CMI 5 Working Group Meeting Minutes – September 26th, 2014

CMI 5 Working Group Meeting Minutes – September 26th, 2014

Attendees

• William A. McDonald – Boeing Flight Services
• Bruce Williamson – Boeing Defense Systems
• Bernard Bouyt - Airbus
• Ben Clark – Rustici Software
• Ray Lowery – Pratt & Whitney
• Art Werkenthin – RISC Technology
• Andy Johnson – ADL
• Chris Handorf – Pearson
• Henry Ryng – INXSOL

Notes

The group continued to discuss “review mode” and “no-credit” concepts.

One concept that was discussed was “read-only” mode – which the LMS would send to the content to tell it NOT to record data to the LRS. Issue raised with this approach were that it violates the current CMI-5 rules requiring “start” and “finish” verb statements for session management.

Chris Handorf raised a use case where “read-only” mode could be used by an instructor to “impersonate” a learner in order to review the learner’s progress in the content of the learning content itself. This use case is needed in Chris’ operations as it the content cannot record enough data to an LRS for an instructor to review what the learner did and have complete context. In addition to the issues raised with “read-only”, this approach also violates the current CMI-5 rule that the XAPI “actor” in CMI-5 is the learner. (And that CMI-5 is focused on the Self-Paced learner model – for the “traditional LMS model”)

Chris further explained how he currently uses SCORM 2004’s “cmi.mode” to accomplish this use case. (Which would seem to indicate that it may be possible to allow for this use case without requiring changes that break existing CMI-5 rules). The Team will review SCORM 2004 “cmi.mode” for applicability to CMI-5.

These discussion spawned another discussion about CMI-5’s original scope.
(i.e. why would anyone want to implement CMI-5 if they can’t do new things like this ? Why not just keep doing SCORM?)

There some very good reasons to implement CMI-5, even in you stay within the traditional LMS model (CMI-5 Goals):

• Record any data defined in learning content (content defined reporting data) – including binary data (attachments)
• Support content as a service (CaaS) model within the context of LMS delivery (Web services, cross-domain)
• Work well with mobile devices (platform independent) (JSON, Web services)

Implementing XAPI (which CMI-5 requires) will also allow you to easily transition to “Non-LMS model” if you desire to later.

The group generally agreed that we should be careful with the CMI-5 scope (keeping it narrower rather than wider).

Next Time

Next meeting we will:

• Review SCORM 2004 “cmi.mode” data element for applicability in CMI-5
• Continue to discuss “Review Mode” in the Runtime Data model.

All Previous CMI-5 Meeting Minutes (After June 6th):

https://github.com/AICC/CMI-5_Spec_Current/wiki

CMI-5 on GitHub:

https://github.com/AICC