This blog is a voyage of discovery for me.
I’ve been working in and around the elearning world for nearly a decade now, and I’m still astonished that SCORM – with all its faults and idiosyncracies – is the de facto standard for linking courses to learning management systems. That’s why, a few years ago, I designed the LM-Light standard which is much easier to work with – especially if you’re a course developer.
However, SCORM remains the standard, and we still need to be able to link SCORM format courses to our learning management systems. So, I could hire a dedicated team of programmers to to develop the code, I could engage a consultant to develop the code, or I could license/buy a SCORM ‘engine’ and integrate it into the LMS software. But, I thought I’d try another approach – I thought I’d try to figure it out myself, document the process as I went along, and (if it works) release the resulting code under a GPL, LGPL, or a Creative Commons license. And maybe my fumblings along the way will help you to understand how SCORM works, and what to do if you need to develop the links yourself.
So, some background. I’m not a computer scientist by training. Other than some FORTRAN coding during my engineering degree several decades ago, all of my programming has been self-taught. So don’t expect any highly technical explanations – I’m going to try to keep it as simple as possible. I mostly program these days in PHP and JavaScript (and sometimes a little perl) so you won’t find any Java or Flash here. But that doesn’t imply that this is the best way so please don’t flame me with “Java would be a better way to do this” or “you should be using Flash”.
So there it is – I hope that you find it useful. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received!
Dr. Steve Addison
Lake Stevens, WA
May 2009
