Forum .LRN Q&A: Response to Anyone working on Scorm ?

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Posted by Michael Feldstein on
Ola, if you mean that SCORM does not provide a complete data model or tagging schema for identifying (and therefore exporting) user information, then you are correct. There are a few places you can look to find standards of this sort, although I use the term "standard" fairly loosely here. First, there's the AICC specification, which is a sprawling standard that covers everything imaginable--poorly. This standard is actually about 10 years old and yet no vendor that I know of has completely implemented it and no two vendors seem to implement the same subset of it. If AICC were decent then there would be no reason for SCORM to exist. Nevertheless, most LMS vendors have partial implementations of AICC in their products.

You can also look at the IMS standards. IMS and, by extension, SCORM, have generally tried to extract the worthwhile stuff out of AICC when possible. The "cmi.foo" API calls that Andrew sites in the SCORM spec, for example, are AICC-derived. (And yes, Andrew, that was exactly the portion of the spec that I was talking aobut.) You might want to look at the "Learner Information" and "Enterprise" specifications. The thing is, though, I have no idea (a) how widely implemented those "standards" are or (b) whether they're any good. So caveat emptor.