SCORM^® in Theory

SCORM is fundamentally a simple idea. It should allow people who invest in creating learning material to be able to use it on a variety of platforms for a long time. It should also allow the reuse of learning materials. There are, of course, other goals, but I think these are the most important.

SCORM was developed to solve the needs of the trainer by focusing on reuse and "portability". It does not focus on the needs of the learner.

SCORM in Practice

If you have been delivering a course face-to-face and would like to deliver it online, you probably already have your learning resource in an application like Microsoft Word^®. It would be expensive to convert this into a SCORM format. Precisely the expense that SCORM was supposed to avoid. What was supposed to happen, is that people could draw on existing SCORM objects, but most people find they are creating these objects from scratch.

If you decide you still want to go to the effort to convert your existing material, you will soon find out that SCORM is obscenely complicated. The specification consists of several books, with the overview covering 57 pages --- perhaps not surprising considering that the specification was the result of several large American government agencies. There is also an incredible amount of jargon involved with SCORM. If you don't believe me, have a look at the how to create SCORM content guide (this was one of the more practical references I looked at).  Even seasoned SCORM content creators have problems. You only need to look at some of the SCORM forums for evidence of this.

Considering that SCORM is such a large and complicated standard, surely significant thought would have gone into ensuring that there aren't glaring security flaws. Apparently not. Javascript is used for practically everything in SCORM. I have seen many assessment pages that use Javascript for calculating the assessment result that is sent back to the learning management system. This means that I can have a look at the page source in my web browser to determine which answers are the correct answers without understanding the course material at all. This is obviously a significant security flaw. Tracking the time spent on learning material is also trivial to fake by someone with only basic Javascript knowledge.

Javascript is also a source of cross platform headaches. For example, I tried to view a toolbox from the flexible learning toolboxes website, but it failed with a Javascript error when I was using my Mozilla web browser under Linux. One of the key objectives that SCORM is supposed to provide is Portability, but this obviously isn't the case as the website won't work with my preferred web browser.

Well, fair enough, SCORM doesn't provide it's major goals, but at least it works, right? Well, at least partially. There are several parts of the SCORM standard that are left up to the implementation to decide what to do. This means that some features that work on one implementation may not work on another.

In order to reuse the learning materials, SCORM introduced metadata based on other standards to allow objects to be searched for (so they could then be reused). In practice, the most effective way to search for materials has proved to make use of the actual content of the resource (not metadata because it relies on humans taking the time to actually create it). Metadata can also be intentially inaccurate to fool search engines, as it often was in the early days of the world wide web. Virtually all of the major search engines today all but ignore metadata as it is considered to be of such low value.

The Alternatives

Why is it that email is still the most used means of communication over the Internet even though there have been dozens of new messaging technologies? It's simple and it works.

Why start using complicated tools to write content? You probably have a lot of learning materials already in electronic form, probably in some sort of document format. It makes more sense to me to keep it in this format so that it's easy to update and add to. Sure, for presentation online you may need to convert it into HTML, but this can be automated (as it is in the Night Owl online learning system - see the demo).

SCORM can be useful at adding assessment into learning materials (ignoring the fact that cheating is very easy by looking at the Javascript source), but it also takes significant effort. The Night Owl online learning system has created a way of converting specially formated word documents into online learning assessment (see the demo). The extra formatting required is certainly much easier to learn how to add then to learn how to do it the SCORM way. Incidently, this assessment is provided in a secure way. There are also various other assessment standards that are in common use that exist outside of the SCORM standard (such as GIFT format).

Instead of creating metadata, use some of the common search technologies. If the materials are for public consumption, simply make it available to the search engine web crawlers. Otherwise, you could make use of something like the Google Desktop under Windows or Beagle under Linux.

Conclusions

1. You probably have learning materials already in Microsoft Word. Why rewrite it so that it's more "reusable" when you can use it as is?
2. Why complicate your life more than you have to? Use the tools you are used to and start spending more time on the things you enjoy.
3. Why learn a complicated standard which provides no extra benefit to your learners.  You would be better off learning new ways of creating exciting material and assessment for your learners (e.g Flash animations, video or audio clips).
   
4. Some of the most valuable features of SCORM are either not implemented in many cases (e.g. full sequencing) or are insecure.

I have to concede that SCORM may be useful for the situation where many, many users are using learning material that only is created once (to offset the high creation effort). However, in most cases, SCORM is a standard that just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make life any easier and is a fools gold for those who just want to follow a standard for the sake of following a standard.

Article by Russell Kliese