Introducing Native SCORM Support for WordPress

The Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin has been a very interesting initiative for us. It opened up LearnDash in a bigger way to enterprise users and proved that it was possible to use WordPress as a viable Learning Record Store (LRS) with advanced reporting. Organizations around the world are now using it, but one thing that’s always been missing is a way to capture SCORM data inside LearnDash. Maybe a business had some content output to SCORM that they couldn’t republish to Tin Can/xAPI, or maybe they were using a product like Articulate Rise, which doesn’t even support Tin Can/xAPI. Whatever the case, today we’re very excited to announce that SCORM modules can be tracked natively inside WordPress with our Tin Canny plugin.

At this time of this post, the Tin Canny plugin officially supports SCORM 1.2 and 2004 as well as xAPI / Tin Can for Articulate Storyline 2, Storyline 360, Articulate Rise (SCORM only), iSpring, Adobe Captivate 9 and H5P (xAPI/Tin Can only). It’s been a lot of work but we’re especially excited to welcome Rise, iSpring and Storyline 360 to the plugin.

Please note that this is the first release for supporting all of this modules, so it’s a good idea to test your modules first and make sure data is being tracked as you expect it to be. The SCORM support is especially important to consider here, as what we’re doing is capturing the SCORM data and then using a wrapper to essentially translate it into Tin Can statements. This makes it reportable along with all Tin Can/xAPI data for consistency, but this also means it may look different than expected if you’ve been using another Learning Management System (LMS).

Version 1.2 of Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting includes all of these updates and more. We also added an easy way to clear all Tin Can data for testing purposes, additional quiz data validation and made some minor changes to user experience.

We hope you enjoy the addition to the Tin Canny plugin!

20 replies
  1. Ben Schlaepfer
    Ben Schlaepfer says:

    Hi there,

    Our goal is to use WP & Learndash to manage Learner accounts and their course performance.

    We currently publish our content as SCORM and deploy via SCORMCloud both using the WP SCORMCloud Plugin and as Dispatch files (which are essentially are SCORM wrappers that load the SCORM package from our central SCORMCloud course library.

    Q1: Does your “Native SCORM” alllow us to upload any 1.2 compliant package to be uploaded (not just the authoring tools you mention)?

    Q2: Have you any experience of working with SCORMCloud hosted content? Especially the use of Dispatch SCORM wrapper files.

    Many thanks,
    Ben

    Reply
    • Ryan
      Ryan says:

      Hi Ben, Tin Canny ONLY supports the authoring tools we mention. If you use a zip file it’s not expecting, it will throw an error. Content can also not be hosted outside of your WordPress site, including having the files served from S3. Modules must be uploaded using our uploader to set the endpoint properly.

      Reply
      • Ben Schlaepfer
        Ben Schlaepfer says:

        Thanks Ryan,

        So “full” SCORM compliance is not enough to use your plugin?

        If we wanted you to add another authoring tool to the supported tools list, what is the process?

        Ben

        Reply
        • Ryan
          Ryan says:

          Hi Ben,

          All of our SCORM and Tin Can/xAPI support is essentially reverse engineered, and we’ve seen a fair bit of variation between authoring tools. To add support for another authoring tool we would ideally have a license for the authoring tool to test output and/or a lot of published modules to see what’s being sent. Our developers can then parse the output and determine how to support the modules. It’s potentially a 15-25 hour effort to add support for an additional authoring tool.

          Reply
    • Ryan
      Ryan says:

      Hi Mandar,

      We don’t have a copy of Storyline 1, so we can’t confirm whether or not the modules work. It’s highly likely that they won’t work though and the use of Storyline 1 is not something we can (or plan to) support. Sorry about that.

      Reply
    • Ryan
      Ryan says:

      Tin Canny accepts SCORM modules from supported authoring tools (currently Storyline, Rise, Captivate and iSpring) and uses a wrapper to store statements generated from them on the WordPress site along with any Tin Can data.

      Reply
  2. Set
    Set says:

    Hi,

    We are looking to move from WPLMS to learn dash + uncanny owl plugin. We are using Adapt learning creating tool to build the SCORM courses, so my question is if your plugin will be able to load the courses. Adapt learning is fully compliant with SCORM.

    Best

    Reply
  3. Jane
    Jane says:

    Does this plugin have an upload function for SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004 packages? We are using LearnDash and plan to use Captivate to export SCORM packages, but we cannot find a suitable plugin where it is possible to upload SCORM packages on the LaernDash LMS without getting LMS API error.
    We would love to use the reporting tool but I assume that the reporting only works on SCORM packages and not just HTML5 packages, did I understand this correctly?

    Reply
    • Ryan
      Ryan says:

      Hi Jane,

      Yes, you can upload SCORM packages from recent versions of Captivate with Tin Canny. You can also use xAPI Captivate packages and even ones published to web, but certainly the latter aren’t tracked (and it’s not recommended). As far as I know we are the only native SCORM solution for Captivate and WordPress, though there are some options with SCORM Cloud if you use their external platform; otherwise with other plugins you would get errors, yes.

      Reply
      • Jane
        Jane says:

        Hi Ryan,
        Thank you for your quick reply.
        Just to be absolutely sure that I’m understanding it correctly. If we buy the TIN CANNY LEARNDASH REPORTING plugin then we can both upload SCORM 1.2 and track users progressing and quiz results with that one plugin?
        Also where are the SCORM packages stored, is it in the wordpress media library?
        And is there a maximum number of SCORM packages we can upload?

        Reply
        • Ken Young
          Ken Young says:

          Hi Jane,
          Yes, you’ll be able upload Captivate SCORM 1.2 modules and track statements from Captivate using the plugin. So if by “track users progressing” and “quiz results” you mean the ability to see what users have done in those modules, as long as your module is passing that data to the Tin Canny plugin, you’ll be able to view it.

          With our plugin, the SCORM files are stored in a subfolder of wp-content/uploads, but do not show up in the WordPress media library. You add the modules to your pages with a button that sits next to the “Add Media” button in the standard WordPress editor.

          The maximum number of SCORM packages you can upload is limited by the amount of server space you have allocated for your WordPress site.

          Reply

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