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If you use the current release of Captivate 2 to make elearning intended for an LMS, then do not use the built-in FTP. Likewise, do not use the current Captivate 2 release with FTP and PENS.

When the FTP box is checked, Captivate 2 makes invalid SCORM 1.2 and invalid SCORM 2004 packages. Under these conditions Captivate 2 puts the required zip-archive root-level files like "imsmanifest.xml" down in a directory structure 4-5 levels deep.

   Captivate 2 Elearning Output published with FTP


   Captivate 2 Elearning Output published locally

This means that when FTP is used, the resulting zip file that gets transferred to the server is NOT valid, whether it is SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004. Adobe was notified of this issue last Fall and confirmed the problem. At the time of this post I can not find a tech note about this issue.

The workaround is to not use the built-in FTP. Instead, use the Publish Dialog to publish for Flash (SWF), select the "Output Options" to Zip files and under "Project Information" select the desired eLearning output format for your package. Finally, after Captivate publishes the zip package locally, use a third party FTP tool or other LMS import capabilities to transfer the valid SCORM package to the LMS. This will give you a better shot at having the package import into your LMS (or LCMS).

   Captivate 2 Publish Dialog settings for local publishing of packages

Two final notes on this topic. First, this bug means PENS doesn't really work. The work around there is to "trick" Captivate 2 by publishing to one FTP address, and then configuring the Captivate PENS settings to use an alternate URL that has a valid package staged by other means. For anything other than testing the capabilities of an LMS server, I wouldn't bother with this approach-- it sort of defeats the intended simplicity of PENS to manually FTP and publish twice to order to get a single package to an LCMS/LMS.

The second note is that there may be other issues with Captivate content communicating to an LMS. I've received private email from one content developer about some issues and heard from another contact that other settings may not work as intended/advertised. I've yet to verify these, but will post more information once this can be confirmed or denied.

Labels: Captivate, LMS, PENS, SCORM

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Two quick and mostly unrelated links to discuss.

Mark Oehlert references a great book, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which I first saw back when I was working on training for the F-22 figher in the 1990s. Yes, even fighter pilot training can benefit from storyboarding, communication and visualiztion tips from comic art techniques. Anyway, Mark's post Following up on the 'learning as art' meme - Let's Start With Comics has some great links and a nice example of applying the principles to something as simple as a bulleted list. Check it out. I may even get an extra copy to circulate amongst the team for the current commercial aviation training project that I am working on now.

PENS (the protocol for simplified publishing of elearning, not the Rapidograph tools favored by comic artists), is getting more attention and support. I just noticed the current (du jour?) Wikipedia entry for AICC mentions PENS. Thanks to Google News Alerts, I learned that IBM customers are asking about PENS support in Lotus Learning Management System (LMS) or IBM Workplace Collaboration Services Learning on the support pages. Great to see that PENS is showing up on the radar of more LMS providers like IBM and Oracle (recently at an AICC meeting), and that the list of PENS supporters is growing. Getting a new standard going and accepted is tough work upfront, but it really catches on once a few early adopters see a competitive advantage to supporting it.

Labels: PENS

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Businesswire shows that OutStart Announces PENS Support. I'll update the link to point to the OutStart site, as soon as it is available there.

Great to have another vendor on-board, and I look forward to seeing their implementation working with others at the plugfest that starts tomorrow. The interoperability labs run Tuesday afternoon, with vendor presentations the following morning on Wednesday. I'll post a wrap-up on Wednesday night to document how things went.

Labels: AICC, LMS, PENS

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Here is a quick 2-3 minute demonstration of how to publish directly from Captivate 2 to an LMS or LCMS using PENS- Publish directly to LMS with Captivate 2 using PENS. I've been getting a few question about this from end-users and various vendors preparing for the PENS Plugfest, so I thought it would be easiest to just post a Captivate demo. Note that the demo is a plain old SWF from Flash, but using PENS like this requires Captivate 2, since it is a new feature.

Labels: Captivate, PENS

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I've been busy preparing for the AICC Meetings and PENS Plugfest happening next week. For starters, I added SSL support to the hosted version of the PENS test tools that I offer online (sample HTML form here, and PHP-based PENS command validator here or SSL here). This change has not been integrated to the official release yet. The official release is always available from AICC PENS Interoperability Validation Suite.

I'm wondering what experiences others have had with content-LMS integration issues, and how we can head-off these issues for both implementers and users. With past specs, I've noticed that ambiguities about the format of data elements could be an issue, as could the presence/absence of optional elements. Based on this, the validator checks for the presence of all required elements and the absence of unknown extraneous elements. The PENS validator also applies a regular expression against each element to check formatting, and where possible the regular expression is drawn directly from the underlying RFC or IETF recommendation.

Another area of headaches was code that depended on URLs to literally start with "http://" URLs and then suddenly broke when someone used a content launch URL or a LMS tracking URL that used SSL ("https://"). A similar issue is code that either depends on the URL having a trailing "/" or breaks in the absence of a trailing "/". To test those cases, I've hosted the PENS validator at URLs like http://pens.lmstesting.com/test/index.php which should still work when one sends a PENS collect command to http://pens.lmstesting.com/test/. As a beta user, I tested the Captivate 2 implementation of PENS against both those cases. Soon, I'll go back and test with content published to an SSL URL and with a PENS server hosted behind SSL.

Are there other specification implementation "gotchas" that we should look for in the test tools? Things to watch for next week when the vendors gather for the Plugfest? If so, please let me know here, without ranting too much on specific products. Thanks.

Labels: AICC, PENS

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It seems like there is so much going on right now. Rather than doing 3 posts I'll do one quick post and hit 3-4 topics.

Blackboard Lawsuit- Disappointing to read about Blackboard filing patent-based lawsuits against other LMS companies. Others have followed this more closely and written about it more clearly than I can, like Stephen Downes has on his blog- see posts like: Blackboard Patent.

LMS CEOs-The Masie Center has podcast (MP3) interviews and PDF transcripts of brief interviews with most of the major LMS/LCM companies CEO or CTO. Free downloads are available off of the Learning 2006 site. There are 15+ short MP3 files (~5MB) to choose from here LMS Panelist Podcasts. Masie Consortium members can also visit that site for a focused podcast with the Blackboard legal counsel on the pending litigation.

PENS- I was busy updating the PENS validation suite PHP for the AICC. The PENS validation code is available on the AICC site, and I am hosting it myself for online testing at the PENS LMS Testing site. The changes to the sample code and server-side validation are described on the AICC blog; PENS Validation Suite Updates. If anyone is interested in collaboration on further updates to the test suite and a certification process, please contact me. I've also been working on a PENS Plugfest to be held in Vancouver September 19-20, see the press release here AICC PENS Plugfest.

SCORM 2004 3rd Edition Public Draft posted Monday If you didn't catch it, the ADL posted a "Final Draft" on Monday, with beta versions of the test suite and sample run-time environment. It seems like a lot of clarifications and some decent clean-up/clarification of Simple Sequencing & Navigation without a major overhaul that would break a lot of things. See the ADL web site (now a .gov domain) for info and downloads ADL site downloads for SCORM 3rd Edition ADL Releases SCORM 2004 3rd Edition Public Draft. The next 30 days is your chance to get feedback to them before it becomes an official, non-draft document.

Labels: AICC, LMS, PENS

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