We have been working with government entities since 2005, so it’s no surprise that we were at NTSA’s ADL iFest 2019 conference. iFest brings together eLearning experts to showcase projects accomplished during the last year and pushes the group to set forth guidance for the industry about the standards and the technologies we all use. And it’s our pleasure to sponsor such an innovative event. We always love seeing familiar faces at our booth and enjoy meeting new stakeholders with challenging problems to explore.
Centralizing eLearning content across systems
One of the more difficult areas that the DoD and other federal government agencies face is from having a variety of LMSs and training systems to meet the specific needs of each department. We heard from iFest attendees that it can be challenging to manage courses across all the intra-agency systems. While the xAPI standard and other emerging ADL initiatives are actively innovating exciting new standards, the reality is that training managers need tools that can be used to solve problems in the short term.
Our eLearning distribution solutions provide ways to support these next-gen standards within systems that learning departments have already deployed. This allows content creators to manage content from a single, central location and share access to these courses across each learning system in their networks.
That way, when a content publisher uploads a course in their central system, it’s immediately made available to every other connected platform. Not only do content producers cut down on time administering the courses, but they also get a consolidated usage report across all learners in every system. These tools can also help content producers take advantage of the latest standards, while still easily deploying into basic LMSs, such as Moodle.
Growth in xAPI adoption
As xAPI has gained increased adoption both within the DoD and across the industry, challenges have emerged–we have seen inconsistencies in both the expression and structure of xAPI data generated from a wide variety of tools and sources.
Understanding how to technically construct a correct structure for a profile is only half of the task when building an xAPI Profile. In addition to the technical structure of the profile is the substance of the profile. Our CEO, TJ Seabrooks, spoke to iFest attendees on how to take xAPI Profiles further when building and using them for a “specific use case.” You can check out his presentation slides here as well as the accompanying worksheet that includes discovery questions to ask your stakeholders to gather specific requirements and guidance for putting xAPI into practice.
TJ Seabrooks presenting at NTSA’s ADL iFest 2019.
Finding a better way to manage it all
Rustici Software’s Content Controller tool can help these types of advanced courses launch and track inside a variety of LMSs that might not have the necessary technical underpinnings to launch such advanced courses. If you have any questions about centralizing your content or xAPI, we’d love to talk with you to learn more about your challenges.
