Scorn for SCORM
I’m intrigued by the disconnect we see between ICT advisors we talk to and the teachers who use our site. People who advise schools on ICT use are usually concerned about whether our content is compatible with a virtual learning environment; the teachers are just concerned that it is high quality and easy to adapt and use in the class. All our files are licenced to use on a VLE (for our school subscribers), but we don’t provide them along with complex metadata – it is often simpler for teachers just to drop them into the online courses / folders of their choice.
My personal view is that the ‘SCORM’ standard adopted by a lot of digital content producers to fit into a VLE is just not suited to most primary and secondary school situations. It was developed by the US Military to make stand alone eLearning modules more compatible, and so many of the tags are not that relevant to school presentations and worksheets. In a way that only military equipment can be, it is also insanely overspecced for the job it is trying to do.
We’d be very happy to comply with a simpler common standard, and we are looking at ways to standardise some of tagging.
I’d be interested in hearing if anyone things we should be providing Teachable files in ‘VLE compatible’ ZIP file format. At the moment our development priorities are elsewere.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
SCORM 1.2 is so trivial it is easy to produce something Scorm compliant. For most of the activities here, they aren’t active – like a quiz (say), so all SCORM can do is mark that it can be accessed. This can be done by putting it into a HTML file, adding a few lines of javascript which ADL provide for free, sticking an XML file in and zipping it up. 2004 is only a little more complex.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Paul – thanks, i’m sure it wouldn’t take much to make the activities that don’t feed back test scores etc ‘SCORM compliant’, but my issue is ‘who wants that?’ It seems that for many users the technical hassle of downloading the ZIP file outweights the tiny benefits of some trivial information attached in the XML file.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Scorm quizzes are useful and most topics we teach have a few. We write them and some students like them (some hate them!).
However, we find that the main role of our VLE is as a way of giving students access to a wide range of resources through a moderately secure, password protected, intuitive portal. ICT people use webpages and html/java and have website managers to do this sort of thing. Teachers want a drag and drop solution, don’t have anyone to maintain a site and have never learnt java script anyway. The VLE is acting as a pretty file manager. Not an elegant solution, but it works.
Teachable.net resources tend to be for teachers looking for something to do with a class (in a room without PCs?) period 1&2 tomorrow. Scorm is irrelevant.
February 18th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
[...] back into the school management information this could be done via a much simpler standard than SCORM or Common Cartridge. The insistence on such clunky, out-dated standards inhibits publisher [...]