It's time for me to say it, "SCORM doesn't suck…"
Categories: Ideas and Thoughts, SCORM, SCORM 2004, Using the Standards
22 Jun 2009
I am a patient man. Slow to anger, slow to annoy. Frankly, some mistake my calm demeanor for apathy. But now they’ve done it. The folks on Twitter (and elsewhere in the community) have made enough comments about SCORM that I’m annoyed. That’s right, I’m actually a little irritated.
I’ve been feeling, lately, like SCORM is my little brother. It’s OK if folks choose to pick on my bro, so long as they are constructive, or at least right. The comments I’ve been seeing lately range from misdirected to out and out wrong.
Feel the angst, read on
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SCORM 2004 4th Edition is Available
Categories: SCORM 2004, SCORM Engine, Standards Evolution, testtrack
16 Jun 2009
Last night we released an implementation of SCORM 2004 4th Edition to the public TestTrack server. For all of you chomping at the bit to take advantage of the new features in 4th Edition, now’s your chance to give it a whirl. Ok, so maybe it’s not all that exciting, but we’re happy to have it out there. As far as we know, we are the first to release a 4th Edition conformant LMS product. Our plan is to make 4th Edition available to all of our active SCORM Engine customers as soon as ADL opens up certification for 4th Edition (last indication was that would be in August).
Note: Details of the 4th Edition changes are available here.
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A few SCORM Engine customers have asked recently what our plans are for SCORM 2004 4th Edition and how it relates to our release schedule.
Must of the SCORM 2004 4th Edition stuff is already complete here in house. We’ve been working with the early versions as they come out and working with ADL in testing the test suites. All of that is going well.
Our intent is to hold our release until ADL agrees to start testing/certifying SCORM 2004 4th Edition LMSs. When they do that, we will quickly release and have some version of the SCORM Engine certified. Once we prove that we are certifiable (in the good way), we will release what we’ll call 2009.1. The announcement of that release will be made via the forums here. Our sense from ADL right now is that they will open up that certification sometime in June, but we don’t control their schedule at all.
In the mean time, we’re incorporating other functionality into our 2009.1 release. Things like historical attempt logging are likely inclusions.
Let us know if you have any questions on the release.
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ADL recently released beta versions of the SCORM 2004 4th Edition Conformance Test Suite and Sample Run Time Environment. 4th Edition adds 4 new features and 30-something clarifications/enhancements/bug fixes to SCORM 2004. This evolution is not a drastic change to the specification, but should represent a significant step forward in the compatibility and usability of SCORM 2004.
Since most of the changes are simply clarifications, the implementation burden on SCORM adopters should be rather light. For content developers, only minimal changes (if any) will be required. Most content should be unaffected by the update to 4th Edition. LMS vendors (as always) will have a greater load to carry. For them, the amount of development work required will vary considerably based on the quality of their 3rd Edition implementations. The 4 new features should be rather straight-forward to implement, but the numerous clarifications will present varying levels of difficulty to different vendors.
The new features include:
-Rollup of weighted completion data. SCORM 2004 has always include a “progress measure” data model element that indicates “how complete” the user is on an individual SCO. This data will now be officially rolled up with different activities having different weights. This weighting and rollup will give an accurate picture of the user’s overall completion of a course and enable LMS’s to provide accurate progress bars.
-Jump navigation request. Many sequenced courses want to provide the ability for SCOs to control navigation in a way that is different than what is available to the user. Previously, the navigation requests that a SCO was allowed to make were identical to what the learner was allowed to do. The new “jump” navigation request gives content authors more sequencing options and separates the requests that are available to internal calls from the requests that the learner is allowed to initiate.
-Shared data between SCOs. SCORM 2004 4th Edition now allows SCOs to share arbitrary buckets of data. When creating a sequenced course, it is often very helpful to have a common pool of data that different SCOs can access to maintain a shared state. The lack of this functionality has always been a big obstacle to creating cohesive sequenced content.
-More objective data available globally. All of the objective data that can be reported at runtime is now available to be shared with other SCOs and courses via global objectives. This will provide for simpler and more creative sequencing strategies.
Part of our duty as members of the ADL Technical Working Group is to be early implementers of new specifications to help ADL verify their accuracy. We are already working to update our products for SCORM 2004 4th Edition. The SCORM Engine was first on the list and we’re making good progress. ADL added or changed 92 LMS test cases for 4th Edition. Of those, 23 deal with the new features that we are starting to implement. Of the other 69 dealing with clarifications and bug fixes, we currently pass all but 12 of them. Of those 12 remaining test cases, 6 have open questions of interpretation that we’re discussing with ADL and the TWG. The other 6 should be completed soon.
Currently 4th Edition is in a beta period for review and public comment. Please let us and/or ADL if you have any feedback about the changes made for 4th Edition before the public comment period elapses. We intend to release a 4th Edtion complaint version of the SCORM Engine to the public SCORM Test Track instance shortly after it is completed. We will have production-ready and formally released versions of all our products that are compliant with 4th Edition very shortly after 4th Edition is finalized and out of beta.
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"Joe Smith answered Question 1 with B but the correct answer is C."
Categories: SCORM 2004
4 Dec 2008
I got a great question from one of our SCORM Engine clients (Brian) first thing this morning, so straight to the blog it goes.
We are getting very involved with developing a custom SCORM report that utilizes and displays interaction data. As we are looking through the information sent back by a SCORM 1.2 published course (using Lectora), we see ID, LearnerResponse, CorrectResponse values being passed in. With this information, we can build a report that tells someone “Joe Smith answered Question 1 with B but the correct answer is C.” This may meet our need, but some of our clients are asking for a report that shows the actual text of the question and answer.My research his showing that this is not a part of the SCORM standard, but do you have any recommendations or experience with capturing the actual text values associated with these variables?
SCORM 1.2 has very limited capability in its data model for accepting details about interactions. Brian has this well understood… something to the effect of “Joe Smith answered Question 1 with B but the correct answer is C,” is about as far as one can be certain of going in SCORM 1.2.
SCORM 2004 enhances this a bit. The question element (cmi.interactions.n.) now has an .id that is a long_identifier_type in addition to a description element. This description element (cmi.interactions.n.description) allows the content to record, typically, the question itself as a localized_string_type. This is a vast improvement from my perspective. Answers, as well, have improved in SCORM 2004. Because the vocabulary varies for different types of interactions, it isn’t exactly straightforward. Taking multiple choice responses as an example, though, the content can at least record a collection of short_identifier_types.
So, what in the world did all that mean? Let’s go back to Brian’s example. In SCORM 1.2, he’s right, the best you can do is:
Joe Smith answered Question 1 with B but the correct answer is C.
In SCORM 2004, you would hope to see…
Joe Smith answered Question 1, ‘What is my name?’, incorrectly. His answer was ‘Bob’ instead of the correct answer, ‘Joe’.
This all sounds great, to this point, but now it’s time for some caveats.
- This is entirely dependent on the piece of content in question sending along the full set of data. If the piece of content elects not to send along the correct response, that is its right. If it elects to send along no interaction data whatsoever, it can still be conformant. An LMS is 100% beholden to the content it is playing. [Note to content vendors: Please don't be lazy!]
- The Joe Smith question above shows the best side of the new answer functionality. Had the answers above been more sophisticated, it might have looked more like this:
Joe Smith answered Question 1, “Compare interactions in SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004,” incorrectly. His answer was “Interactions_are_perfect_now.__Lovely,” instead of “Interactions_are_somewhat_improved.”
So, don’t expect perfection in SCORM 2004, even if the content is behaving well. It is, in my book, something that might be worth tackling as the standard continues to evolve.
Later: I realized I didn’t fully answer Brian’s question here… The answer is, in SCORM 1.2 especially, reporting effectively on interactions is simply difficult. It might be possible, for content from a single vendor, to create a reporting mechanism that would allow you to establish an answer key of sorts… and then “join” that answer key to the answers from the interactions. Applying something like this broadly, across content vendors, is a problem we haven’t even solved yet!
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