Expanded SCORM and xAPI/Tin Can support for LearnDash

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At long last, the Tin Canny 4.0 release is now available! And it includes one major new feature that will transform what’s possible for small businesses running LearnDash sites: full SCORM and xAPI support.

Back when we originally launched Tin Canny it was an easy way for LearnDash sites to upload their modules from popular elearning tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and iSpring. Over the years we added support for Lectora, Quizmaker, H5P, Presenter, Rise… but all of that support was explicitly defined and we couldn’t offer fully SCORM or xAPI compliant solutions.

Tin Canny Uploader

Introducing full SCORM and xAPI/Tin Can support

The 4.0 release should work with any standards-compliant SCORM 1.2, 2004 and xAPI / Tin Can file. It took us close to a year to get there, but the effort was absolutely worth it. Now we can stop saying “no” to people every time we get requests to add support for a custom authoring tool or something third party that we don’t support. Better yet, there’s no longer a need to ask! With this update, he’s a partial list of authoring tools we will be supporting with Tin Canny:

  • Camtasia
  • Elucidat
  • Adapt
  • Easygenerator

Of course, there are hundreds of authoring tools in the market and we have only been able to test a small number of them, but if you were part of our testing group and provided file samples (thanks to those of you who did, especially Dennis Hall!), we can confirm that Tin Canny 4.0 works well with all of those files. And, going forward, we will offer support for any SCORM and xAPI files, as long as they are standards compliant.

The rest of the 4.0 release is far less exciting (and how could it not be?).

Course and User reports will have improved performance on large sites and can now take advantage of object caching if it’s available. For some sites this will mean a huge performance difference ( note that cached results are only refreshed every 5 minutes), but unless you have at least several thousand users, the changes might not be as apparent.

There’s better translation support, LearnDash quizzes that were NOT linked to courses (it’s rare but does come up) are now shown in the front end quiz reports, and Tin Canny users not using SCORM and xAPI features will find fewer confusing references to those options. The rest of the changes can be reviewed at https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/tin-canny-learndash-reporting-changelog/

Uncanny Groups 4.0: Dozens of enhancements

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The Uncanny Groups for LearnDash 4.0 release has been in development for months and focuses heavily on reliability and marginal improvements. And there are a lot of those; this release includes almost 50 plugin enhancements and fixes. Let’s jump right into some of what’s new:

More form support

Use Gravity Forms, WPForms or Formidable Forms? Now you can add enrollment key redemption fields from the form editor so you can link any form in those plugins to key redemption in Uncanny Groups.

Uncanny Enrollment Key in WP Forms

New edit group page options

Ever wish administrators could see invited users? That’s in, so is the ability to see orders and products associated with groups that were created from a purchase. You can even unlink a group from an order if you no longer want users to be able to add courses or seats to a group via purchase.

Edit Uncanny Groups page changes

New group list page options

We modified the group listing under LearnDash LMS > Groups to show seat counts and to make enrollment keys downloadable by admins. Both of these changes will make it a lot easier for administrators to get data they need without drilling down into a group or switching to the front end Group Management page.

Shortcode support in email templates

Email templates now allow shortcodes to be used in emails to users. One interesting use case, and the reason for us building it, was someone wanting to use the group logo shortcode from Toolkit Pro to brand emails to group members with the group logo.

New system status tools

Start with the Uncanny Automator 3.0 release, we’re adding a Status page to our plugins to provide useful troubleshooting information and database repair tools. Uncanny Groups 4.0 is the first of our LearnDash add-ons to support it. Look for the new Uncanny Groups > System status menu.

Bulk discounts for WooCommerce Subscriptions

We had a few requests for users wanting to use our Bulk Discount system for subscription purchases as well as one-time purchases. That’s now fully supported.

New seat management system

The changes are largely behind the scenes, but the entire seat and key management system was rebuilt to ensure that it remains reliable, even with some edge cases that could cause sync issues in the past. While it sounds small, this change represents dozens of hours of work and should negate the need for the Reconcile seat count button for upgraded groups.

New license system

The 4.0 release includes a new system to track expired plugins that we’ll be adding to our other plugins shortly. Currently, it’s not obvious on user sites when license keys have expired and we get a lot of tickets from confused users about why they can’t update. Now, directly on sites, we can show how many activations a license key has, whether or not it’s valid and when it expires.

Other fixes and enhancements

The above is already a huge list of improvements, but here are a handful of other changes in 4.0:

  • New developer filters for the quiz reports to make overrides easier
  • Password complexity was reduced for automatically generated passwords
  • Better Divi, LearnDash Notifications and WPML compatibility

For the full list of changes in Uncanny Groups 4.0, make sure to check https://www.uncannyowl.com/knowledge-base/uncanny-learndash-groups-changelog/