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.
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.
LETSI’s 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.
And so ends another whirlwind of a week known as DevLearn.
Could the timing have been any better? My San Francisco Giants (yes, my Giants!) won the World Series and decided to have the largest parade in San Francisco history on the first day of DevLearn. It just happened to be a block from the conference site, which was A-OK with me! In their honor, I wore my Giants jersey the entire day.
I’ll let the URLs do the talking
If you spend any time using Captivate to create SCORM-conformant courses, you’re bound to have run into an issue or two that caused you to read some Captivate forum posts. Almost without fail, someone will mention that the solution to their problem was changing the value of the magical g_intAPIType JavaScript variable from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1.
So what the heck is g_intAPIType, and why does changing it make a difference?
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?
Someone recently asked me if it was possible to customize Captivate’s SCORM template to reduce the need for manual editing after publishing. In her case, the manifest needed to be edited to include SumTotal TotalLMS’s custom SCORM extensions. The answer is yes. Here’s how.
