
• They are currently being used in a Web Service interoperability project by the International Federation for Learning, Education, and Training System Interoperability (LETSI).

These standards have been in use for over 6 years, so the IEEE LTSC is now deciding whether or not these standards need to be revised. The IEEE LTSC CMI Working group seeks your participation in submitting comments on these standards for consideration in this decision process.

All comments should be sent to sthropp@ieee.org. All comments received will be made public on the IEEE LTSC website (www.ieeeltsc.org) and will be discussed at a CMI Working Group meeting in the future.

The request for comment review period is scheduled to end on January 22, 2010, at which time the IEEE LTSC CMI Working Group will begin to review and determine the next steps for these standards.

Thank you for your participation in this effort.

IEEE LTSC Chair – Don Holmes
IEEE LTSC CMI Working Group Chair – Schawn Thropp (sthropp@ieee.org)

We are moving from [commercial hosted LMS] to [open source LMS] for now. But I really am looking at SCORM Cloud as a way to integrate the serving and tracking of training modules into our customer service portal, website and software. I dislike the concept of the standalone LMS.

–A prospect, via email, today

Let me say first, I totally understand the value of an LMS. To this point, we’ve built our entire business around LMSs and the content they deliver. I believe they still have a place, and they provide excellent value… for the right organization.

I also believe that there are companies, schools, and organizations that simply don’t have a need for a full fledged LMS. This is one great case for the SCORM Cloud… This prospect could easily embed the SCORM Cloud as a part of her HR system. In what system could you embed SCORM delivery?

(Now we wait and see if our prospect takes the bait!)

When we released SCORM Test Track a few years ago, we had no idea it would be this popular. We currently have over 10,000 users with dozens more signing up every day. Test Track has come to be a critical application for many in the community and we take that responsibility seriously. Please help us to make it even more valuable.

Dan Marsden’s thoughts on the SCORM Cloud + Moodle plugin make me feel like we’ve done exactly that.

With the availability of the Rustici engine at an affordable price, the urgency for getting the SCORM module in Moodle SCORM 2004 compliant/certified has definately decreased.

Context: Dan contributes a great deal to Moodle’s codebase, particularly in the area of the SCORM module. He knows his Moodle stuff and he knows his SCORM stuff.

If you use Moodle and you’ve ever had cause to consider SCORM 2004, I think Dan’s message is pretty compelling.

How would you get started?

Moodle mod + directions available here.

SCORM Cloud signup available here.

Thanks to Dan for taking the time to check out our work. He offered some comments that are spot on, of course, and we’ve taken those to heart. We’ll release those changes later this week.

If not, the changes are as follows:

PAYMENT

2. You will be billed on the day you elect to move to a paid account and subsequently on that day of each month.

Why? Well, we didn’t want to charge you for Oct 1 – 27 if you opened your account on Oct 27. So, we just keep up with “your month” instead of “calendar months”.

4. Overages will be charged for each registration over your chosen price plan tier in accordance with our pricing set forth on our website.

Why? We wanted to offer the option of allowing for overages on your accounts. Some people will elect to block overages, and will receive a message indicating they’ve crossed the limit of their plan and can’t offer training anymore. Others will allow for overages, but they have to pay for the overages at month’s end.

5. All fees are exclusive of all taxes, levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities and you shall be responsible for payment of all such taxes, levies or duties, if applicable.

Why? 5 is the old 4. Nothing new here. But now there’s a 4, so this is a 5. Exciting.

TERMINATION

2. If you cancel the Service before the end of your current paid up month, your cancellation may take effect immediately and you will not be charged again except for overages for the current month which will be charged at the end of that monthly period.

Why? Since we added overages as a concept, we have to have the right to charge them after you cancel. We wouldn’t want you trying to take advantage of us, now would we?

So, that’s it. Nothing too exciting here. We’ll continue to fight to keep this thing as short as we possibly can!