Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ?

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24: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ? (response to 23)
Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 09/01/04 02:53 PM
Malte,

I guess maybe we could just change the question to... do we really need SCORM RTE in .LRN?

In the past year or so I haven't really come across more than a handful university courses that make use of SCORM RTE. As a matter of fact -and again, this is based on my experience- very few academics have good things to say about SCORM.

I can see the benefit of having SCORM RTE content for self-paced courseware, but I'm not so sure if that's what lecturers feel it is the right way to delivery their course materials.

A few days back, talking with Rocael, he mentioned that to them (e-lane people) it is more important to have a user monitoring feature to track the students's time and number of views on the content.

However, Giancarlo has emailed me about adding SCORM RTE to LORS.

I was wondering then, if there are many people out there that do have a need for a proper SCORM RTE in .LRN?

Thanks,

Ernie

PS: This weekend I promise the announcement and release of LORS 0.4d on CVS and full documentation (thesis included 😉

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25: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ? (response to 24)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/01/04 04:12 PM
My take on this: If it is an easy feast, we should go for it, just for marketings sake. If it is not and noone needs it, then we should just have an explanation why we did not implement it and maybe some workarounds for the typical use cases where SCORM RTE is used.

I'm really looking forward to LORS 0.4d. Great work you did and congrats to your thesis !

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26: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ? (response to 25)
Posted by Giancarlo Luxardo on 09/01/04 08:53 PM
In addition to marketing objectives (it would be interesting to see which open source projects have a SCORM RTE)... I think a SCORM RTE is important when you deal with copyrighted materials: i.e. the content provider lets you access a courseware only through a SCORM interface... This may not be a common case in a university, rather in an ASP environment.
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27: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ? (response to 26)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/02/04 07:42 AM
Ilias (http://www.ilias.de/ios/index.html, sorry, no English), a German LMS that is fairly close to .LRN in functionality, though sucks with performance (from what I heard) is certified with LMS-RTE3, done by the university of zurich.

As for content access: This (at least in Germany) is something in heavy demand. For one, multiple faculties (or schools in the US) usually have different LMS systems, tailored to their specific needs. Furthermore, there is cooperation happening between universities, where only part of the content should be delivered to outsiders using e.g. SCORM in comparison to the whole content for internals.

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28: Re: Scorm Conformance Level for LORS ? (response to 27)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 09/02/04 04:09 PM
Ernie, you are correct that there has been limited interest in SCORM in higher ed, partly because (as you point out) SCORM is really designed for a self-paced learning environment and has somewhat less value where you have an active, participating instructor and partly because of the way that SCORM was marketed. On the issue of copyright, while SCORM could help with compliance issues, there are simpler mechanisms to do this.

SCORM's biggest advantage to dotLRN would be as a cross-over into the world of non-profits and small to mid-sized companies. There really aren't many good choices for smaller organizations that want to do a mix of self-paced and instructor-facilitated learning, and dotLRN could potentially fill that niche rather nicely (although you start running into stiffer resistance to the technology platform than you probably get in higher ed).

But I'd have to agree that, at this point, dotLRN's core market of higher ed has made it fairly clear that SCORM isn't something that they care a whole lot about. It didn't have to go this way, but that's the way the cookie crumbled.