It's absolutely critical that dotLRN be built to observe eLearning
open standards if it is going to gain wider adoption. In this case,
there are several standards that are relevant. For testing, you'll
want to look at the IMS testing specification
(
http://www.imsproject.org/question/index.html). This may or may
not be something you can bolt on easily later; I'm not the one to
judge. At the ver least, you'll want to look at the way folks who
have been thinking about these problems for quite a while think
the data model needs to be defined.
The issue of branching is more complex. I'm doing something
like the idea that John is suggesting in a course I'm developing
for a client right now. It's called "adaptive testing," and the idea is
that you use a pretest (or a review self-test) to determine which
content the learner needs to see and which content can be
skipped. There is an older standard put out by the AICC that
covers this, but that standard (though still widely used) is
somewhat obsolete. Think of it as analogous to SGML; it's the
big, cumbersome basis upon which leaner, cleaner specs are
being developed.
SCORM (which you can find out about at http://www.adlnet.org)
should cover things like this but doesn't yet. A new version is due
out next week; that version should inclued the new IMS
lightweight sequencing spec
(http://www.imsproject.org/simplesequencing/index.html). I
haven't seen this spec yet but I'll be looking at it soon (with some
help) and will report back to the board when I've done so.
SCORM will be following up next year with a more
comprehensive sequencing standard.
