Current e-Learning procurement patterns and the Tin Can API

e-Learning is a strange market. Often at various exhibitions you will see different exhibitors pitching their latest thinking and how they have found a solution to all your problems. Recently this has become more evident as smaller companies are entering the market to compete with the larger providers.  Whilst this is good for competition and innovation, sometimes it blurs the lines in terms of what actually is achievable for a corporates e-learning strategy.

For today’s corporate learning and development team, what’s most important is ‘honesty and realism’.  Too often, e-learning has picked up a bad name for over promising and under-delivering.  For many current or new entrants to e-learning, getting the correct scope, timeframes and steps to delivery is essential.  As a result clients are looking at a requirements capture type activity during or even prior to their business case.

So, tips for you on e-learning procurement patterns…

• Honesty and Realism. You need your partner to demonstrate these credentials. Think about questions like ‘do you think our requirements are possible in the timescale indicated’, ‘are there any risks you would foresee in this project.’  You will see from their reaction, if the answer is always ‘no, everything will be fine’, then you should think about trying someone else.
• Think about the scale of the company you partner with, you don’t want a situation where they outsource all of your projects.
• Look at your priorities and think about the longer term vision, it’s vital you plan and ask your vendor to support you in this, even if it’s at a cost this will help you in the long run!

Moving onto the Tin Can API, why is this such a big thing? Whilst you may have seen lots of marketing campaigns around this term, many vendors in e-learning are still yet to deliver. We think the key to this is to ignore it all and look for a vendor who really understands how it works and could work for your organisation.

Google trends indicate that Tin Can API search terms are growing in comparison to SCORM (Shareable Object Content Ref Model). This isn’t surprising given the amount of marketing commentary, but, think about the other reasons.

The SCORM model really is something of the past, despite this being a standard still used, it is only able to provide very linear reports on pass and fail rates to a Learning Management System (LMS) which is fine for compliance training but nothing more.  In fact, there’s an argument to say that even compliance training is not the best fit for SCORM.  For example, if you have fire safety training which a learner passes, in a scenario based assessment even if the learner has clicked on a window instead of the fire exit and your parameters are not set to fail under this answer, they could still pass. Tin can understands the granularity of this and therefore provides us with more data.

Furthermore, because Tin Can provides so much data we can link this with other systems allowing us to make better business decisions. We think this is especially powerful. For example, think about this scenario: a CEO is taking a view on their sales team and why they are under-performing. Using Tin Can, he/ she is able to view information from the Tin Can API but also link this into other systems such as the business’ Customer relationship management system (CRM).

Many systems are using this technology – known as a Learning record Store (LRS), notably Learning Locker which is an open source LRS. Learning Locker is also working on a project to integrate with Totara, the world’s most widely used LMS. Now, because the CEO is able to take a view from performance data on sales and also training records, s/he is able to identify the areas of opportunity for growth and improvement.

So, in summary, why should you care about Tin Can API?

• Search trends show that its on the rise
• It takes into account experiential learning
• It will allow you to link performance data with learning data to make better business decisions