This past Friday version 1.0 of the Tin Can API was released, as promised. As I noted in the previous blog post “What the Experience API Is—and Why You Should Care,” I didn’t expect the learning landscape to change overnight, and it didn’t. But the release of version 1.0 is an important marker on the way to a new vision for technology-enabled learning.

Mike Rustici, president of Rustici Software (the developers of the API), summed up the nature of the new vision in his quote for the press release around the release of version 1.0

We spent the past decade surrounded by e-learning geeks. We think we’ll spend the next decade surrounded by K-12, teachers, hackers, universities, government, education technology, MOOCs, games, and an array of real-world use cases we can’t even imagine yet. These are especially exciting times for anyone who ever heard the acronyms SCORM or AICC.

Mike Rustici’s comments struck me as an apt complement to what Jeff describes as the “other 50 years” in his book Leading the Learning Revolution.

Education has traditionally meant K-12 and higher ed—and reasonably accurately so for many years. But we’re living longer, switching jobs and careers more, and struggling to keep up with the increasingly fast pace of change. We can’t afford to assume that education is something that we ever finish. We have to be thinking about how we keep learning (and providing learning) for the other 50 years of life that, statistically speaking, we have coming to us after we finish our formal education.

Tin Can’s inclusive nature looks to be a good fit for the future, where technology-enabled learning isn’t just for “e-learning geeks” but for anyone serious about learning.

Good Product Development and Launch Basics

As I was following the release of version 1.0 of the Tin Can API, I found myself thinking Rustici Software did a nice job with the basic tenets of good product development and launch—tenets that apply as well to learning products as they do to software.

1. Listen to your market.This one is less about what Rustici Software did around last Friday’s launch, and more about the important groundwork they laid before diving into development—they convened a lot of meetings with various stakeholders and gathered input about what the new API should do. This is classic listening to your market and arguably the most important thing you can do before building a product.
2. Embrace a beta mentality.Rustici Software didn’t wait until they had version 1.0 of the API ready to release something—they released lower versions earlier. This let them gather feedback to finetune and add to the API.
3. Deliver what you promise.Rustici Software said version 1.0 would come out on April 26, and it did. It may seem a small thing, but launching on time sends the message you’re attentive and trustworthy. Those are traits I like in those I choose to work with and learn from.
4. Tie the product to other offerings, free and paid.Not only did the company roll out version 1.0 on time, but Rustici Software also made sure their other products were version 1.0-ready, including paid products like SCORM Cloud and free offerings like a free sandbox and Javascript open source library. Something I see overlooked too often when an organization releases a new learning offering is making the connections for potential learners about how the new offering relates to other products and making it easy for those potential learners to somehow get a little taste of the latest and greatest.

So kudos to Rustici Software for bringing us version 1.0 of the Tin Can API and for providing an example of a good product development and launch practices.

Celisa

P.S. Next Thursday, we’re offering a free Webinar (thanks to the sponsorship of Meridian Knowledge Solutions) on Selecting a Learning Management System: Picking the Right Technology for Your Association’s Vision. I hope you’ll join us!

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1. What the Experience API Is—and Why You Should Care You probably know it better as Tin Can, the popular...

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You probably know it better as Tin Can, the popular name that’s stuck and been embraced by Rustici Software (the developers of the API), although Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) prefers calling it the Experience API, or even xAPI.

No matter what we call it, though, it’s the first step in a comprehensive vision for the future of technology-enabled learning.

Part of the Training and Learning Architecture (TLA)

Established in 1997 by President Clinton and overseen by the Department of Defense (DoD), ADL developed the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), the most widely recognized set of standards for e-learning which have been broadly adopted, even outside of the government.

The primary appeal of SCORM is that it assures some degree of interoperability—SCORM content can be delivered using any SCORM-conformant learning management system (LMS) using the same version of SCORM.

But SCORM is 15 years old at this point. How we live and learn has changed. Google and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn didn’t exist when SCORM was born, not to mention game-changers specific to online education, like Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

Source: http://www.adlnet.gov/introducing-the-training-and-learning-architecture-tla

The Training and Learning Architecture (TLA) is ADL’s answer to what the next generation of SCORM looks like. TLA focuses on four interrelated areas:

1. Experience tracking
2. Learning profiles
3. Content brokering
4. Competency infrastructure

In a Training magazine article, Dr. Kristy Murray, director of the ADL Initiative, and Aaron E. Silvers, community manager for ADL explain the four areas of the TLA:

Learner Profiles will be powered by technologies that describe information about a learner: their preferences, competencies, and experiences.

Content Brokering will focus on technologies that describe, discover, and deliver content.

Competency Infrastructure will provide authoritative, machine-readable definitions of learning objectives, competencies, tasks, standards, and conditions.

Experience Tracking is the part that currently is being developed: the Experience API. Its design addresses the limitations people find with e-learning technologies currently used in organizations that are focused only on tracking the learner through a specific course, rather than through diverse learning experiences.

The Shortcomings of SCORM

As Murray and Silvers suggest in their description of experience tracking, Tin Can is meant to address what have become major shortcomings of SCORM.

• SCORM doesn’t track informal or self-directed learning, and we know that an estimated 90 percent of learning is either self-managed or informal.
• Because SCORM uses JavaScript in a Web browser to talk to an LMS, it can’t launch and track native mobile apps and has required a steady Internet connection (versus working when access to network infrastructure is intermittent).
• SCORM focuses on the individual learner in isolation and doesn’t accommodate team-based exercises, collaboration, and instructor intervention.
• SCORM looks at scores (usually a single score) and completions in courses, but doesn’t provide a good way to capture multiple scores (pre- and post-test, say) or detailed test data or to assess learners after the course is complete (but the learning presumably, hopefully, continues).

There are other limitations of the current incarnation of SCORM, but this list alone declares the need for Tin Can.

The Tin Can API is built around simple subject-verb-object statements that will allow a learning record store (LRS) to collect data about a wide variety of real-world learning activities. So, yes, the API will support familiar-to-SCORM statements like “Celisa completed the Intro to Tin Can course,” but also “Celisa asked the Leading Learning group members on LinkedIn what they’re doing about Tin Can,” or “Celisa wrote a blog post on Tin Can.”

With SCORM, an LMS is limited to delivering and tracking content it knows about. As Rustici Software points out, that SCORM limitation goes away with Tin Can: “With Tin Can, the latest Khan Academy video can become a trackable learning event as soon as it is released.”

Another key innovation of Tin Can is that it decouples “the content and the asserter of a learning experience.” Rustici Software explains:

In SCORM, the “thing reporting a result about a learning experience” always had to be the experience itself. You had a SCO [shareable content object] that was both a piece of educational content and a communicator of data about the learning experience. Content had to be smart. Content had to be intentionally converted to enable SCORM functionality. Tin Can removes the requirement that the communicator of data be the educational experience itself.

(By the way, Rustici Software’s “Layers of the Tin Can Onion” is an accessible overview of what Tin Can makes possible, and I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about the API.)

What It Means for You

This post is timely—version 1.0 of Tin Can is due out April 26.

That doesn’t mean that SCORM is dead as of next Friday—ADL emphasizes Tin Can is not a replacement for SCORM, but the evolution of SCORM. Plus, while some organizations have implemented early versions of the API, it will take years for broad adoption among technology developers (LMS and content authoring companies).

But, clearly, Tin Can touches on many critical issues that organizations in the business of lifelong learning grapple with today—informal and self-directed learning, social learning, mobile access.

What’s more, Tin Can provides the possibility of “personal data lockers” that pull information from all the relevant LRSes and aggregate it so learners, rather than a siloed LMS maintained by an organization, have access to their learning records. Given late baby boomers averaged 11.3 job changes between the ages 18 and 46, personal data lockers look really appealing, and figuring out how your association or organization interacts with these lockers will be an important question to sort out.

So keep an eye on the Tin Can API. Ask your current learning technology partners about their plans for Tin Can, and, if you’re looking to add any new learning technology, raise Tin Can in your conversations with those vendors. I’m not arguing these companies need to have a development timeline in place yet—but you want to know they’re staying abreast and have a plan for evolving their technology to help you deal with your critical issues.

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In July, Blackboard acquired Wimba and Elluminate, providers of synchronous learning and collaboration technology—AKA Webinar software, in somewhat reductionistic terms.

Last Wednesday in Anaheim at EDUCAUSE’s annual conference, Blackboard unveiled its product roadmap for the future of Wimba and Elluminate, and this week the company further shared its vision in a pair of hour-long Webinars held this Monday. We attended one of those Webinars and thought we’d share a few key points from Blackboard’s Webinar software strategy.

• Project Gemini will combine Elluminate Live! and Wimba Classroom into a single platform. Blackboard is targeting the middle of 2011 for the release of version 1 of Gemini.
• Gemini’s underlying technology infrastructure will be based on Elluminate, while a more “modern” user interface will be developed based on work already begun at Wimba.
• Embracing “no user left behind” mentality, the company is committed to making the software functional in low-bandwidth situations and for people using assistive technologies, like screen readers.
• The Gemini timeline spans two years (2011 and 2012). The initial focus is on blending the best features and functionalities from Elluminate Live! and Wimba Classroom, with innovation (i.e., new features and functionalities for the Webinar software) not scheduled until the tail end of 2012. What might the innovation involve? Blackboard is saying mobile will be a big focus in the future.

Fuller information about the plans for Wimba and Elluminate is available at http://www.blackboard.com/sites/collaborate/index.html.

Celisa

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