Verb Proposal

[andyjohnson]

The following proposal was made for verbs on April 26, 2013. Sorry for the poor formatting, I would recommend that someone who doesn't have a PR out make this a Pull Request.

Proposed Verbs (all mandatory)

· Launched – AU launched from the LMS. LMS must record this statement in the LRS just prior to actually launching the AU.

· Started – AU has been launched and is fully initialized and ready for learner interaction. This represents the initial launch of the AU and must be provided immediately on the first launch. Must be made only once during a session.

· Resumed – AU has been launched and is fully initialized and ready for learner interaction. This represents a subsequent launch of the AU. This must be provided immediately upon all subsequent launches of the AU. This statement must be made only once during a session.

     o   Results 

     §  Success. (mandatory)  Success must be set to false (unless the AU 
     was launched after a “completion” statement was recorded.) 

· Completed – The AU has determined that the learner has met all of the learning objectives specific to the AU. This may have been determined by viewing all of the material, successfully completing an assessment, or some combination. This statement must be made only once during a session.

      o   Results 

      §  Success = true (mandatory) – Success must be set to true

      §  Score (optional) – should be recorded if used to determine verb “completed”.

· Exited – The AU has exited the launch session. Must be recorded just prior to learner exiting the AU. This statement must be made only once during a session (and it must be the last statement). The LMS/LRS must not accept any more requests from the AU until the next launch.

            o   Results

           §  Duration (mandatory). The duration of the launch session must be recorded.
           The AU determines the duration. (i.e. It may be less than or equal to the actual 
           time between “started/resumed” and “exited”).

[andyjohnson]

So my #1 concern in CMI5 is that for core concepts, a single way of tracking is mandated to promote interoperability. If that single way means putting a bunch of results related to passing, failing, completing, marking incomplete, and scoring in a single statement with the verb "exited", it is more important than defining a bunch of verbs and not tying specific behavior to them.

That said, I think a very important use case for including more verbs is the idea that the timestamp matters. In a chain of flowing events, knowing which statement preceded the "Andy failed Flight Simulation" statement is important. Knowing which statements followed could also be important (maybe I didn't have a good reaction to failing and did something "more wrong" in the simulation). Context matters in statements, and I feel that lumping data into an "exiting" statement causes us to lose a lot of that contextual data.

I think for this reason and many others that "passed" and "failed" should immediately be added to this list, and I encourage a common means of doing CMI4/SCORM tracking verbs should be added (i.e. progressed, mastered, commented, suspended, asked, responded). In the original list, I think a verb for scored wouldn't flow well (see below) and a verb for catching user preferences probably could be accomplished with asked/responded, but a system knowing how to capture user preferences. The area in those two verbs is much grayer.

We also should explore when a score is provided. Are we making the case that a score given without completion isn't really a score? We could perhaps define a notion of a "core score" for the AU versus other activities within the AU which may have a score, but not be considered the score of the AU.