I recently completed development of a rather complex SCORM 2004 sequencing template for use by the Army in ATSC and TRADOC. It was working great in several environments, but imagine my surprise when it wouldn’t pass validation against the XML schemas.
A long investigation turned up the culprit, a faulty XSD document. Specifically the imsss_v1p0objective.xsd file is missing an attribute of “maxOccurs=’unbounded'” on the mapInfo element. In English (or at least SCORM-glish), this means that a local sequencing objective can only map to one global objective. This is clearly against the spec as defined in CAM 5.1.7.1.2.
Hmmm, how could this be. I’ve been using these same XSD files ever since SCORM 2004 3rd Edition came out. I have no idea where I originally downloaded them from, but it must have been some authoritative source. With a little digging I found at least one place on the ADL site that is distributing a copy of the faulty XSD (the MSCE Linear example). By and large though, the correct versions are being distributed, it looks like the faulty version just managed its way into a few selected downloads.
To be on the safe side, I re-downloaded all the standard SCORM 2004 3rd edition XSD files from THE authoritative sources for each set. If you would like to do the same, here is where you can get them from (yes, I agree, it would be nice to have them all in one place).
IMS Content Packaging and IMS Simple Sequencing – available from the IMS site at www.imsglobal.org. You have to download them separately under the sections for each specification and you will probably need to register.
IEEE LOM – The default instance of the IEEE LOM metadata XSD files can be found at http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/downloads/LOM/lomv1.0/xsd/. You don’t have to login, but unfortunately, it appears that you have to download each file separately. Other profiles of LOM are also acceptable for SCORM conformant packages.
ADL Extensions – ADL has specific extensions to IMS Content Packaging and IMS Simple Sequencing that have their own set of XSD files. These files can be downloaded from http://www.adlnet.gov/capabilities/scorm/scorm-2004-3rd#tab-resources. You will need the “content packaging”, “sequencing” and “navigation” XSD files.
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Update [3/17/09] – These are now available all in once place from our site.
