Rustici Software

Rustici Software is a company that helps eLearning products work together through the technical standards SCORM, xAPI, cmi5, LTI and AICC. Its homepage says "Since 2002, we have helped hundreds of eLearning applications, organizations and government agencies conform to SCORM, xAPI, cmi5, LTI and AICC", and describes the team as "the world's leading eLearning standards experts". It does not sell a course marketplace or a full LMS. It sells the software that lets an LMS play standards-based courses, lets a content provider deliver courses into other people's systems and keep control of them, and lets a team test and track content. The company also runs SCORM.com, which it started in 2005 to explain the SCORM standard, and xAPI.com. Its office is just outside Nashville, TN, in Franklin.

Who it serves

The readers are three groups the homepage names. LMS vendors want reliable support for every standard in their platform. Content providers want to deliver courses in the format each customer asks for and keep control once they are delivered, which is the customer education and partner training use the company writes about in its eBook on scaling partner training. Organizations want to build training applications for their own employees and customers. The solutions menu adds associations, healthcare, government, education, information security and authoring tools.

The company is candid about the work. Its homepage says: "Checking off a box to say you support SCORM or xAPI is easy. Actually implementing the standards is, we admit, arduous and boring work." It also claims that "The majority of transactions across the eLearning ecosystem depend on our software."

SCORM Cloud

SCORM Cloud is the product most teams meet first. It is a hosted application that tests, plays and distributes eLearning and reports on the results, with an API that brings the same functions into another platform. Its player supports SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 (2nd, 3rd and 4th Editions), xAPI and cmi5, LTI 1.1 and 1.3, AICC, and MP3, MP4, YouTube and PDF files.

The course sandbox lets you upload, preview and debug a course to see what happens while it imports and runs; the page notes that this is not a strict technical conformance test. Every account includes a Learning Record Store (LRS) for capturing xAPI statements, setting up activity providers and forwarding statements to other LRSs. SCORM Cloud Dispatch shares a course with any LMS that supports SCORM 1.2 or LTI while the course stays hosted in your account, so you can update it without resharing the package, switch off access and see usage aggregated across platforms. For learners with no LMS, Invitations deliver a course by public link or by private email invitation. Reports cover completions and question-level detail, drill down to course or learner and export for further analysis.

The page cites Degreed, which uses the SCORM Cloud API to let clients without an LMS host and track standards-based courses, and HBI, which delivers courses to clients through Dispatch and reports 2x business growth. It says thousands of learning platforms and training providers use SCORM Cloud, and that a team building a new platform on its API can "expect to save over $200,000 and up to 6 to 12 months in initial development costs."

SCORM Cloud is ISO-27001-certified, runs on Amazon Web Services for infrastructure and CDN support, and follows the SANS 20 Critical Controls framework for security management. A redesigned interface is available as a limited beta.

SCORM Cloud pricing

SCORM Cloud is the one Rustici product with a published price list. Billing is monthly, every 30 days, in USD and before sales tax, and you can scale up or down whenever you like. A free trial includes 3 courses, up to 5GB of storage and 10 resettable registrations. Paid plans start with Tester at $40 a month, then Little at 50 registrations a month for $90, Medium at 100 for $180, Big at 300 for $360, Bigger at 4,000 for $1,100, Mega at 10,000 for $2,000 and Ultra at 50,000 for $5,000. Testing is unlimited on every plan, all paid tiers include the full functionality, and an overage cost applies to each registration beyond a plan's 30-day limit.

The unit matters. A registration is one learner associated with one course, so one learner taking four courses counts as four registrations, while a learner can revisit a course as often as they like without creating new ones.

Integratable products and Content Controller

Behind other applications, Rustici sells components it calls "the plumbing for a larger application". Rustici Engine is a content player that integrates into an LMS to import and launch SCORM, xAPI, cmi5, LTI and AICC content, and the products page says Engine "sits behind hundreds of LMSs on the market." Rustici Dispatch shares content from your platform to other learning applications in the format they need while the courses stay on your servers. Rustici Driver converts content so it complies with SCORM, xAPI, cmi5 and AICC, for an authoring tool or a whole content library. Rustici Cross Domain helps content providers deliver dynamically generated content to SCORM or AICC platforms while keeping it on their own servers. Rustici LRS is an on-premised, ADL-conformant Learning Record Store for receiving, storing and returning xAPI statements. Rustici Generator, the newest product, is an AI-powered, API-driven processor that extracts text from eLearning content for metadata generation and semantic search.

Content Controller is a web application you install to centrally host, manage and distribute courses: your team uploads content, manages versions, enforces licenses, captures analytics and delivers courses to clients in multiple languages. The products page lists case studies for Lockheed Martin with Rustici Engine, The SANS Institute with Content Controller and ej4 with Rustici Cross Domain. The pages show no prices for these products, which are discussed with the company.

Standards work and support

Rustici's standards history is long. The xAPI page says the specification began in July 2010, when Rustici was awarded a BAA from ADL to modernize the SCORM communication framework, producing Project Tin Can and the Tin Can API .90 announced in 2012. SCORM Engine and SCORM Cloud were the first two LRSs to pass the ADL xAPI LRS conformance test suite, and the company works with the IEEE LTSC xAPI TAG and ICICLE groups. On SCORM.com the company is clear that it did not create SCORM, which ADL developed and manages.

Support is by phone, email and a knowledge base, from what the company calls a Stevie Award-winning team, and it tracks the success of its support tickets with a public Delight-O-Meter. The free SCORM.com guides, from a one-minute overview to developer documentation, make it approachable for newcomers too.

Who it suits

Rustici suits an LMS or learning platform vendor that needs dependable support for every standard without building its own player, a content provider or customer education team that sells courses into many client LMSs and wants to keep them updated and licensed, and an organization that needs to test, host or track standards-based content. SCORM Cloud's published plans also make it workable for a small team that only needs to test courses or deliver a few to clients. A creator who sells video courses directly to the public and never ships a SCORM package has little need for it.