Scott Tompkins

eLearning Course Player

2 min read

eLearning Course Player

I built course playback systems that delivered interactive e-learning content across desktop browsers, mobile devices, and constrained hardware—adapting learning standards designed for one environment to work reliably in others.

Context

E-learning content follows standards (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI) that define how courseware communicates learner progress, completion, and scoring back to a learning management system. These standards were designed for desktop browsers with persistent connectivity. But learners don’t always sit at desks with stable internet—they’re on factory floors with BlackBerry Curves, in warehouses with tablets, on planes without any connection at all. The playback systems had to bridge that gap.

What Changed

Desktop and device players at BP-Tech: I built Flash/Flex-based course players that rendered interactive courseware and tracked learner progress via SCORM. The players handled the full lifecycle—content loading, interaction tracking, bookmarking, scoring, and LMS communication. When the CVS project required targeting BlackBerry Curves and later thin clients and iPads, the player architecture adapted to each device’s capabilities while maintaining consistent content behavior and SCORM compliance.

Native mobile players at NetDimensions: I took the playback problem to native mobile, building cross-platform course players using Xamarin (C#) and earlier Flex Mobile (ActionScript 3). These players ran SCORM and xAPI content offline on iOS and Android, with local progress storage and sync-on-reconnect. Making learning standards work in a native mobile context required rethinking fundamental assumptions: how the runtime communicates with content, where progress data lives when there’s no server, and how to reconcile local and remote state after extended offline periods.

The result was that organizations could deploy the same courseware across desktop LMS, mobile devices, and constrained hardware with consistent learner experiences and reliable progress tracking regardless of connectivity.

Why It Matters

Course players are invisible when they work and catastrophic when they don’t—if a learner completes training and progress isn’t recorded, the training might as well not have happened. Building players that were reliable across varied devices and connectivity conditions directly enabled the business outcomes for both BP-Tech’s clients and NetDimensions’ product. The work also established patterns around standard adaptation and offline-capable architecture that informed my approach to system design well beyond e-learning.