Posts pertaining to SCORM development and the broader SCORM ecosystem
In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In part two, we cleaned up the HTML file and externalized all JavaScript. In part three, we cleaned up the JavaScript. In this installment, we will examine and update the SCORM code.
In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In part two, we cleaned up the HTML file and externalized all JavaScript. Today we will clean up the JavaScript.
In part one of this series, we published a simple Captivate course and examined its file structure. In this part, we’ll take an in-depth look at the HTML generated by Captivate (using the SCORM 2004 publishing template) and clean it up as much as we can.
In this multi-part series, I will walk through the files Captivate outputs when publishing to SCORM 2004, pointing out the bad parts and suggesting alternatives when needed. At the end of the series, I will provide a fully-functional SCORM 2004 publishing template you can use with Captivate 5.5.
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.
The pipwerks SCORM Wrapper has been updated with a small patch for handling odd behavior in the Plateau LMS. Special thanks to Joe Venditti for the patch (and sorry for taking almost 2 years to add it to the codebase!). Get the latest version here.
About a week ago I tweeted:
from what i’m reading between the lines, #SCORM is dead to the ADL. they’re moving on. interesting timing considering #TAACCCT
I had no idea how much hand-wringing and consternation my off-handed comment would cause. It apparently caused (directly or indirectly) some heated discussions about SCORM being dead.
The problem is, I never said “SCORM is dead.” I said “SCORM is dead to the ADL.” Big difference.
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.
At DevLearn 2010, Ben Clark and I presented a session named SOAP for SCORM on behalf of LETSI. The topic was the LETSI Run-Time Web Service (RTWS), a proposed modification of SCORM to use SOAP for communication rather than the current JavaScript model. I presented the first half of the session, covering the basic “what” and “why” ideas while Ben covered the technical details (“how”) in the second half.
I’ll let the URLs do the talking
