Tin Can for WordPress is Coming!

Update: Our Tin Can/XAPI LRS plugin with LearnDash reporting is now available. Read the announcement.

We’ve seen a lot of excitement for Tin Can use in WordPress in the past but very little use of it in the real world. After all, every Tin Can solution relied on a reporting application outside of WordPress. It meant segregating reporting and figuring out how to send Tin Can statements externally, plus reports tended to be too granular and not practical. Many LRS solutions obfuscated code and prevented customizations, so making improvements was impossible. We discouraged Tin Can use for our  clients because capturing data—and, more importantly, making the data meaningful—was just too cumbersome. Of course, the lack of a viable Tin Can solution also meant that WordPress wasn’t a useful platform for larger organizations that tended to create elearning modules with tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and others.

We decided it was time to add Tin Can to WordPress. We just finished building a complete Learning Record Store (LRS) that’s entirely native to WordPress. It captures Tin Can statements with no configuration. Just upload Storyline or Captivate zip files, or add H5P modules, and statements are automatically captured right inside an existing WordPress site. And it integrates seamlessly with LearnDash, the leading WordPress LMS plugin.

Please note that all images in this post may change before the final release but were all generated with our plugin from live data. Additional charts will be added before release.

Of course, Tin Can data isn’t of much use unless it’s feeding a robust reporting platform. We built that too! We’re still wrapping up the reporting work, but it’s going to add a lot of insight to administrators of elearning programs powered by LearnDash. It fact, it reimagines reporting for LearnDash data in a big way. Here are just a few of the metrics you’ll be able to see with our reporting:

• Average completion time of every course
• Tin Can statements by verb, LearnDash Group, module, user, or almost any other combination you can think of
• Course completion trends
• Tin Can statement trends

There’s a lot more available, of course, but the metrics above are examples of data that was never before available for LearnDash courses. There are also drill down capabilities, so you can start from a view of overall course activity and click down to seeing which topics have been completed by a particular user. It’s all inside WordPress too—there are no CSV files or external applications to worry about. We support instant sorting, filtering and searching inside javascript data tables too.

The plugin will be available before the end of August, 2016. We’re very excited about it, but it’s also new territory for us and we want to make it as useful as possible to people using Tin Can modules in WordPress. Do you use Tin Can on your LearnDash sites, or are you considering it? Tell us what we can do to improve Tin Can in WordPress in the comments below!