My “Planets” example (How to Add Basic SCORM Code to a Flash Movie) has proven to be one of the most popular items on pipwerks.com. Unfortunately, it was designed as a quick example and had a bunch of flaws and shortcomings. It’s also about 3 years old and starting to show its age. Since people frequently contact me with questions — many of which were due to the flaws in the example — I decided to update the project.
An abstraction layer is a way of hiding complexities and maintaining cleanliness in your application. When integrating tracking support (SCORM, AICC, etc,) into an an e-learning course, it’s a good idea to abstract as much of the tracking code as possible. Here are some examples.
What happens if the browser window containing your course is closed by the learner before the course finishes sending data to the LMS? If you’re not careful about how you’ve coded your course, you can lose some of the data.
A number of people have recently asked me about the scorm.save() function in the pipwerks SCORM wrappers. What is it, and when should it be used?
I’m working on a new SCORM 2004 wrapper for both JavaScript and ActionScript that will contain advanced functionality and improved shortcuts. I’m looking for good ideas.
I recently emailed a shortlist of good SCORM development resources to a colleague, and figured I should probably post a list here, too. This is a quickie list, and I’m sure I’m leaving someone out. If you know of any resources I’ve missed, please add a link in the comments. This list is presented in no particular order.
Most e-learning developers don’t care about SCORM and only (begrudingly) learn enough to get the job done. I don’t blame them. This brings up the never-ending question when it comes to using SCORM in courseware: What are you really trying to do with SCORM?
I’ve had a number of people ask me why I haven’t extended my SCORM helpers (the JavaScript-based SCORM API wrapper and the two ActionScript classes) to completely remove the need to know any of the “cmi” calls. I have three reasons: SCORM is not that simple, the functionality between SCORM versions is significantly different, and extending the helpers that far means writing a complete (non-standardized) replacement syntax for SCORM.
Here’s a quick tutorial for adding basic SCORM functionality to an existing Flash file. This tutorial aims to demonstrate just how easy it can be to add SCORM functionality to an existing Flash movie.
Please note that this tutorial uses ActionScript 3 and SCORM 1.2, but the same principles apply for ActionScript 2 and SCORM 2004.
I’m currently working on a tutorial explaining how to add SCORM code to an ordinary Flash file. Here’s a teaser: a very simple Flash movie I made using some images from NASA. It’s called PLANETS!
