Scorn for SCORM?
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working with a few clients who are looking to launch new e-learning platforms in the near future. One client is a major test preparation company (helping students prepare for standardized testing and providing subject tutoring) and the other 
is a major K-12 textbook publisher.
As part of our investigations on how best to implement these platforms, we’ve been looking at learning management tools and learning content servers. Most of the off-the-shelf variety of education specific content tools support several standards including SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).
SCORM is actually a standard that comes from the Department of Defence (not Education?) under the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative that was started in 1997. As you can imagine then, numerous government agencies are heavily using SCORM including the armed services, the FBI and many others.
So, what’s the problem with SCORM? Well, as you can image, standards by their very nature tend to be made to solve general problems instead of specific problems. Here are some issues as I see them today:
1) SCORM is effective for non-evaluative content (i.e., learning materials) but it is lacking in evaluative content (i.e., drills and assessments); for example, SCORM does not support short-answer or essay questions as part of an assessment How could you use this for K-12 or higher education without this support?
2) SCORM not only defines the content, but it also includes some presentation-specific scripting within the learning objects themselves. Anyone who’s had to deal with separation of data and presentation logic know how painful it can be if the core material is merged. This would be like storing HTML code in your database so that you can present it to an end user’s browser. If you then wanted to support, for example, an iPhone – you would have to parse through that HTML and provide a new look and feel. That’s a lot more painful that just parsing through core content.
3) Overcoming SCORM limitations requires some pretty significant – and non-standard – approaches. For example, most vendors suggest the use of custom developed Flash objects or other types of rich media for content or questions that can’t be supported by the standard.
4) Like any other standard SCORM progress is slow and it can be implemented with proprietary extensions by any vendor.
The most recent version of SCORM (2004) was released in March of this year. While they have added in some nice restrictions, they have not addressed fundemantal problems that would allow SCORM to become more of a universal educational language. That’s really too bad. As I wrote in my blog previously, I think the Federal CTO should be leading the charge in things like SCORM so that we could build a real platform to support education across K-12 and universities. I’d love for major book publishers, schools, teachers, etc. to all speak the same core language and instead of focusing in on technology focus in on the learning content and teaching our kids.
