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.
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People often ask us to recommend an LMS for them. We shy away from doing so because we don’t want to pick favorites amongst our clients and potential clients. More significantly though, we really don’t know all that much about the functionality and utility of a particular LMS beyond its SCORM interface.
“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.
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Well, put simply, we had a bad day on Wednesday. Frankly, I haven’t heard from anyone that they definitively noticed the downtime we had, but we’ve said all along that we would be direct and clear, and so we shall.
<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.
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Lots and lots and lots of blog posts everywhere wrapping up 2009 and making predictions for 2010.
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.
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As you may know, SCORM is a reference model that is composed of other underlying standards. Two of the most important parts of SCORM, the CMI data model and the ECMAScript API, are governed by the IEEE. The IEEE is currently soliciting comments on these standards. That means, now is the time for you to speak up if there are things that you want to see changed.
- 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)
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