The Least You Should Know About SCORM
From "One
Minute Overview"
published by RUSTICI
SOFTWARE
Used by permission.
“What do you know about
SCORM?”
This is frequently where we start with people who call us. Many
of these people know only that their boss has asked them to “find
out about SCORM and how it affects us,” or that a prospective
customer insists it is necessary for their success.
For some, SCORM is simply an obstacle on the path to a sale. For
others, SCORM is a tool that enables effective, efficient online
training. At its core, SCORM allows content authors to
distribute their content to a variety of Learning Management
Systems (LMS) with the smallest headache possible.
“What is SCORM?”
The Sharable Content Object Reference Model defines a specific
way of constructing Learning Management Systems and training
content so that they work well with other SCORM conformant systems. Basically,
the different versions of SCORM all govern the same two things:
packaging content and exchanging data at runtime.
Packaging content determines how a piece of content should be
delivered in a physical sense. At the core of SCORM packaging
is a document titled the “imsmanifest”. This file
contains every piece of information required by the LMS to import
and launch content without human intervention. This manifest
file contains XML that describes the structure of a course both
from a learner’s perspective and from a physical file system
perspective. Questions like, “Which document should
be launched?” and “What is the name of this content?” are
answered by this document.
Runtime communication, or data exchange, specifies how the content ”talks” to
the LMS while the content is actually playing. This is
the part of the equation we describe as delivery and tracking. There
are two major components to this communication. First,
the content has to “find” the LMS. Once the
content has found it, it can then communicate through a series
of “get” and “set” calls and an associated
vocabulary. Conceptually, these are things like “request
the learner’s name” and “tell the LMS that
the learner scored 95% on this test.” Based
on the available SCORM vocabulary, many rich interactive experiences
can be communicated to the LMS.
Why should I use SCORM?
SCORM is a really powerful tool for anyone involved in online
training. Content can be created one time and used in many
different systems and situations without modification. This
plug-and-play functionality can be powerful within an
organization but even more so across organizations. Content
can be sold and delivered to the user more quickly, more robustly,
and at a lower price.
SCORM is widely adopted by some huge organizations. It
has the critical momentum and is the de facto industry standard. The
US Department of Defense has specified that all of its content
must be delivered via SCORM. All of it. Industry
is following suit, and the standard appears in a vast majority
of RFPs to procure both training content and Learning Management
Systems.
What’s a SCO?
A Sharable Content Object is the most granular piece of training
in a SCORM world. Some would call it a module, a chapter,
a page… the point is that it varies wildly. A SCORM
purist would tell you that it should be the smallest piece of
content that is both reusable and independent. In terms
of how the LMS treats it, this is the item shown separately in
the table of contents and tracked separately from other items. It
can contain its own bookmark, score, and completion status.
How does SCORM relate to AICC?
SCORM is a reference model, which means that it is built on
top of existing specifications. From the beginning, SCORM
has been described as a “best of breed” solution,
culling the best pieces of prior specifications. AICC,
a standard from the aviation industry, was used as a basis for
the runtime communication portion of the SCORM specification.
Conforming to one standard does not mean that you automatically
conform to the other.
Which version of SCORM is relevant?
The answer is all of them. The primary goal of adopting SCORM
is generally to create an interoperable system that will work
well with other systems. Support for all of the SCORM versions
and AICC is essential to fulfilling that goal. To date, there
are three released versions of SCORM, each building on top of
the prior one.
- SCORM 1.1 was essentially
the first pass, and never gained wide acceptance. Some
products still support it, but it is not widely adopted.
- SCORM 1.2 followed
on 1.1, and solved many of 1.1’s problems. It was
and is the widely adopted version. As of October
2005, every major LMS continues to support it, and the majority
of content vendors still produce content that meets the 1.2
specification.
- SCORM
2004 (formerly known as SCORM 1.3) is the most recent release. It
extends and formalizes the packaging and runtime portions of
the 1.2 standard, but its key addition is the sequencing and
navigation (S&N) specification. S&N allows the
content vendor to specify both the behavior within the SCO and the
behavior between the SCOs. This allows for substantially
richer content interactions and huge increases in the reuse of
SCOs. Adoption has been slow, to this point, but the number
of LMS’s and content vendors supporting SCORM 2004 is increasing
greatly.
Am I a content vendor or an LMS vendor?
An LMS is responsible for keeping track of people and what they
do. Content is responsible for conveying knowledge to a learner
that it doesn’t have any knowledge of. Prior to SCORM,
many hosted systems served as both the LMS and the content concurrently. Due
to the structure of SCORM, this is substantially more difficult. If
someone wants to play your content for their users and track
that completion themselves, then you are the content vendor. If
you wish to import someone else’s content and play it,
you are the LMS vendor.
What is SCORM NOT?
SCORM governs online training only, and only between
a single user and the system. Offline training does not
apply, nor does group training.
SCORM remains intentionally silent on many things as well. Window
size, cosmetic appearances, reporting… these items belong
to the LMS or the content, and are not commented on at all.
