After reading this article, you’ll know what SCORM is and how to turn a simple PowerPoint presentation into a SCORM course and upload it into a learning management system. For a quick overview of SCORM, watch the video below. Skip it to the article if you prefer more comprehensive details.
What Is SCORM?
SCORM means Shareable Content Object Reference Model. It is an international standard for e-courses. If your course is published in the SCORM format, you can be sure that almost any learning management system (LMS) will recognize it.
Standards are important in any field. Let’s take the movie-making industry as an example. When you buy a DVD, you’re sure that you’ll be able to watch it with any DVD player: Toshiba or Panasonic — it just doesn’t matter. This is possible because DVD is an accepted standard; that’s why film studios don’t have to produce different types of discs for each brand of player.
Unfortunately, that was the situation in eLearning before the noughties: courses were created for a platform. An e-course created for one system wouldn’t work in another. If a university changed its LMS, it would lose its entire collection of courses, as well as the thousands dollars spent on their development. In 2001, the SCORM format put the eLearning market in order.
In fact, SCORM is a list of technical requirements. This list tells us how to make a course that will work on any platform – there’s a detailed description of the e-course structure and the principles of its interaction with LMSs.
Basically, to deliver eLearning courses via an LMS, SCORM has three components that work together:
Now that you have an idea of what SCORM is and how it works, let’s look at what benefits it provides. There are actually quite a few that you might not have expected:
There are three existing versions of SCORM: 1.1, 1.2, and 2004. Each version has its own technical features and advantages. However, SCORM 1.1, which was the first version, is not widely adopted, so we’ll go straight to those that are used extensively:
SCORM 1.2 indicates the student’s progress in the report, that is, how much of the course the learner has studied. For instance, “The learner has studied 70% of the course.” If the learner has studied the entire course, the system will display the “Completed” status.
SCORM 2004 provides more detailed information. In addition to the progress and the status, it shows how many points the learner scored upon completing the course and passing the test.
If you already have a SCORM conformant LMS, the main thing you need to know when creating an e-course is which SCORM version your LMS supports.
SCORM is a very powerful tool for all who are engaged in eLearning, but let’s see what it means to “use SCORM.” When someone talks about “using SCORM,” it typically refers to utilizing SCORM packages as courses that are a part of the eLearning program created by eLearning professionals. Rather than coding, instructional designers usually work with an authoring tool to create the content and export it as a SCORM package. Then training managers upload SCORM courses to the LMS and deliver them to learners online.
A SCORM package that can also be referred to as a SCORM course or a SCORM module is a ZIP file that contains specific contents defined by the SCORM standard. It is known as a Package Interchange File (PIF) and has all the data needed to transfer learning content to an LMS.
###Files that a SCORM package contains
Here are the contents every SCORM package should include:
You can find a detailed description of the SCORM content packaging specification on the website of Rustici Software, the world’s leading eLearning standards expert.
In the past, only professional programmers could develop SCORM courses. It was a technically complex process: developers manually built the SCORM package from a number of HTML pages, wrote the code that binds the course to the LMS, and then packed everything into a ZIP archive.
Nowadays, everyone can create an e-course using special eLearning software products. The authoring tools will automatically generate the code for LMS interaction and pack all the training materials into a SCORM package. All you have to do is upload the course to the training system.
Tools for creating SCORM courses can be divided into three groups:
If you’re developing your first e-course, it’s better to use a PowerPoint add-in for at least two reasons:
Creating such courses is easy with iSpring Suite Max, which appears as a PowerPoint add-in. After installation, all the capabilities of iSpring Suite will be available in a special PowerPoint tab. That means you can turn your presentation into an e-course right in PowerPoint.
How to create a SCORM course with iSpring Suite Max
It’ll take only a few minutes to make a professional educational course out of a common PPT presentation. Here’s how:
How to add a SCORM course to an LMS
After publishing, you’ll have a ZIP file that you need to upload to an LMS. Check out the articles in the list below to learn how to import courses into popular LMSs like:
The only thing left to do is share the course with your learners. If you use iSpring Learn LMS, you can send out invitations by email. Specify one or more emails, and the recipients will get access to the course instantly.
You can run a SCORM package in one of two ways.
What we call a SCORM package is, in fact, web content that can communicate with an LMS using the SCORM API. You can’t edit or reverse-engineer a published course; however, most SCORM courses are created with authoring tools like iSpring Suite and, as mentioned above, use source (project) files that contain all the contents, including text, images, videos, etc. If you have a project file, you can open it right in the authoring tool, make the necessary changes, and publish the course to SCORM.
Even though SCORM is a quite dated technology, it still dominates the eLearning market. SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 have become the most popular technology standards. According to a Software Advice survey, 62% of businesses use SCORM courses for training in their LMS.
However, some experts believe that other eLearning standards will become more dominant in the future. More recently, the evolution of SCORM has generated the Tin Can (Experience API) and сmi5 formats. These formats feature a wide range of capabilities: they allow your learners to study offline and/or use mobile devices, support PDF documents and interactive simulations, collect detailed statistics about learners’ progress, and much more.
Here, you’ll find answers to some frequently asked questions about SCORM, and we’ll update this blog post with any new ones you might ask in the comments.
SCORM compliance means adherence to the industry standard for communication between eLearning content and LMSs. Simply put, using any SCORM-compliant authoring tool means you can create a SCORM-compliant course and then publish it to any SCORM-compliant LMS. The course will play on a multitude of platforms without requiring any adjustments, and you’ll be able to track your learners’ activity and results.
A SCORM wrapper is a set of files that make it possible for a learning management system and your eLearning content to communicate with each other. You can apply a SCORM wrapper to nearly any form of training content, and then upload it to an LMS for immediate learner access.
To get a detailed overview, read our post about SCORM wrappers.
If you have a SCORM package and are not sure what version of SCORM it was published in, you can figure it out by looking in the imsmanifest.xml file in the root directory of the course. Unzip the SCORM package, find the imsmanifest.xml file, and open it with either TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (Windows). You need to find the metadata tags and see what’s between them.
To make sure that your SCORM package can be played in an LMS and properly report course completion status and learner results, you need to use a SCORM player that can display your content and show you how it communicates with the SCORM API. The easiest way to test your course is to upload it to your LMS, change the admin role to Student, and give the course a few attempts before checking your results in the reports. The other way to check how your SCORM package works is to use a SCORM player like SCORM Cloud. It allows you to view the course from the learner’s side, test it, and then see the stats. It also has a Debug Logs option, which lets you debug SCORM content and understand the inner workings of the standard.
If you have some legacy learning content, check out our articles about how you can turn different kinds of content into full-fledged SCORM courses.
Source https://www.ispringsolutions.com/blog/scorm-course
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