Scorm in a teacup
How a tweet about Disney's e-learning teething troubles triggered a small storm on Twitter.
I have always been puzzled why the phase ‘a Mickey Mouse organisation’ is a derogatory comment, when Disney is recognised globally as defining excellence in entertainment and customer service. If you’ve ever spent time in one of its facilities you’ll know what I mean; although I recently had the opportunity to find out that when tackling something new there is no magic kingdom and Disney is as vulnerable to making mistakes as any other organisation.
It was 8am on a Monday morning in Florida and I was sitting in an Elliot Masie seminar entitled ‘Painless Compliance Training – Finally!’. It was taking placing in a Disney resort and what had attracted me to this particular one (out of the 18 happening at the same time) was that it was The Walt Disney Company who delivered it.
So I was amazed to find that this world-class organisation went through exactly the same pain as every other organisation introducing e-learning, and that it didn’t take advice from those who had been there before. Even Disney had no magic wand to save its learners from a poor experience initially.
Jill Gardner gave us the usual catalogue of mistakes the business had made along its three year journey and how it learnt from and dealt with them. However, one particular issue caught my attention: “to overcome tracking issues with its compliance training, Disney moved from SCORM to AICC”. What?! Is that not a backward move? Well, that to me was VERY interesting and quite significant. So what do we do these days in a conference when we get a nugget like that? Yes, we tweet! Have you ever seen the digital equivalent of dropping a brick into a pond and then watching the waves and wondering if it would be possible to press rewind?
Because of my interest in the e-learning standards for interoperability, because I follow and have followers on Twitter worldwide who are equally geeky, and because I was stateside and in that time-zone, the effect of that tweet rippled around the world. It was retweeted numerous times by supporters of AICC. It was challenged by the SCORM community who told me not to blame them for a learning management system (LMS) issue. What had I said? Don’t shoot the messenger! And it was still only 8.40am on a Monday morning.
As I left the seminar to go for a strong coffee still shaken by ‘what a difference a tweet makes’, a familiar American voice from behind me said: “That tweet went down well!” Tom King, who I’d heard speak the day before and with whom I’ve had numerous chats about AICC and SCORM over the years, also follows the people I follow on Twitter. Although he had been in another seminar across the convention centre he had silently, without a tweet, watched the ‘drama’ unfold. As he explained, with a glint in his eye, we both knew exactly who had given The Walt Disney Company the advice to move from SCORM to AICC. This was a scary realisation that people actually read the posts on Twitter but I was secretly smug to have caused such a stir.
The Twitter issue aside, what was more useful to discover from the discussions after the Disney revelations was that many companies across the US are experiencing the same tracking issue that we are in the UK. People aren’t talking about it because they believe it is a local problem. The issue can occur regardless of which LMS or content supplier you use – I know the Disney LMS supplier is well respected in the industry. I wouldn’t necessarily give the same advice as was given in this case, but it is one way of dealing with it.
So what is the problem? Courses are being launched, cached locally and completed by the learner without getting the ‘complete’ signal back to the LMS. The courseware can even provide a certificate of completion to the learner but because of timeouts or unstable internet connections can lose the data when exit is pressed. This is very frustrating for the learner, particularly if it is a compliance course that has to be seen to be done by the system. Consequently e-learning gets a bad name.
I’ve discussed different solutions in previous e.learning age standards columns but if you have experienced this tracking issue please get in touch and let me know your particular way of resolving it. Send comments to the editor Peter Williams.
Fiona Leteney is an e-learning implementation consultant