Graham Glass, etc.

EDU 2.0 SCORM, Part 9

In this part of the series, I focused on recording all the objectives, interactions, timing, latency and other information that is typically send from the SCO to the LMS during a SCORM activity.

This went fairly smoothly, and resulted in the addition of several SCORM-specific database tables in addition to minor extensions to existing tables. All interactions and results are stored in the existing EDU 2.0 structures, which means it should be easy to integrate SCORM activities into the gradebook and assignment metaphor.

In the next phase I'll add support for student preferences and test out the integration with the gradebook. Things are getting close to a beta release!

This phase took 8 hours, bringing the total time to 37 hours.

Brothers

I just scanned in a lot of old family photos. Here's one of me and my brother Blair.

We're just a Speck

LiveScribe Demo

This is my first demo. I couldn't find a way to turn off the "preview" ink by default (you can do this by zooming to full size and then clicking "hide preview" on the bottom, but I want a way to remember this setting by default).

Demo Two
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My Goals for 2010

For fun, here are my goals for 2010. It will be interesting to visit this post at the end of next year to see how many of them I've met.

EDU 2.0 Goals

• 200+ companies subscribed to EDU 2.0 for business
• 400,000+ members of EDU 2.0 for school
• mobile EDU 2.0 in production
• EDU 2.0 platform licensed to at least 2 large companies
• build a prototype virtual world for EDU 2.0
• add e-commerce, e-learning marketplace and other cool features

Other Goals

• launch MINDS 2.0 portal
• write and record at least 2 songs
• trips to China, Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania, and New Zealand
• go to Burning Man
• try pilates and/or yoga

EDU 2.0 SCORM, Part 8

In this part of the series, I created a simple randomized quiz using Articulate Studio and exported it as a SCORM 1.2 package so I could understand better how SCORM quizzes ("interactions") worked. It's quite straightforward, but it's annoying that a SCORM client never actually transmits what the questions are to the LMS. It transmits the student response, the correct answer, and the score, but never the text of the question.

I was originally intending to map the SCORM questions onto EDU 2.0 questions so that the LMS could build up its question bank dynamically as it ran SCORM modules, but now I realize that it's technically impossible since SCORM never sends the text of the question. Ironically, this makes my life easier as all I really have to do is to create a single "ScormInteraction" class that captures all the data but doesn't bother to do anything more meaningful with it.

I also stubbed out all the remaining cmi.* methods so my ScormController now accepts the full SCORM 1.2 API, although many of them are just skeleton implementations. So now I can run a SCORM 1.2 quiz but I can't record any of the data.

The next step is to add ScormInteraction and ScormObjective classes and support the recording and playback of all interaction data. At that point, I'll be close to the finish line.

This part took 3 hours, so the total time spend is now 29 hours.

EDU 2.0 SCORM, Part 7

In the next part of this series, I implemented most of the core cmi.* callbacks, including support for session timing, launch data, entry/exit status, lesson status, lesson mode, and suspend_data. This functionality supports simple SCORM packages (without questions or objectives) to be executed.

For example, I used the Articulate Studio to create a simple SCORM 1.2 package from a Powerpoint. I then uploaded the SCORM .zip file to EDU 2.0 and opened the SCORM package from within a lesson.

Here's what I saw:

I was able to play the slides, resume them, etc. and all the API calls from the Articulate client were handled correctly! The next step is to support the callbacks necessary to support a SCORM quiz.

Part 7 took about 4 hours to implement, so the total time spent is now 26 hours.

EDU 2.0 SCORM, Part 6

The next step was to add a ScormSession class that tracks SCORM sessions (which tracks things like suspend data and times) and a skeleton ScormAssignment class that represents the points, thresholds and optional questions for a SCORM module. 

I also added more skeleton implementations for the various cmi.* properties, and the only ones left to stub out are for interactions and objectives. It's not clear whether I can map SCORM objectives onto the existing EDU 2.0 proficiencies concept or whether we need to introduce a new concept. Ideally, I'd like to map SCORM concepts onto existing EDU 2.0 concepts whenever possible in order to get the more natural integration.

All this took 2 hours, so the total time spent is now 22 hours.

 

EDU 2.0 SCORM, Part 5

After some more thought, I decided that sections within lessons, and not lessons themselves, should be SCORM entities. So now when you try to add a section within a lesson, you get the following choices:

 

If you choose "SCORM", you're prompted for the SCORM .zip file and then a new section is added to the lesson that shows the SCORM table of contents in a frame. This redesign allows other sections to be added to a lesson, as well as additional resources to be added to the SCORM section. You can also browse the directory structure and contents of the SCORM package from the browser, which is a nice bonus.

Then we added skeleton callbacks for all of the cmi.core functions defined in the SCORM 1.2 specification, as well as several important ones such as cml.launch_data. My guess is that the implementation of all these methods will take no more than a day.

The total time spent so far on SCORM is about 20 hours.

EDU 2.0 Growth

It's almost the end of the year and school is over for most people, so I thought I'd do a quick analysis of the EDU 2.0 growth numbers. Here's a little summary of total registered users for the past few years:

Dec 2007 - 4,000
Jun 2008 - 10,000
Dec 2008 - 27,000
Jun 2009 - 50,000
Dec 2009 - 117,000

Based on these figures, our membership doubles every 6 months. This is quite exciting, since the projections would be:

Jun 2010 - 240,000
Dec 2010 - 480,000
Jun 2011 - 960,000
Dec 2011 - 1,920,000

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the growth will continue in this way, but we have a great roadmap for 2010 and I think teachers and students will really enjoy what we have in store!