Comments on: SCORM Isn’t Dead, But Apparently It Is Misunderstood

By: Mike Rustici

Mike Rustici — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:17:00 +0000

David, you hit the nail on the head in identifying adaptive learning paths as having huge potential in the educational sector. Unfortunately however, the higher eduction and K12 spaces have seen rather laggard adoption of SCORM. This is largely because SCORM is a bit rigid for these environments. Education (as opposed to training), encourages lots of free exploration. Training is a bit more structured. In its current implementation, SCORM is oriented more towards training than education. Conceptually, it should be useful in both contexts, but the actual details of the current implementation seem to have gotten in the way. Fortunately the SCORM 2.0 effort underway in LETSI is being developed under the umbrella of “learning, education and training”.

By: David Ells

David Ells — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:39:00 +0000

It seems that SCORM metadata has all the features to deliver the "sold as" intention of aggregating smaller self-contained learning objects into specialized (i.e. dynamic) "courses" or "books" or even something more interesting, like an aggregation that changes over time as you progress towards different paths. (I read a lot of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as a kid. Plus, it still *sounds* like a really cool idea.)

It's just that the interoperability provided by SCORM has taken a great priority because it is immediately valuable to the eLearning industry. From the perspective of content providers and companies maintaining a large active LMS, it is a heaven sent to have one single standard point of interaction with the other side. Just this idea alone, in a world where it was previously absent, is enough to provide new opportunities for both providers and LMS holders. Suddenly, for the same amount of work, a content provider has no technical barriers in the way of selling to potentially hundreds of more (LMS) customers. It's the economy of interoperability, and business wise it's a no brainer.

I would go beyond the statement that "SCORM is not dead" to say that "The potential usefulness of SCORM metadata is not dead". But unless/until the active commercial industry using SCORM moves towards the concepts pushed by ADL (i.e. content repositories and aggregation of sharable learning objects), I think it will be left up to a more non-commercial, community effort to explore (and exploit) the usefulness of SCORM in that context, and there metadata would play a key role. I'd be surprised to hear if there were not a number of universities conducting research along these lines, that is, studying dynamic learning aggregations, and comparing them to traditional static aggregations like text books. SCORM could be an interesting tool in that type of research, but only if it was readily available. At any rate, I think that the increasing availability of SCORM software to the non-commercial community would reveal several other uses of the standard beyond the extremely beneficial use of interoperability between content providers and LMS holders. But, SCORM may never need to fulfill the ADL's release "dream", and as the blog post noted, it can live side by side with any number of other content discovery mechanisms.

By: Mike Rustici

Mike Rustici — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:06:00 +0000

Damon, I thought you and Robby might have something to say about that post! Your proposal to shift the focus of reuse up to the package level rather than to the SCO level makes a lot of sense in today’s world. Maybe once package level reuse is more widely adopted, the framework for SCO level reuse won’t be much of a stretch.

By: Damon Regan

Damon Regan — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:44:00 +0000

Great post, Mike. Certainly interoperability is the primary value. However, I think the reuse value is still possible with a different approach. Robby and I proposed a focus on content packages rather than SCOs in our recent I/ITSEC talk. So much of the focus has been on the object reference model historically, yet the focus rightly belongs on sharable content.

SCORM doesn’t require metadata as Brian stated. Unfortunately, the perception is that it does based on the strange use of application profiles in SCORM 1.2. I was glad SCORM 2004 decided to remove any notion of mandatory. What is mandatory rightly belongs within an organization’s approach to cataloging.

By: Brian Caudill

Brian Caudill — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:43:00 +0000

I also agree, metadata is not even required by SCORM and is not a big part of the "conformance". It still is a DoD requirement, but our private sector customers only provide course level metadata that is used to tell the student an abstract of what the course is about. SCORM is alive and well and required by just about every e-learning contract that is let. Also, with the fact that SCORM has been widely adopted around the world by LMS vendors and e-learning developers, the demand for newer better SCORM will only grow. SCORM is not dead; it is growing deep roots in the community and continuing to thrive.

So when you say:
"So, in short, I think that SCORM is anything but dead. A while back, we bet the company on SCORM's future. Today I am much more inclined to double down than to walk away."

I will be right there with you on that bet and our chips are all in!

---Brian Caudill
JCA Solutions

By: philip

philip — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:11:00 +0000

well said, i agree with you 100%, especially regarding SCORM being more popular as an interoperability standard as opposed to a reuse standard. the latter is a great concept, but the former is the reason SCORM has been adopted by learning organizations across the globe.

moving forward, many SCORM enthusiasts (myself included) would LOVE to drop some of the metadata aspects of SCORM, as it isn’t always useful and adds unwanted complexity.