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

Yesterday I had a meeting with a potential partner of ours (javanti.org, formerly jtap.org), who informed me about the scorm standard. We have been discussing of interfacing the javanti software as a demo using scorm to a grading system within dotLRN. Talking about it, do we have a grading system, which allows people to be graded on items in the content repository?

So, before we delve into unchartered territories, maybe someone else wants to enlighten us, or tell us they are doing it. Unless it is alreadying existing is there any chance to have a grading system by middle of Jan 2003?

More to the point. If a student uploads his thesis, the grading system should allow the professor to give a grade or points for this object to the owner (aka the student). If a student answers to a multiple choice survey the grading system should get the information from the survey, how good the student was (aka, he gets a grade for it). If a student wants to run a learning application (e.g. like javanti), which offers to give a grade afterwards, dotLRN should provide the learning application with the necessary information about the student using scorm and allow that application to store a grade for that learning application.

In addition to that, I'd love to see grades weighted. In Germany some universities work with credit points, so you should be able to store a grade along with the number of points (or the percentage) it is worth. Furthermore there should be the possibility to have multiple people give a grade for one item.

So far I got the impression that you'd like to add grading to a specific module. I would like to see grading as a seperate module / service, which allows the grading to happen on any object that is stored in the content repository (why not give someone a grade for a posting he has done in the forums).

Stepping back for a moment, I think the challenges are to figure out a) the data model and b) what API calls to expose.  Acknowledging the simplest case solution ("create table object_grades (object_id references acs_objects, grade integer)") it would seem reasonable to look to organizations like IMS and SCORM, who have done all kinds of research to figure out what educators want, and build on their most relevant findings.

Michael, I haven't looked at the SCORM stuff yet.  Care to make any comments about how to best use IMS versus (or as a complement to) SCORM?

I really like the idea of service based packages used to build up an application.

One of the most common uses of SCORM today (as opposed to the stuff that it theoretically can do but that nobody uses it for) is to tie information about application state (in this case, it's a courseware application) with user data that's stored in the LMS, e.g., whether the user has taken the pretest, what page in the course the user was on when s/he last exited the course, etc

// Javascript sample code from SCORM runtime spec.
LMSSetValue("cmi.core.score.raw","85");

# Possible OACS/Tcl.
# Here the object_id would uniquely identify
# to the student being scored.
lms::set_value [                 
  -object_id $object_id          
  -element "cmi.core.score.raw"  
  -value 85 ]

Given that, unlike SCORM, we're not assuming that our learning object is client-side, it's not clear to me yet what the right abstractions are (the Tcl package example above is just for illustrative purposes and not a proposed design).

Also, SCORM doesn't really address use cases that live above individual learning objects. This includes Malte's case where you want to assign relative weights to different learning objects. Perhaps that would just be an add-on (or maybe IMS defines it).

One piece of good news is that the SCORM scoring stuff adds only marginally to the simplest possible case. They propose three fields: raw score, max possible score, and min possible score, where all three numbers are assumed to be between 0 to 100. That at least lends support to the notion that the grading system need not be terribly complicated.

Let me suggest that you (and other interested parties) take a peak at IMS Simple Sequencing Content Developer's Guide which talks about grading/tests in tandem with simple sequencing, albeit in a not very detailed way. It may prove strategic to form one's opinion about the "big picture" (LMS) of which grading will be a substancial part. AFAICT the two concepts - grading system / graded survey and LMS / curriculum - go hand in hand (although they can also be used separately). So, that document may not be as off topic as it may seem. I found it quite easy to read, too ...

As mentioned by folks in other threads, methods of the survey/grading package that will answer questions and/or perform actions on behalf of the curriculum/LMS should be exposed to the same by use of service contracts to avoid unnecessery package dependencies and to encourage code reuse, etc.

Example contract for LMS/Curriculum:

create function inline_1()
returns integer as '
DECLARE
BEGIN

PERFORM acs_sc_contract__new (
           'Survey',                                -- contract_name
           'Survey Information Provider'            -- contract_desc
);
PERFORM acs_sc_msg_type__new (
           'Survey.GetValue.InputType',
           'object_id:integer,student_id:integer,element:string'
);
PERFORM acs_sc_msg_type__new (
           'Survey.GetValue.OutputType',
           'value:string'
);
PERFORM acs_sc_operation__new (
           'Survey',                                -- contract_name
           'GetValue',                              -- operation_name
           'Get SCORM element value',               -- operation_desc
           'f',                                     -- operation_iscachable_p
           3,                                       -- operation_nargs
           'Survey.GetValue.InputType',             -- operation_inputtype
           'Survey.GetValue.OutputType'             -- operation_outputtype
);

impl_id := acs_sc_impl__new (
              ''Survey'',
              ''GradedSurvey'',
              ''survey''
);

foo := acs_sc_impl_alias__new (
              ''Survey'',
              ''GradedSurvey'',
              ''GetValue'',
              ''lms::get_value'',
              ''TCL''
);

set value [acs_sc_call Survey GetValue [list $object_id $user_id "cmi.core.score.raw"] GradedSurvey]

# Possible OACS/Tcl.
lms::get_value [                
  -object_id $object_id
  -student_id $student_id         
  -element "cmi.core.score.raw"]

Malte, I guess the answer to your question is, "nobody's working on it but a few folks are willing to spend time reading and commenting on specs."  At this point my own interest was to do a little research into the problem space (and the discussion has been really helpful!).  Perhaps the others might be interested in investing additional cycles to design/coding if it's something you're planning to go after.    What are your plans (if you even know them 😉 )?