Thursday, August 2, 2007

Implementing AICC

AICC is actually an easier task to implement than SCORM. Here are the
components you would need:
1. Your database to create a unique session identifier for each
student. Frankly, you could just use the student ID. It all depends on
how detailed you want to be in your reporting.
2. When the student is ready for the courses, you need to create a
launch page - that is a dynamically created web page with a list of the
courses available to the user with URLs pointing to those courses. The
URLs have to include the session identifiers.
3. On your server you need an application that can catch and parse the
data coming from the course. Most AICC courses never use or ask for
previous history data, so you may be able to get away with not providing
the getParam response. The tricky part of this application is that it
has to organize the incoming data (by SessionID, perhaps) and store it
for reports later. When this application receives an exitAU message, it
should end the session (and ideally store the elapsed time, although I
haven't yet seen an LMS that does this.)

For a low price, I can provide a basic catcher routine, but you'd still
need to do a lot of work to store the data. We use this internally to test AICC
courses to ensure that they're reporting the information we intend them
to report.

Alternatively, contact me directly, and I will give you the e-mail
address for someone I know who created an AICC-based LMS. They may
resell it to you for your development. The price would end up being
lower in the long run than developing it yourself.

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