The training vocabulary, one definition each

Active user

An active user is someone who signs in at least once during the billing month. People you have provisioned but who never sign in are not billed, and neither are deactivated accounts.

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AICC

AICC is an e-learning interoperability specification published by the Aviation Industry CBT Committee before SCORM. Its HACP protocol lets a course report progress to an LMS over HTTP, and content in that format is still in circulation.

Source: Rustici Software, accessed 2026-09-10

Attendance and competence

Attendance evidence shows a person was exposed to the material. Competence evidence shows they met a standard, such as a passed assessment or an observed task. A record that captures only attendance cannot be upgraded after the fact.

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Audit ready training record

An audit ready training record answers four questions without further research: who was trained, on what, when, and how completion was established. It survives a change of system with its original dates intact.

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cmi5

cmi5 is an xAPI profile that defines how an LMS launches, authorizes and reports on xAPI-enabled content, including its course structure, so a package can be imported and tracked the way SCORM packages are.

Source: Rustici Software, accessed 2026-09-10

Data residency

Data residency is a statement about where data physically sits at rest. It is verifiable in the form of a named cloud region, and it does not, on its own, answer which government can compel access to that data.

Source: Amazon Web Services, accessed 2026-09-10 · Read more

Data sovereignty

Data sovereignty is the question of which legal system can reach the data, which depends on where the operator and its parent company are incorporated, not only on where the disk is.

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Law 25

Law 25 is Quebec’s 2021 statute, S.Q. 2021, chapter 25, which rewrote the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector. Employee training records are personal information under that Act.

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Learning Record Store (LRS)

A Learning Record Store is the system that receives and stores xAPI statements. It can exist on its own or inside an LMS, and one LRS can share statements with another.

Source: Rustici Software, accessed 2026-09-10

LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)

LTI, Learning Tools Interoperability, is the 1EdTech specification that lets a learning platform integrate remote tools and content in a standard way, launching them with a signed request rather than a separate login.

Source: 1EdTech Consortium, accessed 2026-09-10 · Read more

Mandatory continuing education

Mandatory continuing education is the number of hours of professional development a professional order requires its members to complete and declare per reference period, with supporting documents kept for a set time after.

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OpenID Connect (OIDC)

OpenID Connect is an interoperable authentication protocol built on the OAuth 2.0 framework. It lets a service verify who a person is through an identity provider such as Okta, Entra ID or Google Workspace.

Source: OpenID Foundation, accessed 2026-09-10

Original completion date

The original completion date is the day the person finished the training, not the day the record was imported or exported. It is the field most often lost in a migration.

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Per seat licensing

Per seat licensing charges for the right to have an account. Active user billing charges for use of the account.

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PIPEDA

PIPEDA is Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, S.C. 2000, c. 5. It covers employee information when the employer operates a federal work, undertaking or business.

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Recertification

Recertification is the renewal of a completion when its certificate expires: the learner is reassigned the training on the interval the obligation sets, and the record keeps both the old and the new completion.

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Retention period

A retention period is how long a training record must be kept. It comes from the obligation that required the training, not from the training platform.

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SAML 2.0

SAML 2.0 is the OASIS standard that defines XML-encoded assertions about authentication, attributes and authorization, and the protocols that carry them between an identity provider and a service such as an LMS.

Source: OASIS Open, accessed 2026-09-10

SCIM provisioning

SCIM, the System for Cross-domain Identity Management, is a standard for managing user identities in cloud applications. With it, accounts in the LMS are created, updated and deactivated from the identity provider rather than by hand.

Source: SCIM working group, accessed 2026-09-10

SCORM

SCORM is a set of technical standards for e-learning content that lets a course package run in any conforming learning management system and report completion, score and status back to it. SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 are the two versions in use.

Source: Rustici Software, accessed 2026-09-10 · Read more

Single sign-on (SSO)

Single sign-on lets a person sign in to the LMS with the identity their organization already manages, through SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect, instead of a separate password.

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White-label

A white-label platform carries the customer’s name and branding with the vendor’s badge removed, so learners and partners see the organization that trains them rather than the software behind it.

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xAPI (Experience API)

xAPI, the Experience API, is an IEEE standard (IEEE 9274.1.1-2023) for recording learning activity as statements of the form actor, verb, object, which are sent to a Learning Record Store. It records activity inside and outside an LMS.

Source: Rustici Software, accessed 2026-09-10

Definitions of EmbayLMS billing terms are the ones the billing system uses. Definitions of statutes summarize them in general terms and are not legal advice.