Q&A - eLearning Standards Especially SCORM

Now that I posted about Better Questions for Learning Professionals, I've been receiving questions via email from a variety of people. That's great! I like getting interesting questions. Some of them I just respond with an email. But, I'm going to try to make a practice of creating blog posts around some of the questions.

Here's a recent one to get me started:

• Is it mandatory to use SCORM while developing an E-learning Software?
  
  SCORM is as close as you get to Mandatory in the world of eLearning. You want to implement your courseware to the SCORM standard if you plan to have it launched and/or tracked under an LMS. SCORM is a fairly easy standard to deal with especially since most people are fine with a single SCO that does only single score/completion reporting. More than that is most often not expected and can cause you integration problems.
  
  There are a couple of situations where SCORM gets dropped. One case is building a one-off course that needs simple tracking/reporting and will never run under an LMS. If you won't ever need to run it under an LMS, then SCORM is overhead you don't need (see Tracking Without an LMS).
  
  The other situation is if you are building something that is not a course, e.g., it's reference material. In these cases, I'm not tracking and likely it's not under the LMS. Most LMS systems have ways to launch these kinds of reference systems (they are just a web page after all).
  


• What about other Standards?
  
  AICC goes after the same thing as what I've described above for SCORM (tracking under an LMS). However, it is less common now than SCORM and it is harder to implement (which is why it's less common). Once in a while, you will still run into this. Most of the time, it's to handle cross-domain issues, i.e., learning content is on different server than learning management. I've also seen it in an environment that had certain restrictions on JavaScript.
  
  There are a bunch of other standards by ADL (who is responsible for SCORM), IMS, IEEE LTSC including CORDRA™, LOM, Meta-data, etc. in the eLearning world. However, as Pierre pointed out in the comments (and I've edited the text here based on his comments - thanks Pierre) - ADL's SCORM really incorporates what we need from these other standards and thus we've not needed to spend effort going into these standards separately. (Note: ARIADNE, AICC, IEEE LTSC, and IMS all participate in ADL's work on SCORM).
  
  There are also standards such as WebDAV that are going to be important for authoring tool implementations in the next few years. So, when I've been consulting with vendors who are working on any kind of authoring system, that was a particularly interesting standard.
  


• Can we develop the same project using : Java, JSP, J2EE, XML, Oracle, Flash combination?
  
  This certainly can be used. Flash may make it a litttrickierker to implement SCORM, but there are lots of resources on how to do that. SCORM uses JavaScript to communicate so you will need to embed a bit of JavaScript code on the pages your application generates.

Couple of quick updates to this post on Sept. 6, 2006:

Judy Brown has left her long time position, but the good news is that she is writing a blog - SCORM Watch. Love the name, love the blog, and we all love Judy. In her blog she pointed to a bunch of great SCORM related resources:

• Jennifer Brooks of the ADL Co-Lab shares experiences and lessons learned through facing these issues.


• David J McClelland shares his experiences and a standard troubleshooting method for SCORM content in his blog. (Great post on issues that many of us have faced!)


• This does not appear to be a new posting, but one that I recently found for the ToolBook community, but it is relevant for all. Included are: the business case for SCORM; overview of SCORM including kinds of SCORM learning objects, online or offline learning objects, and organizing and sequencing learning objects; organizing learning objects and SCOs; implementing SCORM-compliant learning objects and SCOs; and packaging SCORM-compliant content. The chart on cost of content integration before SCORM and with SCORM is very interesting.


• And - Suresh Susarla, the Business Analyst in the Workforce ADL Co-Lab at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, asks important questions to determine whether you need SCORM:



• Do you need to control learner access to courseware, track learner progress, or monitor the effectiveness of your e-learning content?
• Do you want to be able to control the learner’s path through the content in some way?
• Do you plan to develop content in house and also purchase content from one or more third-party content vendors?
• Do you plan to use the content for multiple new audiences in the future?
• Do you plan to reuse parts of the content in future courses?
• Are you planning to redistribute or sell the content to another
  organization?