The Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a system for standardizing how e-learning courses interact with a learning management system (LMS).
In the mid-1990s, the Internet — still spelled with a capital “I” — was booming, and new learning management systems were popping up left and right. The LMS ecosystem was a bit of the Wild West, as each LMS tended to use its own proprietary code for tracking score, managing bookmarks, and sending course data to the LMS. Vendor lock-in made courses difficult to produce, maintain, and reuse. If you wanted to port the course from one LMS to another, you’d need to rewrite the underlying tracking code (and course packaging) to be compatible with each LMS.
The US government, including the Department of Defense, recognized the inefficiencies and wanted to bring order to the chaos. In the late 1990s, they created a federal program called the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative to create “standards, tools, and learning content for the future learning environment.”
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the ADL team opted to borrow fragments of existing standards to form their new reference model.
Note: Although SCORM is often referred to as a “standard”, it is in fact not a standard — it’s a curated collection of standards that had been previously created by other organizations. For example, the CMI data model is from the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) group, and is an adaptation of an IEEE standard. SCORM’s packaging system is from the IMS Global Learning Consortium, hence the SCORM package requiring a file named imsmanifest.xml.
SCORM 1.0 was released in January, 2000, providing guidance for standardizing the structure of e-learning course packages and the communication between the course and LMS. The result would be portable SCOs (shareable content objects, a.k.a. courses) that work in any SCORM-compliant LMS.
A simplistic, contrived example: Prior to SCORM, if the US Army purchased an e-learning course explaining how to use a fire extinguisher, the course could not be shared with the Navy, Air Force, or Marines because the course had been customized for the Army’s learning management system. In this contrived scenario, each military branch used its own proprietary learning management system, none of which were compatible with the Army’s course. They would have to either buy a different course to fill the same need, or pay a developer to modify the Army’s existing course to work in their system(s).
By using SCORM to standardize communication and packaging techniques for e-learning courses, the courses become portable and reusable, reducing redundancies and likely saving a lot of time and money.
Since SCORM was a US government initiative, US federal agencies quickly added SCORM support as a requirement in their contracts, helping SCORM gain widespread adoption within a few years. Millions of government dollars were up for grabs, and the e-learning industry jumped at the opportunity. LMS vendors added SCORM support to their platforms, and course developers began producing SCORM packages.
SCORM 1.2 (released 2001) was the first widely adopted version of SCORM, and still holds the most market share. SCORM 1.3, more commonly known as SCORM 2004, was released a few years later, and was much more ambitious. It introduced some much-needed improvements to SCORM 1.2, but was also much more complex. SCORM 2004 included a new sequencing and navigation model that was incredibly difficult to implement, leading most LMS vendors to ignore it or (even worse) only support a subset of its features. SCORM 2004 has four editions, the most common of which are SCORM 2004 2nd Edition and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition. The first and fourth editions have very little market share.
In early 2011 the ADL “put a lid” on SCORM, making SCORM 2004 4th Edition the last official release. SCORM is no longer maintained or updated.
And that’s the 60-second history of SCORM. Of course, there are many details I’m leaving out for the sake of brevity, including SCORM’s unintentional(?) enforcement of specific instructional models and pedagogies, but those are topics for another day.