Occasionally, our customers have run into problems that need to be solved by placing their learning content… somewhere far away from their LMS. Folks in the eLearning industry know that this has historically been a sore spot for SCORM. Over the years, we’ve helped our customers solve these problems with Rustici Cross Domain or Central / Remote when possible. However, over the last few years we’ve seen an ever growing need to make our SCORM solutions work for customers who need to use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to deliver learning content.
Why, and when, do LMSs need to use a CDN? The short version: using a CDN allows LMSs to put high bandwidth web assets closer to the learner in order to reduce the time it takes for learners to download and view courses. If you host your LMS in the U.S. but serve a global population, this is a capability you’ll want to investigate further. Using a CDN can help because it allows your customers in remote locations to load your eLearning content from a location in their own geographic region.
Our old solutions were great for solving a variety of problems but weren’t very helpful for customers who wanted to make use of modern, commercialized CDN solutions. To address this need, we spent the last six months developing two different ways in which customers can use our SCORM Engine solution in a CDN. SCORM Engine 2017.1 includes integrated support for Amazon’s S3 content storage and Amazon CloudFront. This support is built right in and can be easily configured during installation or upgrade for customers using AWS as their hosting provider.
To help customers who use other CDN solutions, like Microsoft Azure, Akamai, Rackspace or something else entirely, we’ve re-architected the way our client-side SCORM implementation works. These changes enable customers to host our JavaScript files on the same CDN they use for hosting their content files. The client side files will then be delivered by that same CDN. Enabling you to move your courseware closer to your learners.
You can check out the technical documentation for SCORM Engine 2017.1 here.
Reach out to us if you want to learn more or would like to schedule an upgrade.
