Implementation Issues of SCORM
This paper investigates the data elements required to fully and flexibly support a broad range of collaborative learning activities and proposes extensions to the SCORM data model to enable support for collaborative learning designs within SCORM. The analysis is partly based on a range of well established collaborative learning designs that cannot be implemented within the SCORM 1.2 specification.
One problem holding back more widespread re-use of SCOs is the mosaic effect that arises when assembling a course from sequences of SCOs that are from a different origin… To reuse these SCOs for different courses (or clients in a private enterprise context), or in combination with SCOs from other providers, the courseware developer must edit the HTML tags to change the appearance of the SCO to suit the new context. This re-work severely compromises a key promise of the SCORM initiative: “the flexibility to incorporate instructional components into multiple applications and contexts” (Dodds, 2001) and undermines the principle of separating content from its presentation. Unless sharing can be achieved with no intervention or recoding of a SCO, there is little hope of it being successfully promoted. This paper describes an approach which has been used in a leading Australian Higher Education provider that has successfully overcome this problem.
his paper puts forward a generic solution to the problem of re-use of Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) from multiple content repositories without making new copies of the SCOs. One of the difficulty is to enable SCORM communication where the LMS dynamically loads learning content from an LCMS which is installed on a server in a different internet domain or sub-domain (e.g. lms.yourdomain.edu and lcms.mydomain.edu). SCORM requires that the communication mechanism is the responsibility of the LMS. Such mechanism is typically provided as Javascript by the LMS, hence come from lms.yourdomain.edu. The initiation of communication, however, is the responsibility of SCO. Typically, a SCO will try to locate the communication script from the document hierarchy of the browser and communicate via the found communication script. However, due to the security requirement, the modern browser will typically block any Javascript calls or communication when the scripts involved are originated from different domains, in the case the SCO coming from lcms.mydomain.edu…
The forthcoming paper is on “Extending the supported pedagogical frameworks within SCORM
“http://koala.dls.au.com/scorm/
