SCORM Compliance

I’m addicted to “standards”. I can’t help myself! I suppose part of this comes from my unstoppable desire to create order out of disorder. Course descriptions, course content, syllabi, assignments—they’re all just a wild mess of relatively non re-usable objects.

SCORM is a standard for online course delivery that tries to combat this with re-usable objects called “Sharable Content Objects” (SCOs). These SCOs are made up of one or more “assets”. An asset, by definition is an "electronic representation of media, text, images, sound, web pages, assessment objects or other pieces of data" (see clippings below).

SCORM Version 1.2 Overview for Developers Annotated

1. Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) allows learning content from any vendor to play in any SCORM conformant Learning Management System (LMS).
2. SCORM was created in cooperation between government, academia and industry and it consolidates the work of AICC, IMS, ARIADNE and IEEE’s LTSC into one unified reference model.
3. Basically there are 2 parts SCORM Version 1.2: the Run-Time Environment and the Content Aggregation Model.
4. The Run-Time Environment specifies how content should behave once it has been launched by the LMS.
5. The Content Aggregation Model specifies how you should package your content so that it can be imported into an LMS. This involves creating XML files that an LMS can read and learn everything it needs to know about your content.
6. All communication between the content and the LMS is handled by this adapter, thus the content author does not need to worry about communicating with the server, he only needs to be able to find the API Adapter and make the appropriate JavaScript calls.
7. This separation of client and server is essential to SCORM in that it ensures the portability of content by forcing it to run on a standard platform (the web browser).
8. There is no SCORM conformant method for content to communicate with the LMS through other methods such as web services, or HTTP requests.
9. Content Aggregation model is divided into three parts, the Content Model, the Meta-data and Content Packaging.
10. The Content Model describes the content being delivered.
11. The Content Model defines a powerful model for breaking content into arbitrarily sized units of reuse. These units are called Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) and Assets.
12. An Asset is simply an "electronic representation of media, text, images, sound, web pages, assessment objects or other pieces of data".
13. A SCO is a collection of one or more assets that represents a logical unit of learning.
14. The defion of a SCO is left up to the content author to define under the guidance that a SCO should represent the smallest unit of learning that the LMS should track.
15. To achieve reuse, a SCO should not be context sensitive, it should not reference other SCOs, and it should not link to other SCOs.
16. The Meta-data specification provides a mechanism to describe the content using a pre-defined and common vocabulary. This vocabulary is broken into nine categories:
17. The Content Packaging specification defines how the Content Model and Meta-data are implemented.
18. From a technical perspective, the two most important things to take away are that all communication between content and an LMS is handled via JavaScript and that all content should include an XML file called imsmanifest.xml which describes its structure and other characteristics to the LMS.

Tags: Standards, Curriculum Development, Online Learning, Learning, Teaching