The Learning Solutions Blog

Tin Can – more than a couple of tin cans and a wet bit of string!

I’ve been watching the emergence of project Tin Can (think SCORM for a modern world) with great interest. The folks over at Rustici Software working with Aaron Silvers and the ADL team are nearing a first release – scheduled for June this year.

In my view, the potential for what it has to offer is huge. Tin Can promises to address many of the shortcomings associated with existing SCORM standards that are now over 10 years old and as the Rustici Web site puts it “The Tin Can API fuses a decade of collective e-learning experiences with a decade of technological advances.”

Even more significantly, I believe it will have a profound impact on the way we think about, create, host and track eLearning and learning content in the future. For me, the top five benefits that can be delivered by Tin Can are these:

1. It completely decouples content from host LMS. Content can be launched and consumed from anywhere and the content can use any form factor. There is no longer a need for a supporting Learning Management System (LMS) – just a Learning Record Store (LRS) – somewhere to store learning records and achievement events – more on this later.
2. It enables content authors to build content in any way they like. There is no more reliance on the browser and associated browser based technologies like JavaScript. Content authors can now choose the most appropriate form factor and technology for their content yet still enable individuals to record learning events and achievements. Developers of mobile apps, simulators and games will all be able to use the Tin Can API to track learner events.
3. It supports disconnected scenarios. The content doesn’t need a continual connection to the server. So long as it can occasionally connect, learning events can easily be held locally and then replayed to the LRS when next connected. This is ideal for mobile learning and disconnected scenarios in general.
4. It supports platform transition. This refers to the fact that you can start consuming some content on your computer at work, continue with it on your mobile phone while travelling home, and then finish it later perhaps on your home computer. This capabiliy is more down to the content and the way it’s delivered but Tin Can inherently supports this mode of operation. It’s commonplace already with eBook readers such as Kindle and Apple’s iBooks, where your current chapter position is tracked across devices.
5. It will help to unify the worlds of eLearning with the wider world of learning in general. Learning events and achievements can be recorded based on…..guess what –learning as opposed to your completion of a piece of “eLearning”. So classroom based training, experiential training, game-based training, recording the fact you’ve read a new book or attended a seminar and learned something – all of this is accommodated.

So what’s wrong with what we’ve got today?
The standards used for eLearning today (predominantly SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004) are inherently problematic in many ways. Experienced eLearning developers are used to working their way and innovating their way around the issues, but it’s not an ideal situation by any means. Here are a few of the top issues with SCORM today:

• It’s overly complex, convoluted and open to interpretation in too many areas. It’s rare to meet anyone who has worked with eLearning for any amount of time not to have come across interoperability issues – usually between content (SCO) and host LMS.
• It assumes and is reliant on JavaScript and browser-based content – OK up to a point, but what about the world of mobile Apps? What about classroom based training? What about simulation and game-based training? What about all of the other learning experiences out there in the “real world” that people encounter on a regular basis?
• The existing SCORM standards were developed many years ago and many years before the emergence of smart phones and tablets.  Developing SCORM based solutions that work with mobile devices and work offline while disconnected is tough – much harder than it needs to be.
• The content requires some form of (often expensive) Learning Management System (LMS) to host and manage the content.
• It’s very limited in terms of the learner tracking data that can be recorded and subsequently reported on.
• It’s concerned solely with computer based (usually online) training content and has no connection with, or support for any other form of learning. This means that additional bespoke, out of band mechanisms have to be developed (often by LMS vendors) to support tracking other forms of training (classroom based, simulation based, experiential and more).

Today, establishing and recording a “complete picture” of an individual’s or team’s learning and achievement history is difficult. This is largely because SCORM based eLearning is treated in isolation from other forms of learning, which when you think about it is far from ideal and a rather strange state of affairs.

So here’s the before and after picture that illustrates how Tin Can radically changes things and offers the opportunities to unify the worlds of online eLearning with other forms of learning. Along with all of this will come many new business opportunities, and many new interesting learning scenarios.

How does Tin Can Work?
You can find more details about the Tin Can API and the current specification itself on the Rustici Web site at http://scorm.com/tincan/ however I’ll provide a brief summary here.

Tin Can is based on statements that are sent from the content (or “activities” as Tin Can refers to them as) to the LRS. These statements are all based around a very simple sentence structure:

Noun (actor), verb, object

At its most simple, this can be stated as:

“I did something”

Examples might include “Alex completed Tin Can API training”, “Peter experienced the SalesForce CRM demonstration”, “Jane achieved green belt in Jujitsu”, “Chris attended a Web seminar” and so on.

Statements can get a little more elaborate and can include context information. For example:

“Steve completed Company Induction Training with a result of 85% on 21^st Feb 2012 at 14:35.”

Using this approach, Tin Can can capture everything you can capture today in SCORM, but it also provides much more flexibility by enabling the addition of new nouns, verbs, and objects.

The Learning Record Store (LRS)
The record keeper for these learning events is the Learning Record Store (LRS). This could be an LMS with extended support for Tin Can, but it doesn’t have to be. An LRS on its own could simply provide the repository for learning events. To be of much use it would also need to include a way of extracting the data through reports.

With statement data being able to record a multitude of different learning events, the reports available from LRS systems in the future, will be much richer and better than the typical reports available from LMS today.

The key thing to remember is that the LRS can be located anywhere and the content when it is created doesn’t need to know where. I expect many LRS will be “Cloud” based because the “Cloud” is an ideal place. Furthermore, the LRS doesn’t need to know in advance anything about the content – the location of the content, the type of content or even the identity of the learner consuming the content.

Final thoughts for now
It will be interesting to see how quickly authoring tool and LMS vendors jump on board with Tin Can. I’d like to think this will happen quickly but expect it will be slow going at first and will take time to gather momentum. This has tended to be the case with eLearning over the past 10 years.

I expect to see the more forward thinking LMS vendors adding LRS capabilities to what they already have, while continuing to support existing SCORM 1.2 and 2004 along with the Tin Can API.

I also expect to see increased App innovation with Apps built for specific platforms (such as the iPad for example) providing first rate content experiences. For the first time, content developers will be free to provide THE VERY BEST experience for specific devices (free from the shackles of SCORM) while at the same time being able to easily use the Tin Can API to push learning events through to Cloud based LRS systems for tracking purposes.

We will certainly be looking to adopt Tin Can within our Cloud-based Reach LMS and within the content oriented Apps we have in the pipeline. Delivering top quality learning experiences across the widest range of devices possible is exactly what we’re focused on. SCORM at the moment is not making that easy, Tin Can should help oil the wheels.