Archive for the ‘News’ Category
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……
It’s amazing how much support labor is expended trying to find out what browser (and on what platform) a user is using.
Not to throw IE under the bus, but if the user is using IE6, that’s something the support team will want to know (and soon). Unfortunately, it is also something that doesn’t always surface immediately.
We do see users who, when encountering launch problems, do a little dance. First they try their phone, then their iPad, then their wife’s Android device, then that dusty old laptop in the corner with the annoying fan.
Then comes the report, “it worked once … I think on my wife’s phone”.
What we’ve discovered is that it’s better if the support team “just knows” the user’s user agent without having to ask. Even when they ask, the answer they get might be incorrect.
As such, with a nod of the hat to everyone who does the dirty work of coaching people on how to clear their browser cache, we are happy to add easy to use user agent tracking to bright.
This information is available straight from the Bright API. To use it, you’ll need to know your Bright realm guid and realm secret key. Don’t know yours? Ask us. You also need to know your Bright URL, it looks something like:
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2
Now you might want to know your learner’s email address. For this example, will use rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu.
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2/launch_history.json?realm_guid=[realm-guid]&realm_secret_key=[realm-secret-key]&learner_id=rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu
You can actually type that into your browser and get this user’s launch history out. Since you are using your secret key, don’t do this on an insecure computer and don’t do it over HTTP (use HTTPS).
Now what you’ll get out is fairly nice ….
Now what you really want is the JSON Formatter for Chrome 😉
If XML is more your speed, try a URL like this:
https://[bright server]/bright/api/v2/launch_history.xml?realm_guid=[realm-guid]&realm_secret_key=[realm-secret-key]&learner_id=rstallman@prep.ai.mit.edu
We’ve recently become aware of workaround for courses with IE10/11 where you touch the course window to move or resize and it locks into a smaller than full screen window.
After some additional testing by dominKnow support, the best options to use for the “launch parameters” will be the settings below. Please change the existing courses to this and then adjust your procedures for adding new courses.
