What is AICC and why do I care?

It may not be obvious why anyone should pay attention to an eLearning standard that is falling in popularity, but the AICC isn’t (quite) dead yet, and many corporations still use it – and require it – as their only supported eLearning standard.  The AICC standard is the oldest existing standard in the eLearning industry:  The Aviation Industry CBT Committee (http://www.aicc.org), composed mostly of aircraft builders and aerospace contractors, started laying out a set of guidelines for computer-based training in the early 90s, to facilitate sharing content amongst the member companies without the need for reprogramming.  Once codified, this standard specified how to package and describe courses, as well as including guidelines (suggested and mandatory) on the “behind-the-scenes” order of operation.  With the rise of the internet, the AICC became a leading proponent of standardized online training, enforcing a set of commands and data-fields built on the HTTP backbone known as the HACP (HTTP AICC CMI Protocol).  Before the SCORM standard – which itself incorporates large parts of the AICC’s original specifications – this was one of the few standards that Leaning Management System Vendors supported, and certainly the most prominent.

The AICC HACP model uses form posts – a standard HTTP communication device – to submit course and learner data to an LMS.  The LMS then returns a plain-text response, structured by allowable parameters and field values.  Because of this rigid structure, AICC was tricky to implement for eLearning: course vendors couldn’t make sense of the LMS’s return data without using Flash, Java or other technologies which could process a text response on the fly.  This made it difficult to determine if the course’s calls to the LMS were successful, or to retrieve prior session data (place-in-course, cumulative score, etc.).  Many courses would blindly send post data without paying attention to what the LMS returned.  This in turn created headaches for anyone testing or using these courses.  Even if a vendor or course creator got over these hurdles, the specification was vague in many of its particulars, and as a consequence every vendor implemented it slightly differently.  For example: to mark a learner as “passed”, a course could set its AICC lesson_status variable to “Passed”, “p”, or “pass”.  For both the variable name and the status value, Learning systems often required course vendors to use a specific character case in order to get the data to store properly – even though the AICC itself allowed any of the listed versions.  This meant that anytime vendors created (or integrated) a course for a new LMS, they would need to determine how that particular LMS chose to implement the standard.  This was time-consuming, to say the least.  Over the years, in response to criticism of this and other issues, the AICC standard has become stricter; but given the popularity, ease on more-comprehensive (and web-native) approach of the SCORM standard, AICC has continued to lose ground in the overall eLearning standard arena.  Currently most LMS vendors don’t really support AICC anymore. They maintain their original AICC integrations as part of their offering, but are not longer certified (at my last check there were only 3 systems with current certifications).

So why do you care?  If you work for  a company that uses only SCORM-conformant courseware, you probably don’t (except maybe for the pleasure of knowing the historical context), but there are still a lot of companies out there that have some legacy AICC courses, or even only support AICC. 

One big reason I often hear why companies want to stay with AICC is that AICC doesn’t require the LMS browser window to remain open while the course is running.  With SCORM, the course will often launch in a pop-up window, and this implementation requires that the LMS window persist, open, in order to receive the calls the course makes via its API.  If the user closes the LMS window or changes the page, or if the user’s LMS session times out due to ”inactivity”, the bookmarking or completion data usually won’t be stored in the LMS.  This is not an issue with AICC, because courses using HACP (the AICC communication protocol) submit an HTML form with specific user data that the LMS script can process regardless of the browser’s current condition (i.e., the call is made to the “catch” page on the LMS regardless of whether the original window has remained open).  From a usability standpoint, this is a big plus for AICC.

Although that may not be enough reason for you to cast off SCORM support, when you have thousands of users, it can have a big impact on your support network.  That said, I won’t stop advising that SCORM is the standard to use for eLearning, but I will keep my eye on AICC.  And with the release of the PENS standard (which facilitates deploying content from content tools directly to an LMS), there may be another reason to pay attention to the Aviation Industry CBT Committee.


* I would like to thank Ted Blanchard for contributing to this entry.