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

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
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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Posted by Giancarlo Luxardo on
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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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
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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Posted by Michael Feldstein on
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.