SCORM for Developers

The Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a system for standardizing how e-learning courses interact with a learning management system (LMS). Here’s a 60-second walk-through of how and why SCORM was created.

A quick overview of each SCORM component: the SCORM API, the CMI data model, and the course manifest (imsmanifest.xml).

Commercial course creation tools like Adobe Captivate, Articulate Rise, and iSpring are designed to be as compatible as possible by utilizing only the most commonly supported SCORM elements, which I refer to as the Safe Parts. If you limit your course’s use of SCORM to this subset of features, your course will work pretty much anywhere.

A primer on building a minimalist SCORM 1.2 course, containing only the bare minimum of SCORM code and not much else. This is a contrived example and is not meant for testing in an LMS.

In the last lesson in this SCORM for Developers series, we dipped our toes in the water and created the most barebones SCORM course possible. In this lesson, we’ll wade a little deeper, adding sophistication to the course via a smattering of JavaScript and HTML. We’ll use cmi.core.lesson_status, implement some error-checking, personalize the content, and even require an interaction before granting a course completion.

Before we start building functional SCORM courses, let’s take a moment to discuss how you can test your SCORM courses.

In the last lesson we briefly covered how to test SCORM courses. If you’d like to test a course in an LMS, you’ll need to package the course, so let’s take a moment to discuss packaging.