Author Archive
For a split second, I was getting the error
“Oops! There was a general error executing method [createInvitationAsync]: Too many bytes in this Domain.”
out of SCORMCloud while creating a registration.
It seems like registration creation was currently not working [although w/ SCORMCloud’s excellent support we fully expect this to be fixed immediately].
But here’s a great and fairly unique chance to test Bright …. with the SCORMCloud backend responding not exactly perfectly at the moment. Reality is, 100% uptime doesn’t exist, anywhere. But when its 99.9999% you don’t get much chance to test you infrastructure when a cooperating service isn’t working……
In virtue of the Bright web service, all pages are functioning normally, which is what I expected.
But since we know we can’t create a reservation, what do I get if I go to launch a course [which will require a new registration]? LET’S BREAK SOME STUFF!
And here’s what I get:
The launch button changes text, with the error:
“There was a general error executing method [createRegistration]: Timed out waiting for operation – failing node: ip-10-2-20-98.ec2.internal/10.2.20.98:11211”
Everything else functions perfectly well. Does this qualify as graceful failure? Beauty is the eye of the beholder…. but it’s not too bad since launch/registration are a fraction of the requests we server.
And look now, SCORMCloud is already fixed!
I can imagine a fancier message along the lines of ; we’re sorry, your request can be fulfilled just this moment. Why not refresh the page and try again?
In every SCORMCloud realm, there’s an internal ‘SCORMCloud’ application.
But if you go to the application listing:
https://cloud.scorm.com/sc/user/Apps
It’s not there!
This is frustrating because you can still interact with it via the API.
Now, you can coerce the application ID out of SCORMCloud by
- upload a dummy course to the internal application.
- then find the course in the library and click on it. It will give a full URL that will include the SCORMCloud application ID!
Now to get the secret key, take the APP ID you found earlier, and build an URL like this:
https://cloud.scorm.com/sc/user/AppsAuth?appId=[MY APP ID]
in the response, you’ll need to view the page source, and then search for “secret=”
This is the secret key of your internal SCORMCloud API! You are ready to rock!
Got questions? Ask us:
there's no alternative to http://t.co/FZOWhBaing when it comes to flexible, agile LMS or better LearnerXperienceSystem
— ▼ Thomas N. Burg (@thobu) March 15, 2015
SCORM Cloud is the gold standard by which all other SCORM content players are judged. Previously known as Test Track, SCORM Cloud is where the e-learning industry turns to solve compatibility issues and has been for over 8 years. It was actually the first LMS certified by ADL for SCORM 2004 3rd edition back in 2007. SCORM Cloud handles over 7 million registrations each year , so they’ve seen pretty much every iteration of SCORM and have built flexibility into the SCORM Cloud player to account for the wide ranges of SCORM interpretations out there. SCORM Cloud has also racked up a few awards and recognition along the way:
- Brandon Hall Awards- 2 Gold medals (2010 and 2013)- as both a stand alone application in 2010 and for the work CA is doing with Cloud in 2013.
- Identified by several eLearning experts as a ‘game changing’ application when it first hit the market in 2009.
- SCORM Engine was awarded a Brandon Hall Gold Medal in 2014 for a collaboration with LifeWay Christian Resources incorporating SCORM, Tin Can, and Video based content for desktop, mobile and offline environments.
Thanks to Tammy Rutherford at Rustici Software for providing the backing data [and text].
In a conventional LMS, you get all of these:
– a learning management platform. Who takes what learning, when, and why.
– a learning UI. This is how your learning is delivered to the user.
But wait, why are these two functions bundled together? This part makes sense from a software construction perspective [we are only writing one piece of software], but for learners, it makes no sense at all. Why would we connect to the system where the learning is managed to receive the learning?
With Bright, we’ve striven from day 1 to decouple management from delivery. Why? Well….
User interaction is a pretty personal thing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and one man’s UI Taj Mahal is another man’s garbage dump.
The problem with typical monolithic LMS software is that it foists its UI conception [or its designer’s conception] onto the learners. If that fits your model, great, if not, too bad.
Even though not everyone gets it, we will always be dedicated to these fundamental notions:
– management and delivery need not happen in the same place.
– UI is a matter of personal taste, and we will always focus on allowing our customers’ complete customizability of their user experience.
Since the world already has 400+ shrink-wrapped ‘all in one’ LMS systems; what would the point be of building #401? Instead, we try to provide something different.
I found this in an email I sent to a prospect, it sums up the philosophy fairly well:
Based on your requirements I thought you could do pretty well with a shrink-wrapped LMS if your requirements don’t change or change much. I think this is where a lot of companies become disenchanted with their LMS platforms, they don’t or can’t be changed as quickly as the encompassing organization is changing.
From my side, at this point I’m not competing on features, I compete on flexibility. I feel like you can always bolt on one missing feature, but you can’t take a fundamentally monolithic or inflexible architecture and fix that in a day, a week, or probably ever.
In Bright for WordPress 5.1, speed junkies get a little boost.
Normally, Bright loads its Javascript files …. whether the page or post ends up using them or not. Well …. Javascript takes time to load, and if there’s no Bright functionality on the page, why load them?
Since WP makes it a bit difficult to load a plugin on a per page basis, we offer the following compromise.
Make a custom field called ‘bright-stop’, and that’s all. Bright will not load on the page. But if you have Bright templates in your header, footer, or sidebar widgets, you probably won’t want this.
Before we got to roll out all the cool features we’ve got in the backs of our heads ….. it seemed that we needed to get hip.
By hip I mean, today, up to date, the latest greatest, get in with the “in” crowd. Stop listening to a walkman, stop wearing bell bottoms, get rid of the mutton chops. Or is it all in vogue again?
So we are proud to report a massive upgrade to the Bright/Aura infrastructure.
– all machines are now 64 bit 100% SSD. There’s nary a disk drive spinning in the house! Those babies smoke!
– 100% Ubuntu 14 LTS on all devices. Haazzzah!
– Postgres 9.3.5+ everywhere. We are REALLY excited to put this baby to work.
– WordPress 4.1 everywhere.
– Rails 4.1.9 [4.2 …. we see you, we want you, but your time hasn’t come yet!]
– Ruby 2.1.5. Yes!
– JQuery 2.1+
I feel so ….. “modern”. Now let’s build some stuff.
Sometimes, you pull a stat and just go “WHAT!?!??!?!”
It seems, that in Dec 2014, some learner somewhere [distance learning, ya know?] launched a course via Bright once every 3 minutes FOR THE WHOLE MONTH.
Not bragging, but I think we did something like < 5 support tickets. OK that's a lie; I am bragging.
Just staring into our launch statistics for the Bright Platform, and Voila!
It seems we are doing something right:
Now this isn’t the number of times people log into a Bright enabled site and launch a course, rather it’s the number of unique associations between launched courses and users. So if the user launches the course a thousand times, its still just counts as one.
2014 is just an estimate. Last year, December of 2013 was our biggest month ever and will probably be again this year…… so this is quite a cautious estimate.
Here’s how we are described in the Trimeritus list of Vendors of Learning Management and E-learning Products.
Aura Bright (Aura Software, LLC) https://www.aura-software.com/. Not a traditional
LMS, it is a highly configurable SCORMCloud based learning platform that embeds
LMS functionality into any application. Has a WordPress plug-in.
What we find interesting in this review is that the word “configurable” …. this is the only place
the term appears in the entire document.
I guess one of these is not like the others……
