Is XCL an alternative to the LMS? | Mark Berthelemy Consulting

Laptop showing the XCL home page — Image credit: Stocksnap on Pixabay

I’ve been experimenting with the new beta version of XCL from Build Capable. It’s a new tool to help organisations deliver online learning without an LMS.

It looks like it has a lot of potential…

As I say in the video clip below, I’m really quite excited about what XCL can do. It opens up new possibilities.

Here’s what is does, and what it doesn’t (yet) do:

Plus points

It allows you to turn any digital resource into a trackable learning object (with caveats - see below)
If your resource is a SCORM or xAPI package, you can extract all the data that they provide (eg. completion status, scores etc)
If you upload files into XCL, like PDF, ppt, mp4 etc, you get much richer data than if you just link out to them
It works through this process: You provide a link to the user -> User clicks the link -> User enters their name & email -> Resource opens -> Data is sent back to XCL
You can capture the data in XCL’s internal learning record store, or your own LRS.

Things to work on

Resources provided via a URL just capture whether someone has launched them
In the beta version there is no way to inform people about your privacy policy, at the point of collecting their name and email address.
It currently struggles to display and play Youtube videos
You can only keep content secure if you either use the Enterprise Version with Single Sign On (coming soon) or put the content somewhere you control (thus losing a lot of the built in tracking)
I’m not sure I completely trust the Dashboard data. It recorded two completions of a SCORM package, when I’d only done it once.
There’s no way currently to perform additional analytics on the data stored in the internal learning record store
There’s not yet a way to capture a tick/check for the user to say that they have read and understood something (essential for compliance)