About two weeks ago, we reached out to some SCORM Cloud users, asking them a few questions about how they use SCORM Cloud. You see, we built SCORM Cloud in such a way that people can really use it how they want to. The problem, though, is that we want to make sure we’re supporting our users in the way they need us to, and that requires us knowing a bit about how they use our products.
[Personal disclosure: My hate for spam and survey emails makes it incredibly hard for me to actually send these out, even to our customers. We’re going to do a bit more of that this year, so accept my apologies… And definitely opt out if you’re not interested in participating.]
This is what we learned:
- Our customers are incredibly kind. Even those who had complaints had clearly gone to a class on how to offer constructive criticism. Great ideas were layered with respectful comments. We definitely came away appreciating the way you guys go about your business.
- Our customers and trialists are using SCORM Cloud in several distinct ways:
- Test Track, redux. Many of you came to us in the days when we offered Test Track as the simplest way to test SCORM content, and those bones are still at the core of SCORM Cloud.
- The API. More of you are building applications against SCORM Cloud than we realized, and we love that. Hopefully, that speaks well of the API documentation we’ve enhanced over the course of the year. Some of you rightfully complained about the early state of that documentation, and I think we’ve come a long way. If there are other things we could be doing to make building apps on top of SCORM Cloud easier, tell us.
- A training delivery system. This is definitely something less than an LMS, but it lets small organizations get content out to their constituents simply. Simple seems to be good.
- A public URL. It seems this simple, public URL option works well from you. The people who need to learn aren’t always in an LMS, but that doesn’t meant they shouldn’t be offered great content.
- In an application we helped build, like Sakai, or Moodle, or WordPress.
- As a trial for our ever popular SCORM Engine.
- To deploy your content to other LMSs as a SCORM Dispatch. Even within Dispatch, we’re seeing different uses. Some take advantage of how tolerant our technology is (when their LMS’s isn’t). Others want a layer of protection and tracking placed around their valuable content. And we’ve got ideas about other ways we could dispatch content on your behalf. Has anyone heard of AICC PENS or LETSI RTWS?
- We’ve got a bunch of functionality that we’ve not done enough to tell you about. People are asking for things that they can already do, or that we know how to do already. We need to be sure that we’re properly exposing those things.
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- Did you know you can use tags to organize your courses and learners?
- Did you know that those tags can be used to do some pretty sophisticated reporting?
- Did you know that you could do some reporting?!
- We really want to hear more from all of you, but without bothering you in the least. As we reach out to you more over the course of this year, please tell us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. And don’t feel like you have to wait for us to ask… we want to hear from you all the time.
