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.

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.

We’re still waiting for either a SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004 or an AICC certification for the SumTotal LMS that was first released in December 2004. In the same time frame, many major competitors have achieved two or more certifications, as have some smaller firms with solid LMS offerings. Since Claude Ostyn left SumTotal I haven’t really seen much corporate participation in ADL or AICC activities from SumTotal. Hopefully, they are still keeping an eye on LMS fundamentals as they move towards performance-management.

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.

For those of you who don’t know what the AICC is, here’s a little description that I culled from the AICC FAQ page.

The Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) is an international association of technology-based training professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for aviation industry in the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT and related training technologies.

I’ll antipate your next question, My company is not involved in aviation so why should I care about AICC? Again, citing their FAQs:

The AICC wants the aviation training community to get the best possible value for its technology-based training dollar. The only way that this is possible is to promote interoperability standards that software vendors can use across multiple industries. With such standards a vendor can sell their products to a broader market for a lower unit cost. AICC recommendations are fairly general to most types of computer based training and, for this reason, are widely used outside of the aviation training industry. If you are concerned about reuse and interoperability of online learning, the AICC is a good group to participate in. The AICC also actively coordinates its efforts with broader learning technology standards organizations like IMS, ADL, ISO SC/36, and IEEE LTSC.

I hope to see you there.