There are lots of tools for creating on-line learning. But just how good are any of them for integrating different sources of information ? And just what is involved technically in harnessing the Web to provide useful learning content ?
Simple is best
Our experience here at Ossidian shows that the simplest approach works best. We tried all the leading authoring tools and eventually concluded that it was cheaper, quicker and easier to author in a basic Word Processing package such as Open Office or Word. Then everything can be assembled together with graphics using Macromedia Flash. This produces minimal filesizes and quick on-line response - and, real importantly, there are lots of Flash developers around.
Reload is a great free tool for creating and maintaining Scorm manifests (and packaging the results).
But Scorm ...
Well Scorm is not really that difficult, is it ? Standard Javascript wrappers are available free, and integration with server-side LMS is well-proven. In our own technology (all open source using PHP, Apache, Linux and MySQL) we wrote the basic code in 2 weeks - and all the Scorm javascript is created dynamically by PHP. To get a basic Scorm system running - you don't need all the functions and weird metatags that the standard contains. There are only 4 or 5 key functions needs to start off and provide tracking and scoring.
Anyway, the authoring tools really don't need to optimize for Scorm. As long as you are passing the tracking and scoring data out of your SCOs - then the LMS work is pretty easy.
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> Scorm is not really that difficult, is it ?
Have you tried getting your SCORM content to work on more than just a few LMS's...it's easy to do SCORM, it's very hard to do SCORM well.
We've got 43 Scorm modules running on all the world's major LMS's plus some more besides.
Its not that hard if you follow the rules - the problem of course is that most of the LMS's don't follow them the same way !
We found that the simplest thing is to keep interaction with the LMS at a minimal conformance level - session time and score. If you want to do lots of fine-grained stuff then you are inviting problems.
Actually from an IT perspective Scorm 1.2 was very poorly designed and just look at the timing code when you try to implement it in a timezone that is not an integral number of hours away from GMT - eg Bangalore India is 5:30 ahead. The Javascript functions in the early standard wrappers were the wrong ones ! Should have used the UTC ones.
SO do I agree with you or not ? Well actually I do. But do I want to do Scorm at all ? There has to be a better way ....
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