Tim and I have been discussing how our own experience in designing the SCORM Engine might directly apply to the “platform for e-learning” being discussed by LETSI. Behind the scenes, the SCORM Engine is essentially a platform that facilitates adding plug-in functionality to LMS’s. In this case, the plug-ins are currently all learning standards. For instance, the available plug-ins allow an LMS to support, AICC, SCORM 1.1, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 2nd Edition, SCORM 2004 3rd Edition and IMS Sharable State Persistence. We have high level designs to extend the SCORM Engine to support other plug-ins like a discussion boards or an assessment engine.
An added benefit of the SCORM Engine’s architecture are its integration options that allow it to tie into any LMS. The diagram below shows how the SCORM Engine’s architecture allows for it to be integrated with any LMS and serve as a platform for supporting many content delivery mechanisms.
Should LETSI move towards a path similar to the one described here we would look forward to contributing our experience and lessons learned from the design of the SCORM Engine.
