That’s not the first time I’ve heard people complain about math questions in e-learning. It’s a common frustration.

Building a custom solution using Flex is perfectly reasonable, as it will allow you to control the logic and let the learner build on previous results. If you SCORM-ify it, it should run in your LMS with few (or no) issues.

If you aren’t using heavy animation or video, you could also build your course in HTML/JavaScript; ActionScript and JavaScript are both ECMAScript-based languages, though ActionScript’s strict typing might be advantageous with mathematics.

Regardless of authoring language, in your case, SCORM would do little more than store data between sessions, and perhaps let you report on the outcome of specific interactions, should you choose to report that data to the LMS.

You might want to post your topic on the eLearning Technology and Development Google Group, there are a few people there who would probably enjoy this conversation.

My main complaint is that neither system does much of a job with calculated/arithmetic/algorithmic-type quiz questions. (I’m sure I would have more complaints if I was knowledgeable enough about instructional design to use an LMS for effective/engaging content delivery … but I’m a math/engineering instructor who codes in his spare time.)

(For content, I tend to use LaTeX compiled to PDF to reinforce what I deliver on the old-fashioned whiteboard.)

I have had good results (i.e. increased student learning/satisfaction) with a system (built using PHP) that allows multi-part questions, with instant marking or feedback for each solution submitted. These quizzes are primarily formative and the feedback seems to encourage students to keep plugging away until they achieve as much success as they have time for. This seems an improvement on the more typical LMS equivalent: complete a quiz, get it marked and then repeat the whole process in order to try for an improved result or to investigate errors.

Our institution brought this functionality into our existing LMS by inserting javascript marking, buttons, etc., into the LMS question statement. I am extremely loathe to use this practice in our new LMS.

I’m currently thinking of rolling my own SCORM test packages using Flex. I know that Flash has issues, mainly surrounding web standards, and I presume this extends to Flex also. But it does seem a good tool for this particular job. I suspect that Googe Web Toolkit would be preferable, from a standards perspective, but I seem to be having trouble getting my head around GWT and I do have experience with Flex.

So, does this seem sensible? Or am I heading in completely the wrong direction?

Any thoughts, feedback, … from you or pipwerks visitors?

on the bright side, some vendors (esp the newer ones) appear to be putting more emphasis on instructional design.