Dave Boggs, CEO at SyberWorks, states, “This episode examines how the Validation &
Compliance Institute has developed the SyberWorks Hosted Learning Management
System to sell online FDA compliance training..”
Dave Boggs, CEO at SyberWorks, states, “This episode examines how Advertising Specialty Institute has developed an online training portal to augment member benefits by providing continuing education to its association members. The courses offered through their training portal are on subjects such as sales and marketing, social media, business management and other topics important to promotional products suppliers, distributors and decorators. The program itself has become very successful, growing to over 1100 users in ten short months.”
Episode #40 is an interview with Stuart Campbell, Director of Software Engineering at SyberWorks. In this edition, Stuart talks about his latest article, “AICC and the LMS."
By Stuart Campbell, Director of Software Development, SyberWorks, Inc.
First, a little clarification. “AICC” is not just a standard; it is also the committee that defines the standard. The AICC, Aviation Industry Computer-based training (CBT) Committee, was formed in 1988 by aviation manufacturers such as Boeing, Airbus, and McDonnell-Douglas to standardize the delivery of CBT at a time when multimedia training was becoming increasingly popular. Over the years, however, the AICC standard branched out from aviation into a plethora of other industries.
The AICC standard was originally designed for local file-based operations, but was updated in 1998 to include a web-based interface called HACP (pronounced “hack-P”). HACP is HTTP-based and stands for HTTP-based AICC/CMI Protocol. The following year, the standard was updated again to include a JavaScript run-time interface. With these additions, AICC courses could integrate with the growing web-based e-Learning initiatives. This AICC HACP standard is now the most common installation configuration of AICC courses on LMS systems.
Technically, the definition of an AICC course is spread across several files, which describe the course's content and structure. The files are generally known by their file extension and are described below:
CRS file
The CRS file contains information about the course as whole, such as the course creator, title, description, and total number of lessons in the course. Below is a sample CRS file:
AU file
The AU file contains details about the Assignable Units. These are akin to the lessons that comprise the course. This information includes the file name to launch the lesson, mastery score, and maximum time allowed. Note that the file_name item in the screen shot below is actually a URL. (See the Cross Domain Course Content section below for more details.) Below is a sample AU file:
DES file
The DES file is the Descriptor file and contains information about every course element in the course. Below is a sample DES file:
CST file
The CST file is the course structure file and contains basic information about the structure of the course, including a listing of all AUs. This listing usually determines the order in which lessons are displayed to students. Below is a sample CST file:
Three additional file types also comprise the AICC course but they aren’t used as often as the above files. These files are Objectives Relationships (ORT), Prerequisites (PRE), and Completion Requirements (CMP).
Cross Domain Course Content
One of the powerful features of AICC courses is that they support “cross domain course content.” This means that, though a course exists on the LMS, the actual course content can reside on another server… even one outside your own network. With cross-domain courses, the course-content provider can host the content on their server and the LMS can call that content when users launch the course.
AICC accomplishes this by using a signed Java applet. The applet must be signed because the domain the course is launched from (i.e. the domain of the LMS) differs from the domain that the content comes from. An unsigned Java applet would reject this process, which it would consider to be cross-site scripting and a potential attack.
AICC accomplishes cross domain course content in the following manner:
The student launches the lesson and the filename in the AU file is a URL to its content server on the internet.
In the launch to the URL, call-back information is sent to the remote (content) server, so that it knows which (LMS) server it needs to communicate with.
The remote content server attempts to establish communication with the LMS server that launched the lesson.
Once communication is confirmed, the content is displayed through the LMS, from the remote location to the student’s web browser.
Course Installation
For the AICC course to be available in the LMS, the course needs to be installed on the LMS. The method of installation varies from LMS to LMS, but typically includes the following steps:
The course file (CRS) is located and interpreted.
The course identified in the CRS file is created in the LMS and the course properties are populated with the values defined in the CRS file.
The course lessons are created in the LMS and the lesson properties are populated with the values from the AU file. Lesson properties include information such as the path to the lesson file, passing grade, and so on.
It’s important that the LMS has the ability to overwrite an already-existing AICC course. If updates are made to an existing course, its re-installation would then deploy those changes.
Conclusion
AICC has been developed and implemented over a number of years, and therefore, is robust. However, due to the nature of the AICC committee and the number of revisions to the standard, it remains unclear what the term AICC-compliant actually means. The term has become quite relative, and a number of LMS’s claim to be AICC-compliant even when they support only core AICC features… and not all of them. So it’s wise to check.
AICC did go out of vogue for a while with the increasing popularity of the SCORM standard, but has seen a resurgence in the last year or two. [For more about SCORM, see my article “SCORM and the Learning Management System (LMS)” (at http://www.syberworks.com/articles/scorm-and-the-lms-article.htm.] The ability to support cross domain course content is a real bonus, as some companies do not want or need their LMS vendor to also host their course content. AICC has been around for a number of years and will continue to maintain a strong presence in the e-Learning market.
About the Author:
Stuart Campbell is Director of Software Development for SyberWorks, Inc., a privately-held supplier of e-Learning software and training. A native of the United Kingdom, he had previously served as a Principle Software Engineer, Senior Consultant, Senior Software Engineer, and Development Specialist for companies such as Brooks Automation Inc., Digital Equipment, and Honeywell Control Systems. His areas of expertise include Visual Studio.NET, C#, VB.NET, VB6, VBScript, XML, COBOL, WindowsXP, Windows2000, WindowsNT, VAX/VMS, UNIX, Oracle, SQLServer, Oracle Rdb, Oracle DBMS, and Agile Modeling Methodology.
About SyberWorks, Inc.
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in the custom e-Learning Solutions and Learning Management System/Learning Content Management System (LMS/LCMS) industries for Fortune 1000 corporations, law enforcement, healthcare, and other industries. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions to create, manage, measure, and improve e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and around the world.
By Bob Goldschneider, Director of Business Development at SyberWorks, Inc.
A basic definition of a learning content management system implies that the system has authoring application, a data repository, a delivery interface, and administration tools—many of the things you find in a full-featured learning management system. Some LCMSs have collaboration tools, including chat, integrated email and threaded discussion groups. Again, these are all features you can find in a robust learning management system.
In fact, many of the features found in a LCMS have been incorporated in a full-featured LMS. The most salient features of a LCMS are those focused on the development, management and publishing of the content that will typically be delivered via an LMS.
Organizations that truly need a LCMS are ones that have many collaborators in the development of training courses. These collaborators (co-authors) need access to the material under development by other content authors. An LCMS provides developers, authors, instructional designers, and subject matter experts the means to create and re-use learning content and reduce duplicated development efforts.
Several different modules may make up any number of courses. The learning modules residing in the Content Repository (Directories) can be re-purposed into a number of courses that may be assembled by the LMS as courses to be taken in a specific order (pre-requite order) or all modules could be included in one course. Courses themselves may be targeted at different audiences with different job roles.
An LMS and an LCMS complement each other and don’t necessarily replace each other. As previously stated, LMSs offer several features traditionally fulfilled by an LCMS.
The important thing here is that you have done a full evaluation of your company’s training and certification needs. The evaluation should consist of a needs assessment where you have investigated and hashed out the company’s course development strategies to understand what types of tools you need to produce your training. You must understand who is tasked with developing training at your organization and how it is to be constructed. If you have a good understanding of your own processes and what the system needs to do you won’t be paying for functionality you don’t need.
About Bob Goldschneider:
Bob Goldschneider has over 30 years experience in corporate training and educational services. He has served as Director of Educational Services and Director of North American Sales and Service for the Open Software Foundation. He built their Educational Services division from the ground up into a multi-million dollar business. He also served as Director of Educational Services at Apollo Computer and Training Development Manager for Wang Laboratories, where he managed a staff of over 50 instructors, course developers, video producers, and graphic designers.
About SyberWorks, Inc.
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in the custom e-Learning Solutions and Learning Management System/Learning Content Management System (LMS/LCMS) industries for Fortune 1000 corporations, law enforcement, healthcare, and other industries. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions to create, manage, measure, and improve e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and around the world.
Episode #37 is an interview with Steve Pena, Senior Instructional Designer at SyberWorks. In this edition, Steve discusses his latest article, ““Distributor-Modeled” Training.”
David Boggs, CEO of SyberWorks, states, “In this episode, Theresa Humphrys, Director of Organizational Development and Learning and Janet Sharpe, Project Manager for Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), discuss their use of the SyberWorks Learning Management System to train and certify hospital employees."
By Steve Pena, Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant for SyberWorks, Inc.
Can your distribution partners access your training-services infrastructure, to quickly train their employees about your products, while also building a university-like organization to deliver and track training of their (and your) end customers? In a distributor-oriented organization, your LMS should be able to support many levels of such “Distributor-Modeled” training… and deliver benefits to you, your distributors, and your customers.
At the simplest level, your distributors would be able to send people to your LMS training site, and have them registered as customers of each distributor (as shown in Figure 1). This would allow you to generate reports about courses delivered, classroom scheduling, and training results for each distributor’s customers over the past month, quarter, and year. It will also allow you to create more complex training solutions for heavy users of your training services, while being able to identify distributors who might benefit from special training promotions.
Figure 1: Distributors push their customers to your LMS.
The next logical step would be to give distributors themselves restricted administrative access to your LMS (Figure 2). In the simplest implementation of this model, the distributors would be able to:
Modify training accounts for their own customers.
Assign online training.
Enroll customers in your LMS' scheduled classes.
And on a more advanced level, distributors could:
Assign Training Certificate Competencies and their related learning events to their customers.
Create and run their own onsite training sessions.
Figure 2: Distributors have restricted administrative access to your LMS:
This model will improve your relationship with distributors, enable you to provide them with more services, and reduce the training-administration overhead for your company. Some of the advanced services it also enables are:
Linking a class with a specific distributor, so that only that company can enroll its customers in the class.
Customizing training catalogs, with a reduced set of courses/classes and/or individualized course/class pricing for specific distributors.
Offering these catalogs with either a prepaid training-account that end customers can tap, or a standard e-Commerce “customer pays” set up.
Allowing distributors to order training for their customers.
Creating special reports to track the training and certifications of distributors’ customers.
Setting up customized user-interface paths for distributor-administrators, to control their access to specific LMS functions.
This model also allows you to create a “Super Administrator” role for more advanced distributors, which allows them to perform such functions as:
Creating classes.
Entering class results.
Creating user accounts.
And finally, to extend this Distributor Model to an advanced level, think about branding separate campuses for each distributor (Figure 3). This allows you to create completely separate, distributor-branded training sites for each distributor within your LMS, while still permitting you to do complete rollups of all their training information and results.
Figure 3: An advanced distributor-branded implementation
Among this model’s advantages are that it allows distributors to:
Keep their corporate branding throughout all customer training materials.
Create one-to-many levels of structured reporting, allowing each distributor to produce hierarchical training reports for its own operation.
Receive a single point of contact in your company, with Registrar rights and privileges, to help distributors maintain their training operations.
So if they fit into your operation, these three levels of Distributor-Modeled training can improve your relationships with your distributors and provide them with much better levels of service, support, and training functionality. These models can also both save you money (through reduced administrative costs) and increase revenues (through branded training campuses).
About the Author:
Steve Pena is a Senior Instructional Designer and Implementation Consultant at SyberWorks, Inc., Waltham, Mass.
About SyberWorks
SyberWorks, Inc. is a leader in providing Learning Management Systems and custom e-Learning Solutions for Fortune 1000 corporations, higher education, and other organizations. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions for creating, managing, measuring, and improving e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other countries.
SyberWorks e-Learning Podcast Series
Join the SyberWorks Learning Management Technology Group on Linkedin
Follow SyberWorks on Twitter
