As TinCan is an upgrade of SCORM, can we consider the following as a fact:
A system (LMS) that accepts TinCan objects should necessarily accept SCORM Objects? and If so, do we necessarily loose the tracking ability in this case, or we could configure SCORM's javascript to target an external LRS with tracking data?
Short answer: No.
Tin Can (officially named the Experience API) and SCORM are two unrelated standards. They are only related in ownership (ADL) and audience (e-learning developers).
Tin Can was designed for developers who were frustrated with the limitations of SCORM, including the requirement for the content to be hosted in an LMS. Tin Can does not require content to be hosted in an LMS.
Some Tin Can-based courses use SCORM-style statements for compatibility and interoperability (documentation), but there is no requirement for an LMS that supports SCORM to support Tin Can, or an Learning Record Store (LRS) that supports Tin Can to support SCORM.
Related
We are building an m-learning solution[IOS and Android compatible] at our company. The product needs to be SCORM compliant. I would like to know whether it should be developed in-house by the developers or other paid options should be pursued? What are other ways of making our product SCORM compliant? We are not rally positive about using SCORM Engine for this due to its high cost solution to our problem here.Any suggestion/help is appreciated.
You can include SCORM within content using a number of open source options available on GitHub.
Getting SCORM in the content (free) is step 1.
Packaging, bundling and deploying is really step 2.
This typically has a close relationship to how Curriculum defines a structure of lessons, modules, units etc. Not knowing exactly how they want to organize this, I can speculate that you may just have a simple "I want to know that the student viewed the content" approach. If you get into a more rich dependency on how the student performs dictating what they see or do next, that requires a much for up front design so you can bridge the design, development, and deployment of your content.
Including SCORM Support in content -
Like mentioned if you search google for my SCOBot project or Pipwerks you'll hit the ground running.
Requires JavaScript friendly developer and some base SCORM knowledge attained thru reading. This could be outsourced.
Knowing the version of SCORM you wish to support can help. Consult the LMS to find out that info.
Far as presenting / creating content; if you are doing this from scratch you'd need a HTML/JS developer or if its more interactive your dipping into WebGL, Canvas or beyond. There are other paid services like iSpring, Captivate and others that offer content creation with SCORM Standards support. They may even take care of the packaging for you (covered below).
Packaging -
This requires a zip (CAM content aggregated model) which includes a imsmanifest.xml file to describe a one to many relationship of a TOC. Again simple is 1, many begins to allow you to group tiers and add objectives and other things increasing complexity but doable.
You can perform creating this package with XML, Zip and specification knowledge. I have a Packaging app on my site and a Mac (free) applescript which can also perform very basic packaging. I am not away of any other free options.
Deployment
Commonly performed thru FTP/FileShare by uploading these CAM (zip) packages. LMS decompresses and reads the manifest. Sometimes you can just copy the raw files up to the LMS thru a media / content server but this greatly depends on the options.
We have been building a SCORM packager and API, customized for our own applications, so we don't have to use tools like Storyline or Lectora to provide content to an LMS.
Our test package seems to work fine on Scorm Cloud and Moodle. So, we are happy, but not 100% sure we are done.
Our question is therefore: is there another method to test our SCORM capability before sending packages to customers?
Short answer: Download the SCORM Conformance Test Suite from ADL (e.g. http://www.adlnet.org/resources/adl-conformance-test-suite-verion-1_2_7?type=software_downloads) and test, test, test.
Long answer: If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there. I mean, what are you trying to achieve? If you wanted your content to work in SCORM Cloud and Moodle, you're ok. If you wanted it to work in EVERY LMS, it will never happen, because there are dozens of LMS with poorly implemented SCORM API. If you wanted to legally cover your behind, you should look into your service agreement. What does it say about determining "broken content"? What do you do (legally speaking) if your content works everywhere except your client's LMS?
Ideally, you should determine quality criteria in the agreement, make sure you comply with those and define what happens if your content doesn't work for your client.
adding to Sergey's response: all you can do beyond the conformance test suite and SCORM Cloud is test in as many LMSs as possible. They definitely have quirks. At a minimum, I suggest downloading and installing every major open-source LMS you can find, including Ilias and Sakai. You might also be able to get free trials for commercial LMSs if you contact them directly.
I'm curious to know what language/technologies makeup the SiSense Prism BI platform. It looks like a very powerful platform having quite the impressive credentials.
SiSense Website - Prism
SiSense Prism is coded primarily in C/C++ in the back-end, C# for the desktop tools and JavaScript/HTML5 for the interactive web applications.
There are quite a few unique technologies that are embedded in the Prism suite.Most of these technologies are 'invisible' to you and range from compression algorithms to instruction recycling and CPU-cache awareness (really scary stuff).
These technologies (under their collective name - ElastiCube) enable's Prism most fundamental capability - making terabyte-scale data available for real-time (on-demand) analytics by non-technical users, on a single commodity server.
You can read more about SiSense technology here: http://www.sisense.com/product/technology
HTH,
Elad Israeli |
Founder, SiSense
It's obvious that the backend makes intensive use of monetDB:
https://www.monetdb.org
This can be easily observed by inspecting the dlls that come with the package, the data stored on disk and the server's internal connection streams.
Obviously recycling, compression, caching and CPU utilization are techniques used by all professional developers for creating software (monetDB seems to be a good reference), so that's not really unique...
I'm writing some SCORM SCOs to be embedded in clients' learning management systems but I currently don't have anything to test them on. It seems foolish (to the point of being unprofessional) to just foist these files upon the clients and to hope they "just work".
Is there a simple framework I can use to test a SCORM SCO package? I realise I could spend all day setting up a whole learning management system but if there's something more simple, I'd be really appreciative.
You will definitely want to check out the SCORM Cloud. They have a trial version you can use.
There's always the Test Suite provided by the publishers of the SCORM specification.
If you're working with SCORM 1.2, I'd recommend the Reload Scorm Player.
Tt's free, very easy to install and you don't need to be a tech guy to make use of it.
http://www.reload.ac.uk/new/scormplayer.html
I have used the tools from http://www.ostyn.com/resdownloads.htm both for testing SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. Basicly just a HTML page that wraps the SCO in an iframe with a nice console to keep track of the communicaton.
http://scormpool.com has scorm proxy player with trace log option. Supports SCORM 1.2 and 2004 4-th edition plus you can download player and run it on you local computer.
I am working on a commercial web application that has a separate mobile browser version intended for the more capable devices (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, etc). I don't want to do simple User Agent contains style logic and was looking at the various detection libraries. It seems like WURFL and Mobile Device Browser File are my best options.
The Mobile Device Browser File (MDBF) project at CodePlex exposes information through the Request.Browser property. Also, it has a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). Mobile Browser Detection in ASP.NET mentions "data for MDBF comes from WURFL" and Mix: Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File confirms MBDF is "created from a database from many sources, including the popular WURFL mobile device capabilities database."
51degrees has a .NET Mobile API that uses the WURFL data files and also populates Request.Browser. It is licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1. and claims:
With the .NET Mobile API installed and
WURFL providing mobile device data,
these calls will return extremely
accurate data when compared to the
standard browser information provided
by Microsoft
Since the official WURLF .NET API is distributed with a GPL License, so it is a non-starter for my project.
WURFL ASP.NET Implementations compares ASP.NET implementations of WURFL, but this is over a year old (2009-01-16 - Article submitted) and doesn't mention the 51degrees API or MDBF.
Can I get any feedback on which library to use.
How often are these data files updated?
Is it better to use feature detection that user agent parsing?
Is an online service (e.g. Handset Detection) easier that update data files?
Any other useful input.
Regarding Mobile Device Browser File:
Quote: "Due to the organizational restructuring of the team that developed and supported the Mobile Device Browser file, we will no longer have the resources to support and update this CodePlex project. The team will be providing two more releases – one on the 27th July 2010 and the final release on the 24th August 2010."
So that I am not just the bearer of bad news...
We are planning on using:
Mobile Device Detection and Redirection
by 51 Degrees
Which has a really good example of:
How to Add the .NET Mobile API to an
Existing Web Site
Hope this helps.
The MDBF was updated fairly recently. If what you need is basic information it's probably better as it integrates nicely with your .NET framework.
Marg.Wurfl is definitely a good choice and integrates with .NET framework as well.
Both have an approach that is good for the old .NET style, not the MVC. In MVC you will have to do your own legwork.
You might also want to consider DeviceAtlas that has an API for .NET and has very good performance in .NET.
Specifically to your questions, WURFL is updated almost once a month, while AFAIK there are no planned updates for MDBF, they will release an update if and when they feel like it (yes, not very exciting).
You might use Javascript to detect features in modern browsers such as iPhone, Android and recent Nokias, but for all the rest, the User-Agent string is still the only real option, so I'd say it depends on your target market. You might want to create a super-simple version that works for all and an advanced version where you do feature detection.
I don't like the idea of online services, if you plan to have a high volume site. Once-a-month updates are OK, with commercial products like DeviceAtlas or Mobile Phone Wizards you can get more frequent updates.
DISCLAIMER: I used to work for dotMobi that created DeviceAtlas
The WURFL official .NET API has been released recently by ScientiaMobile--the WURFL people's newco. You can access it here: http://www.scientiamobile.com/site/page/view/downloads. However, it is subject to the AGPL license, which basically means you need to buy a commercial license to use the API in a commercial app, including a Web site. Raw data remains free.
A whitepaper showing how to integrate it with ASP.NET is: http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/dotNet.
I think WURFL has more capabilities and more active community, and it has more frecuently release than mdbf. But i have to say that microsoft is doing good work. You could look Marg.Wurfl, too.
And remember you can use GPL software in SaaS.
You can look Marg.Wurfl too,
As Dino mentioned, the WURFL API is distributed under AGPL, but also available under commercial licensing terms (this is called dual licensing, or also offering a GPL exception in FSF's parlance).
The wurfl.xml file is not longer considered raw data, though. Because of the creative work of keeping the data organized and groups, ScientiaMobile claims the copyright on the wurfl.xml file starting with version 2.2 and distributes it under certain conditions (notably, that the wurfl.xml file can only be used in connection with one of the standard APIs):
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/licence.php
Acquiring a commercial license also delivers certain extra rights on the wurfl.xml file itself.