Common Use Cases
Thumb Drive or Laptop Deployment
Learners can into a LMS, view a list of courses and select which courses they want to take offline. The LMS creates a downloadable file containing these courses along with an offline SCORM player. The learner saves this file to a USB thumb drive or to a laptop computer. When the learner opens the file it automatically launches the offline SCORM player (no installation is required).
The learner experiences the downloaded courses and SCORM Untethered saves the learner’s results on the laptop or USB thumb drive. Later, when connectivity is available, the learner launches the offline SCORM player which automatically synchronizes the stored results with the LMS. Synching data to a central LMS generally requires the presence of the SCORM Engine as well.
Laptop Delivery (installed application)
This is an application installed on a laptop computer which acts as a front end to a LMS. Through this application, the learners can select courses to be taken offline and take them at their leisure. Both course files and learner results are synchronized. It can even support more than one learner per computer.
Read-only CD Delivery
SCORM Untethered converts any SCORM course to be delivered using just a web browser since it’s written entirely in JavaScript. This conversion embeds a full SCORM player with the course in a single package that can be burned to and run from a CD. The player has full support for all of the SCORM standards, including SCORM 2004 sequencing. As long as the browser remains open, all of the SCORM data is supported. Features like bookmarking are enabled, but this data is not saved once the browser is closed.
Read-write CD Delivery
This allows an administrator to create CD containing one or more courses and a SCORM Untethered player. When the CD is inserted into a computer, the learner is prompted for a location to save his progress data. The learner then uses the courses and the progress data is saved on the computer’s hard drive. The learner may stop and start the courses on this computer and all progress data will be saved. Optionally, this progress data can be submitted to a LMS for recording in the learner’s transcript.
Cached content, network deployment or classroom delivery
Using SCORM Untethered and the SCORM Engine, content can be positioned at locations that are “close” to the learner. These locations can serve all of the content to the learners locally, reducing the burden on the central LMS servers. The local locations can further unburden the central LMS by temporarily storing the learner’s results locally as they progress through the content. These results can then be synchronized with the central LMS at a later time in a single efficient batch update.
What are the minimum requirements for SCORM Untethered?
The minimum requirements for SCORM Untethered depend on the configuration of components being used. The client side typically requires a modern web browser and the .Net run-time (version 1.1 or higher) to persist data. Unless desired, no application needs to be installed and the client side components can run within the .Net sandbox to limit security concerns. The server-side components require ASP.NET, a relational database (we support most vendors’ recent releases) and our SCORM Engine components.
What does SCORM Untethered look like?
The answer is that it looks like whatever you want it to look like. The SCORM Untethered components are completely skinnable and customizable. They can be seamlessly integrated with your existing system.
How is the data synchronized?
Learner progress data is usually exchanged between the LMS and offline SCORM player using web services. Alternatively, data files can simply be transferred to the LMS and directly input into the server-side synchronization engine. SCORM Untethered provides six different modes of merging offline data with live data. The modes include, “most recent”, “simple mode”, “most complete”, “most satisfied”, “most done” and “best done”.
How does SCORM Untethered integrate with our system?
The first step in integrating SCORM Untethered is to identify the requirements that need to be met. What is the particular offline delivery mechanism that is needed for your system? Once these needs have been identified, our consultants will design a custom mash-up of the SCORM Untethered components. This mash-up will contain the SCORM Untethered server-side components to tie into your system.
Do need to install anything on the client machine?
Only if you want to. The SCORM Untethered components can work without an installer or they can be embedded in a feature rich installed application.
