We love hearing how our products help our customers and recently held a truly explosive webinar on the science behind American Chemical Society’s content sharing technology. Despite the chemistry puns, we had a great time learning about how ACS Publications leverages Content Controller as an LTI tool to share their content. Veronica Hart, Sr. Product Manager of Revenue Operations and Pamela Peacock, Product Manager of ACS Institute at ACS Publications, shared how Content Controller delivers their library to any LMS, making it easier for them to provide updated versions of their courses. Don’t worry if you missed the webinar – oxidants happen – we’ve got you covered with a link to the recording or read on for the summary of the interview.
Could you share ACS’s journey in developing and delivering lab safety courseware?
ACS’s Publications Division has developed four lab safety courses using a learning spiral approach. The courses are designed to build upon each other with increasing complexity. The primary customers are higher education institutions, as well as corporations, with plans to bring these courses to high schools. They are also looking to offer translations in more languages, which Content Controller can handle with ease helping ACS deliver the courseware effectively.
How did you start creating digital courseware?
ACS started by reaching out to professors to identify their needs and pain points for lab safety curriculum. They soon discovered that many professors were using outdated courses that they either built themselves and, in some cases, using outdated YouTube videos copied from VHS tapes. This was an opportunity to utilize ACS’s subject matter expertise to provide training with the latest lab safety best practices to meet the needs of the ever-changing curriculum while providing an engaging learning experience for students.
How do you onboard an organization or institution for your courses?
The ACS team spends time with LMS admins to upload the courses into their system. Each admin has varying levels of knowledge about their platform, and the ACS team supports them accordingly. They supply documentation for the veteran practitioners while providing personal walk-throughs for those who are new to implementing their system. Each school has their own internal processes, and the ACS team is prepared to meet their security requirements or fill out any forms to help remove any barriers getting started. In some cases, ACS utilizes Content Controller’s built-in testing tools for a client to preview what a course will look like ahead of time in a sandbox environment and make any adjustments.
How do you support a wide variety of standard formats and LMSs that your clients are using?
ACS uses Articulate to create the courses in a SCORM format and leverages a variety of outputs from Content Controller, including SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 3rd Edition, AICC, LTI 1.1 and LTI 1.3, to share access to the courses with their customers. The team commonly interacts with LMSs using LTI 1.1 or 1.3, with more than 50% using LTI 1.3. The courses are then tested and verified for compatibility, with the most commonly used systems including Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard and Docebo. Content Controller makes it easy to handle the different combinations of eLearning standard formats and flexibility to deliver into any LMS.
How do you distribute your content to various LMSs while maintaining control and ability to update courses?
ACS uses Content Controller to distribute content to over ten different LMSs while maintaining control of the content and licensing. The team can easily update courses and track learner usage allowing ACS to accommodate customer accessibility requirements and to distribute the latest version seamlessly to all customers. There is no additional burden on LMS admins who already have a lot on their plates as they know that the most up-to-date content is always being served to students.
How has reporting improved with Content Controller?
Veronica and Pam shared how they love the reporting features, which provide both qualitative and quantitative reports. They can understand usage patterns across all their clients and their learners. The assessment piece allows ACS to identify areas where learners are struggling and improve their courses accordingly. The client LMS also gets all the student progress and scoring to report into their gradebooks.
What measures do you have to protect student data privacy?
By using Content Controller’s PII hashing functionality, they can obscure any student data, while still providing a unique ID for learner-level detail without revealing any identifiable information. This protects student privacy while still providing useful information.
Our webinar brought a positive reaction about the power of Rustici Software’s Content Controller in enabling content sharing through LTI. It was fascinating to hear about how ACS leverages this technology to easily share their courses into any LMS and receive updates automatically. We hope you found this recap helpful, and we encourage you to learn more about our content distribution solutions and how we support LTI.
