Canvas LMS?
Jun 08, 2011
By
Lisa Smyser
Hi All,
We're talking with Canvas LMS, and they are telling us that we can't capture Articulate quiz scores because SCORM is not secure and they are using the new LTI (learning tool interoperability) protocol instead. Does anyone know about LTI, or have any experience with Canvas?
Along the same subject, is there a simple, inexpensive way to capture basic quiz scores and report them legibly, or export them easily? Although we LOVE articulate online, we're looking at a potentially large number of students and the cost is too high.
5 Replies
Here are some low cost LMS you might want to consider:
http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2009/10/29/getting-your-own-lms-part-1-dokeos-campus/
http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2009/12/23/getting-your-own-lms-part-2-efront/
http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2010/01/22/getting-your-own-lms-part-3-docebo/
http://daveperso.mediaenglishonline.com/2010/11/11/getting-your-own-lms-part-4-moodle/
For the types of quizzes typically built with Quizmaker I wouldn't be too worried about the security of SCORM communication. While it's possible to hack your way around a completion or capture interaction data, it's not trivial. I would be more worried about an LMS that doesn't support SCORM than I would about the security implications of using a SCORM component. This advice ("we only use LTI") would make the choice easy for me. I wouldn't choose Canvas. At least not until the LTI standard has propogated to more platforms and authoring tools or the LMS supports the prevalent standard.
Issues with SCORM security are one of the weakest arguments for an alternate packaging / protocol standard, in my opinion. The security of SCORM protocol communication simply isn't that big a problem. Tech heads and security nerds will panic about the risks. But we've really got to weigh what the real risks are. I have yet to see any statistics estimate the number of abuses of the client side API. SCORM has nothing to do with authentication and if the LMS sandboxes the way it should any potential damage is limited to the course launched.
There are many great arguments for pushing an alternate to SCORM. Security isn't the argument I'd lead with. In most cases, it simply doesn't matter enough to solve this issue only to create a host of other problems. Pushing bleeding edge, excluding the prevalent standard, in any LMS technology is a losing strategy (this year anyway, could change in the future).
I don't use Canvas (The lack of SCORM support was a dealbreaker), but I just happened to be checking in on development again to see what improvements they'd made over the past few months and found this SCORM article in their help wiki that had recently been created/updated on June 7th? I don't understand why you could upload SCORM if you couldn't get results, but maybe they are working on it. I could be wrong, but I don't even think there was anything about uploading SCORM at all when I tried it out a few months ago. For what it's worth, they do seem to be adding features at a pretty fast pace.
Todd
Probably this will help for those who wish to try Canvas.
Scorm2CC is a utility for converting packages of e-learning content from the ADL SCORM Package Interchange File (PIF) format to the IMS Common Cartridge format (LTI).
Source: http://scorm2cc.codeplex.com/
I second Moodle. Boise State uses it and in my scholarly opinion, they are on the cutting edge of online education. I'm an alumni and I received my masters through them and I definately plan on taking more courses. This is not an advertisement; it's just my opinion.
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