What Was AICC? – AICC vs SCORM for Legacy Courses

You're planning an LMS move, or you've inherited a training catalog, and some of the oldest vendor courses are labeled "AICC." Nobody on the team has published an AICC course in years. The new LMS vendor says it "supports AICC," but nobody seems sure what that means or whether it'll last. What was AICC, and how should you think about AICC vs SCORM for your legacy courses?

AICC was the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee, a group formed in 1988 that wrote some of the first standards for how training content talks to a learning management system. Its web-based tracking method, called HACP, let courses send status, scores and bookmarks to an LMS using ordinary HTTP messages, which also allowed content to be hosted on a different server than the LMS. SCORM borrowed heavily from AICC's data model, then became the dominant standard, and the AICC itself dissolved in 2014. Today, AICC courses are legacy content: many LMS platforms still import them, but for long-term use you should plan to republish them as SCORM or cmi5, rebuild them, or retire them.

What Was the AICC?

The AICC was an international committee of aircraft makers, airlines, training vendors and technology companies. Aviation was one of the first industries to rely heavily on computer-based training, and it had the same problem everyone else would face later: training from one vendor wouldn't run on another vendor's system.

The committee published guidelines covering hardware, media and, most importantly for us, computer managed instruction (CMI): how a training system launches lessons and records results. Those CMI guidelines spread far beyond aviation because they were among the only practical standards available. The Wikipedia history of the AICC covers the committee's full timeline, from its founding through its dissolution.

How Did AICC Tracking Work?

Web-based AICC courses used HACP, the HTTP-based AICC/CMI protocol. It's simpler than it sounds. The LMS launches the course and gives it two pieces of information in the launch URL: a session ID and the web address where the course should send its data. From then on, the course and LMS exchange plain text messages.

1. The course sends a GetParam request to fetch the learner's name, previous status and bookmark.
2. As the learner works, the course sends PutParam messages with status, score, time and location.
3. When the learner leaves, the course sends ExitAU to close the session.

The course itself was described to the LMS through a set of small text files with extensions like .crs, .au, .des and .cst, which together listed the course, its lessons and their structure. Importing an AICC course meant giving the LMS those files plus the URL where the content lived.

AICC vs SCORM: What's the Difference?

The biggest AICC vs SCORM difference is how the course communicates. SCORM content talks to a JavaScript object the LMS provides in the browser. AICC HACP content sends HTTP messages to an address on the LMS server. That one design choice drives most of the other differences.

That hosting flexibility was AICC's quiet superpower. Content vendors could keep courses on their own servers, update them in one place, and still report to a customer's LMS. SCORM couldn't easily do that. It's one reason AICC hung on in some corporate catalogs long after SCORM took over, and it's the same need that cmi5 now meets in a modern way.

The security trade-off is real, though. Because HACP messages are simple text posts, a technically curious learner could, in principle, send their own "passed" message. SCORM's browser API has a similar weakness, since anyone comfortable with a browser console can call it, so neither standard was built for high-stakes testing. That's not a reason to panic about old completions, but it is a reason not to build new high-stakes assessments on AICC.

Do AICC Courses Still Work Today?

Often, yes. Many LMS platforms still accept AICC imports, and a well-built AICC course can keep running for years. The question isn't whether it works today. It's whether it'll keep working through your next browser update, security review or LMS migration.

Three things tend to break them. Old courses may rely on plug-ins browsers no longer support. Browsers block mixed HTTP and HTTPS content, and older courses sometimes post their tracking data over plain HTTP. And LMS vendors may drop or neglect AICC support as fewer customers use it. Rustici Software's overview of SCORM versions and their predecessors is useful background if you're explaining the history to stakeholders.

What Should You Do with Legacy AICC Courses?

Sort them into four piles, based on how much each course still matters and whether you have the source files.

• Keep as is: the course is still accurate, still used, still works in your LMS, and has a planned retirement date. Test it after every LMS update.
• Republish: you have the original authoring files. Open them in the authoring tool, publish to SCORM 1.2 or cmi5, and test. This is usually the cheapest fix.
• Rebuild: the course matters but you only have the published output, or it depends on obsolete technology. Use the old course as a storyboard and build fresh.
• Retire: the content is outdated or rarely taken. Archive the completion records and remove the course.

Whichever pile a course lands in, export its completion history first. Those records are often what auditors care about, and they should survive no matter what happens to the content.

How Do You Test a Converted Course?

Test a converted course the way a real learner would use it, messy parts included, then check what the LMS recorded. Quit in the middle and come back. Fail the quiz, then pass it. Confirm the bookmark, score and completion all land where they should.

Expect a few surprises. A course that tracked fine under AICC may report differently under SCORM because the status settings work differently. If the republished version stops recording completions, my checklist for SCORM not tracking walks through the most common causes in order.

AICC vs SCORM in Hindsight: Respect the Pioneer, Plan the Exit

AICC deserves credit. It solved interoperability for training before most industries knew they had the problem, and its ideas live on in SCORM's data model and in cmi5. But it's a finished chapter. The committee is gone, support is shrinking, and its security model shows its age.

For your catalog, the plan is straightforward: inventory every AICC course, export its records, then keep, republish, rebuild or retire each one on purpose. Doing it before an LMS migration is far less stressful than doing it during one.

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