SCORM Offline Player

Why do you need the SCORM Offline Player?

The SCORM standard has been widely adopted across industries, making it the de facto e-Learning standard. However, the SCORM standard’s inadequacies have surfaced stronger with the emergence of new technology and changing needs. Though you may have invested a lot in the creation of SCORM content, there are far too many scenarios that adjudge SCORM to be outdated. This is exactly where the SCORM Offline Player comes in.

The SCORM Offline Player enhances the way training content is delivered, supported and managed. It works on three fronts:

2.1 The Mobile Front

The SCORM Offline Player is designed to allow SCORM-compliant courses to run across mobile devices. The very idea about this product emerged from repeated demands from customers, about making their courses more accessible.

2.2 The Offline Mode

The SCORM Offline Player also brings in the option of running the course content, completely offline. Our customers voiced their needs about the devices being the primary source of content consumption for their users.

In that case, the evaluations showed that even if mobile technology had moved fast and gifted mankind with powerful handheld devices, the carriers themselves lacked the same penetration. Offline access hence became an important feature for the product to have.

2.3 How is the content delivery supported?

The SCORM Offline Player ingests SCORM courses, generating offline-enabled mobile apps and the SCORM tracking information from the course. The entire management of the courses and the apps themselves happen on a backend portal.

The portal is responsible for maintaining the users who are authenticated to access the courses.

•  All these users are created by the administrator.
• The administrator can also upload courses, assign app name and icon and order an app, for a bunch of courses.
• These apps, once ready, are installed on their intended mobile platform. The created users can access whatever course-apps they are assigned to.
• These users’ activities on the app is tracked both when the app is online and offline.
• All the tracking information hence gathered is pushed to the client’s LMS or LRS. The tracking information is also made available on our own LRS, called the SCORM Activity Viewer.

2.4 What versions does the content delivery support?

The many versions of SCORM that are out there, also find themselves supported in the SCORM Offline Player. Starting from some of the most popular SCORM versions, we worked our way into the less adopted ones and the other offshoots of SCORM. Android and iOS were also picked as the first mobile platforms to be supported by the SCORM Offline Player. 
 
2.5 User Experience Benefits

The overall user experience of the SCORM content also received a face-lift in many cases. Earlier, the SCORM content would have to be fetched request-by-request and hence, the loading time would slow down the overall speed and hamper experience. With the SCORM Course-apps, the entire SCORM content was in one device, cached in it. Hence the course behaved much better to user interaction and any waiting time, if before, was eliminated. The browser dependencies were also removed. Due to the technology involved in creating the mobile applications, the apps were able to run on any of the wide range of devices prevalent in the market today. 

 
3. Benefits

• The biggest advantage: there is no requirement to install new servers, infrastructure or invest a new standard.
• The older SCORMs, whose adoption have dropped are easier to consume at a self-controlled pace on the mobile medium.
• Mandatory trainings are completed more efficiently and easily. Air hostesses, submarine trainees can access their courses from their comfort.
• Instructional Designers are also able to add new features and design considerations that can take advantage of the mobile dimension.
• Customers can re-use their SCORM packages and do not need to migrate to a new standard.
• The reach and presence of e-Learning is enhanced in places, where mobile has emerged as the first computer for people.
• Volunteers of NGOs, deployed in remote locations, who need to refer to courses about vaccinations, paramedic training and emergency medical instructions are benefited. Students of these remote locations are empowered with their curriculum courses, more easily than before.
• With the declining cost of mobile devices and no requirement of any additional infrastructure or servers, the total cost of ownership is less.
• It is simple for the e-Learning content providers to just have apps created from raw content and track the progress in whatever LMS they use. Hence, they the user base is increased significantly, for a relatively much less investment.

4. How does the SCORM Offline Player differ from its predecessors and competitors?

The SCORM Offline Player offers a greater range of functionality at a much lower cost, to make sure, everyone has an opportunity to benefit from the features.

1. The predecessors to the SCORM Offline Player require installation of more engines, backend systems and other softwares, to make it work. This draws out a huge budget to make the SCORM courses work offline. Such a magnitude of investment doesn’t allow organisations of all types and sizes to opt for this technology. 

2. In other cases, the players do not work across mobile devices, but only across desktop devices. While the SCORM Offline Player doesn’t work across desktops, but only on mobiles, it is a better design choice. The offline feature and true course content portability is achieved when we move outside the browser. The offline feature on desktops doesn’t let the content reach to users who never may access a laptop or desktop in their lifetime.

3. Certain competition also offers limited integration to LMSs and favour certain LMSs over certain others. The SCORM Offline Player does away with any preference or inclination towards any LMS, open-source or proprietary. The tracked SCORM parameters are exposed in the form of an API, which can be accessed by any LMS to pull the data and update the records. This sort of ‘open-hook’ design makes it more useful and LMS agnostic.

5. Why must you use the SCORM Offline Player?

The SCORM Offline Player envisions to bring the next paradigm shift in e-Learning. Through its powerful m-Learning features, tracking, and ease-of-use, it aims to help customers across all domains get their content reached as far as possible. The limitations of machine and network would be circumvented completely. Supporting more standards and platforms, the number of people impacted by this innovation would be noteworthy.

To learn more, write to us at info@e-zest.com.