Monthly Archives: July 2009

Cheating on SCORM Courses – It’s Not Difficult

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Steve Addison

Since I’ve spent much of the last 10 years working in the slightly paranoid world of information security, I’ve always been concerned about SCORM’s dependence on JavaScript for communicating with a LMS. It’s always seemed to me that it would … Continue reading →

Posted in Further Reading | 1 Comment

Step 23 – More About cmi.core.lesson_status

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Steve Addison

OK … time to implement the handling of cmi.core.lesson_status as I discussed in Step 22. I’ve already covered the initialization of cmi.core.lesson_status in Step 20, so I don’t have to worry about that. So most of my changes will be … Continue reading →

Posted in Run Time Environment | 10 Comments

Courses and SCOs

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Steve Addison

Reader ‘jcasolutions’ recently posted this comment: When you make this statement “course (or ‘SCO’ in SCORM terms)” it is incorrect. There is no such thing as a course in SCORM. What most people consider a course is equal to a … Continue reading →

Posted in Content Aggregation Model, Run Time Environment | Leave a comment

Step 22 – Progress and Completion – cmi.core.lesson_status

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Steve Addison

The process by which cmi.core.lesson_status is determined is quite complex. So, with a deep breath, let’s see if I can figure it out. Here – as far as I can tell – are the basic rules.

Posted in Run Time Environment | 8 Comments

Step 21 – Progress and Completion – Setting Values

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Steve Addison

The course can change any of the following elements that relate to course progress and completion tracking: cmi.core.lesson_location cmi.core.lesson_status cmi.core.exit In other words, it can tell the LMS where it is, whether the course is completed/passed/failed/incomplete … and how the … Continue reading →

Posted in Run Time Environment | 6 Comments

Step 20 – Progress and Completion – Initialization

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Steve Addison

I’m going to get started on the mandatory ‘progress and completion’ elements: cmi.core.lesson_location cmi.core.credit cmi.core.lesson_status cmi.core.entry cmi.core.exit Of these, only the 3 shown above in bold need to be initialized with specified values. So I’ll modify my initialize.php code to … Continue reading →

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Step 19 – Quick Review of the Mandatory Data Elements

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Steve Addison

OK … I’m going to take a quick look to see how far I’ve got through the mandatory data elements. Here’s a list abstracted fron the SCORM 1.2 standard that shows (from left to right): if I’ve addressed it; the … Continue reading →

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SCORM 1.2 Cookbook

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Steve Addison

The late Claude Ostyn – in his role as Learning Standards Strategist for Click2Learn – created a wonderful SCORM 1.2 Resource Kit aka the SCORM Cookbook. Sadly, despite its popularity, SumTotal Systems (the descendent of Click2Learn) removed the SCORM 1.2 … Continue reading →

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Step 18 – cmi.core.score._children and cmi.core.score.raw

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Steve Addison

After that last post, I think I’ll look at a nice easy one. The score for the course is stored in an element called cmi.core.score.raw. Actually, this is just one of a group of 3 elements that relate to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Run Time Environment | 1 Comment

Step 17 – cmi.core.total_time and cmi.core.session_time

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Steve Addison

Let’s look at another pair of SCORM 1.2 data elements – cmi.core.total_time and cmi.core.session_time. These elements are used to track the amount of time that the student spends on the course. Now, I could argue that the whole concept of … Continue reading →

Posted in Run Time Environment | 2 Comments