CMI Interactions Data, SCORM, and No Way To Report

I like the fact that SCORM 2004 provided the use if cmi.interactions for use in assessments for providing a very granular question by question set and get of the data. That is great. Wait...? Once the student has completed the package, what about addressing how one were to be able to get that data out for learner(s) who have completed the package for all scos that initialize with all cmi.interactions? This keeps coming up over and over with many of the clients I service. How could this not be addressed at some point? This is such a key component, and given the spread of SCORM, allowing for measurement at this granular level shows the forethought put forth to address assessments used in SCORM. Otherwise, another spec would have been addressed or integrated. I don't know how many SMEs, IDs, Instructors, and Content Owners have asked this fundamental question of, "OK, we had our developers created the tests using all the interactions cmi data, now we want to get that data out for Question Item Analysis. .... What, there is no way to do that? Are you kidding me?" I don't know how many of these questions i have had, but it must be infinitely larger for everyone else.

I know, if anyone even replies back to my 'Comment-less' posts, LMS vendors have added this integration into their engines and they support it. Great, so bring it to the community and share it. The community shared the entire model for commercial companies to provide products which profit from SCORM, a model given to them to go forth and charge for services...Rightfully so.

This must be addressed in SCORM 2.0. I believe, so far of what i have been apart of as well as the foundation topics and use cases from the LETSI workshop in Pensacola, that this will be addressed. LETSI is thinking in the whole picture of the system, as a SOA (Services Oriented Architecture), not just the runtime. http://LETSI.org

Birthday for Turing - Maybe the 'Father of Computer Science' -

It's just 71 years ago this month that a seminal paper from Alan Turing was published, which helped pave the way to today's multi-billion dollar IT industry and confer on Turing the title of father of modern computer science.

As is often the case in scientific endeavour, Turing was actually working on an entirely different task when he stumbled on a way to create a general-purpose computer.

The paper that encapsulated this machine? On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

The Entscheidungsproblem - which translated from German literally means "decision problem" - referred to a mathematical challenge laid down by German mathematician David Hilbert.

The Entscheidungsproblem goes to the very heart of Hilbert's thoughts on the nature of mathematics. At the start of the twentieth century deep questions were being asked about science and the tools used to think about scientific problems. In the same way that Einstein's work had challenged orthodox views of physics, so Hilbert and others questioned mathematics.

Hilbert posed three fundamental questions: is mathematics "complete", is it "consistent," and - the Entscheidungsproblem - is it "decidable". The first two were answered - negatively - in 1931 by the Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel.

Turing scuppered Hilbert's final question with his 1937 paper although the American mathematician Alonzo Church - later Turing's professor at Princeton - came up with a similar negative analysis a year earlier. The two approaches are generally combined as the Church-Turing Theorem.

Turing's real insight was, of course, the concept of a "Universal (or Turing) machine." He conceived the Universal Machine as a way to demonstrate that it was impossible to solve the Entscheidungsproblem.

But he had also stumbled on what was effectively the blue print for a general-purpose computer and this almost certainly justifies his status as the founder of modern computing.

Copies of Turing's original paper are available here ->

Specialist that don't talk - You Don't Who!

When specialists are all together but do not exchange...

"Specialization - When millions of specialists can not exchange, they are helpless. In our society, is survival dependent on a circulation medium?..." I don't know where this quote came from but, it is one i know i have heard. I also believe this was in reference to the money at one time, but i think it can also be referenced now conceptually to the cloud concepts and social/collaboration inter-networking mediums. Has the collaboration/sharing/social networking of modern web apps, paved the way for a new circulation medium of thoughts, ideas, associations, exchanging, storing, socialization, etc.?

Are knowledgeable people willing to engage?

If you have not been to the Ageless Learner website: , I highly recommend the reads. Specifically, there is an article labeled "Knowing What We Know: Supporting Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Social Networks" by Cross, Parker, Prusak, and Borgatti. Most specifically, I had a strong interest in the section labeled, "Are knowledgeable people willing to engage?". As part of a social interview to training/processes, the four observed the training/problem solving interactions of learning engaged in a petroleum company, mostly virtually at first. Most thought that those most knowledgeable of their area, would be clearly engaged in issues and training that arises. Oh not the case completely. This raises the question for social learning of, are the most knowledgeable people in a given area of learning going to-be or willing-to contribute to the communities base of learning? If so, will the effect be that the overall bubble of the community going to benefit an increase in area of knowledge/understanding?

"Further, the organization has made a shift in performance measurement to encourage joint problem solving and de-emphasize individual project metrics."
http://agelesslearner.com/articles/knowing_crossetal_tc600.html

LETSI SCORM 2.0 Friday Briefing

Avron opened up the session providing an overview of the week.
Schawn Thropp covered the Architecture Working Groups accomplishments of completing the affirmation of a SOA(Services Oriented Architecture) architecture, along with validating/verifying the intended use of all of the USE CASES developed by the LET 2.0 group.

Mike Rustici covered the Sequencing(:
Why do we want Sequencing?
- Allow content to be disaggregated for reuse
- Context should drive the content
- dynamically change content

Mark Oehlert just wrote at his blog http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/2008/10/live-coverage-o.html

- mark.oehlert Blog comments: " Three Clusters of White Papers Focused on Sequencing
Cluster 1: Simple sequencing is overkill, it doesn't belong in the LMS, let the content developer handle it through some kind of scripting.
Cluster 2: There is value in a sequencing spec of similar scope to the IMS Simple Seq.
Cluster 3: The real solution to sequencing is to make big changes to its architecture. This group advocates major architectural shifts to expose very powerful sequencing."

My impression of the tone of LETSI members views and approach for the SCORM 2.0 effort:
1. This effort has proven that everyone involved is looking and willing to develop a very dynamic services based system as well as a very socially enabled system.
2. This approach is directed to building the systems on a 'USER-DRIVEN EXPERIENCE' as opposed to a technology capabilities approach.

Nina covered the Brief for the LET 2.0 working groups accomplishments:
1. Developed over 24 USE CASES
2. Working in groups of four in 30 minute sessions for all day wednesday to produce the pages.
3. The use cases have been posted for comments and additions at : LETSI USE CASES
4. Nina and Tom will work with the community to vet out the use cases to be used at Learning 2008.
5. The next steps now are vetting, community sorting, and providing

LETSI SCORM 2.0 Thursday morning

Wednesday was like opening a flaming mountain of ideas, perspectives, and knowledge for the next SCORM. For today on Thursday morning, a one hour meeting is currently being held to review and accumulate the accomplishments during yesterday's four working group sessions. 

Avron is opening providing review of the working groups topics, discussion, and focus.

Aaron Silvers - "Maybe, as LETSI, we should be the LINUX of the E-Learning software community" - all in attendance responding that this is the overall perspective we seem to be in complete agreement as the business model and community approach to make LETSI thrive.

Robby - many specifications and code organizations say that you can use if for free but cannot change. Others provide the use and complete adjustment of the code, specification, and standard for free. Others have complete pay, restriction and use. In order for LETSI to play with these organizations, we must respect their business models in our implementation and use.

Jill Abbott - Sequencing and Navigation Group Summary - What is sequencing? Why do we want it? What do we want?

Schawn Thropp - "It was good to validate that everyone is in agreement that moving to a SOA Services Oriented Architecture. Do not want to re-invent the wheel. Cross-domain security will be addressed
Nag S. (Saba) - Security and Scaleability will be top on the list to accomplish

Eric Roberts - Use Cases Group - the types of use cases discussed are definitely what have been discussed in the white papers, forums, and comments

Use & Management of objectivesGlobalToSystem for SCORM 2004 3rd Edition

SCORM 2004 3rd Edition, by default, if not noted in the main organization for objectivesGlobalToSystem, is set to true. What does this mean? Well, it means that any objectives set in the package at runtime will retain the cmi.completion_status and cmi.success_status throughout the entire system in which the objective is available.

Example:
1. Many packages/imsmanifest.xml may have the 'same' name objective sco.
2. Lets say that the given objective for discussion has the ID: 'profBus-ethics-obj-0001-2008'
3. The Learner establishes a completion_status=completed and success_status=passed for this objective in 1 of 5 packages which contain this objective.
4. The result is now that the other 4 of 5 packages will have the completion_status=completed and success_status=passed for the said objective.

Purpose: The intended use is a one to many approach of the use/mapping of objectives. Often times in courseware training, the same parts of training can be re-used in many packages. If the learner has completed/passed/failed a SCO/Objective of training, then they may not be required to retake that sco/objective in another package of training they may be later engaged in.

Jason Haag (Conform2Scorm.com) has most recently submitted one of his SCORM 2.0 White Papers on this very topic. Although he details the use, most importantly he speaks to the 'Management System' which must be spoken to as part of SCORM 2.0's way-ahead for SCORM. Why? Jason points out that with a learning system that does not develop a strategy for the creation/management of these objectives, the potential of 'Objective Mapping Collision' could easily occur in a system which is very large in scale. Read Jason, Jake, Jim, and Teresa's SCORM 2.0 White Paper at LETSI.org "Lifecycle Management of Learning Objectives for SCORM 2.0"->