LETSI

LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability) was founded in 2008 as an international federation to address the growing frustration with SCORM's limitations. By the late 2000s, it was clear that SCORM couldn't support mobile learning, cross-domain content, informal learning, or real-world performance tracking — but there was no consensus on what should replace it.

LETSI organized the SCORM 2.0 initiative, which brought together stakeholders from around the world to document what a next-generation standard would need. The initiative produced over 100 white papers covering topics from mobile delivery and offline support to social learning and competency tracking.

The white papers were LETSI's most enduring contribution. They provided a rigorous, community-validated catalog of SCORM's gaps and the requirements for its successor. Crucially, they concluded that SCORM could not be incrementally updated — a fundamentally new approach was needed.

These findings directly informed ADL's decision to fund the Tin Can project (2010) and shaped the architectural decisions that Rustici Software made in designing what would become xAPI. Without LETSI's systematic documentation of what was broken and what was needed, xAPI might have been a very different — and potentially less successful — specification.

LETSI's work was largely complete by 2012, and the organization became inactive as xAPI's development moved forward under ADL's stewardship.