Why SCORM?
It's not unusual for people involved in authoring and developing online courses to question the need and rationale for building SCORM-conformant courses. The rationale for SCORM is summarized in the "RAID" acronym. That is, the intent is that SCORM-conformant courses be:
Currently there is a large selection of learning management systems (LMS) vendors. In academia, the most popular are WebCT, Blackboard and TopClass. However, there are many other LMS vendors. Edutools.info maintains a web site devoted to reviewing and comparing popular learning management systems.
Although choice and competition in the marketplace are generally a good thing, the rapid growth of LMS vendors has created a significant problem for content authors. Without a common specification for packaging online courses, LMS vendors organize their content databases in any fashion they choose. As a result, every vendor is using a different format for packaging their courses.
Although they are all delivered by http, or some other standard protocol, if an author tries to move a course from one LMS to another, they find that this task is very time-consuming. In many cases, moving from one LMS vendor to another requires complete reconstruction of the course materials.
ADL is evolving a set of specifications for packaging online courses that will not only make it easier to transport a course from one LMS to another, it will also achieve other desirable goals as well. A course packaged following the SCORM specifications can be transported from one LMS to another with minimum modifications.
Why SCORM
Accessibility?
A major goal of SCORM is to provide learning materials anytime-anyplace and to create customized learning geared to the learners individualized needs. Since the Content Aggregation Model within the SCORM specifications describes a standard way for packaging course materials, SCORM facilitates this goal. However, more is needed. Towards this goal, the ADL has developed learning repositories, or a network of databases for learning materials, under the CORDRA initiative that can be searched and accessed for course materials.
Today, Internet users quickly learn to use the popular search engines for finding information on the web, such as yahoo.com and google.com. The popularity and usefulness of the web would be much less if this ability to search for information was unavailable. The W3C html standard makes this possible by providing a common standard, or language, for presenting web pages. Without a common html standard, searching the web would be difficult and impractical.
SCORM repository technology will facilitate the development of new search engines designed to find and make available learning content. Content developers will relate to learning repositories in the way that today's commercial artists use libraries of high-quality photographs and drawings. Developers can take their content and aggregate it with repository learning content. In some cases, this might even be done real-time, at the point of use. That is, learners will be able to create their own, possibly unique, combination of learning content selected to meet their particular needs, just when they need it.
ADL foresees the day when this will form the basis for an instructional economy with incentives for content creators to develop high-quality materials, encouraging the development of whole new classes of products and services that provide accessible, sharable and adaptive learning experiences.
The development of repositories and an instructional economy does raise interesting copyright questions, and questions of compensation for producers and distributors of this content. In some ways, these issues will be similar to those being explored today with the online distribution of recorded music.
It's not unusual for people involved in authoring and developing online courses to question the need and rationale for building SCORM-conformant courses. The rationale for SCORM is summarized in the "RAID" acronym. That is, the intent is that SCORM-conformant courses be:
- Reusable - objects from course A can be used again in course B ,
- Accessible - can be searched and made available as needed by both learners and content developers,
- Interoperable - operates across a wide variety of hardware, operating systems and web browsers, and
- Durable - does not
require significant modifications with new versions of system software.
Currently there is a large selection of learning management systems (LMS) vendors. In academia, the most popular are WebCT, Blackboard and TopClass. However, there are many other LMS vendors. Edutools.info maintains a web site devoted to reviewing and comparing popular learning management systems.
Although choice and competition in the marketplace are generally a good thing, the rapid growth of LMS vendors has created a significant problem for content authors. Without a common specification for packaging online courses, LMS vendors organize their content databases in any fashion they choose. As a result, every vendor is using a different format for packaging their courses.
Although they are all delivered by http, or some other standard protocol, if an author tries to move a course from one LMS to another, they find that this task is very time-consuming. In many cases, moving from one LMS vendor to another requires complete reconstruction of the course materials.
ADL is evolving a set of specifications for packaging online courses that will not only make it easier to transport a course from one LMS to another, it will also achieve other desirable goals as well. A course packaged following the SCORM specifications can be transported from one LMS to another with minimum modifications.
A major goal of SCORM is to provide learning materials anytime-anyplace and to create customized learning geared to the learners individualized needs. Since the Content Aggregation Model within the SCORM specifications describes a standard way for packaging course materials, SCORM facilitates this goal. However, more is needed. Towards this goal, the ADL has developed learning repositories, or a network of databases for learning materials, under the CORDRA initiative that can be searched and accessed for course materials.
Today, Internet users quickly learn to use the popular search engines for finding information on the web, such as yahoo.com and google.com. The popularity and usefulness of the web would be much less if this ability to search for information was unavailable. The W3C html standard makes this possible by providing a common standard, or language, for presenting web pages. Without a common html standard, searching the web would be difficult and impractical.
SCORM repository technology will facilitate the development of new search engines designed to find and make available learning content. Content developers will relate to learning repositories in the way that today's commercial artists use libraries of high-quality photographs and drawings. Developers can take their content and aggregate it with repository learning content. In some cases, this might even be done real-time, at the point of use. That is, learners will be able to create their own, possibly unique, combination of learning content selected to meet their particular needs, just when they need it.
ADL foresees the day when this will form the basis for an instructional economy with incentives for content creators to develop high-quality materials, encouraging the development of whole new classes of products and services that provide accessible, sharable and adaptive learning experiences.
The development of repositories and an instructional economy does raise interesting copyright questions, and questions of compensation for producers and distributors of this content. In some ways, these issues will be similar to those being explored today with the online distribution of recorded music.
No comments:
Post a Comment