SCORM - Lesson 4 - Content Packaging

   Content Packaging

1.     This lesson covers the beginner-level content packaging requirements for SCORM-conformant courses. Rama understanding the content in this lesson is essential to covering the advanced content packaging lesson. It is also useful, by itself, for content authors and others needing a basic understanding of the SCORM requirements.

This lesson assumes that you already covered the beginner-level concepts lesson, and that you are able to:

       identify and state the many SCORM acronyms, and

       describe the history and organization of ADL.

This lesson covers the fundamental ideas for packaging SCORM-conformant courses. Content packaging consists of organizing the content into a single directory, possibly with sub-directories, and preparing a manifest file that describes the following three key components of the course:

       the resources used in the course, i.e., the files,

       the navigation, or sequencing, structure of the course,

       a basic description of the course, i.e., the course metadata.

Content packaging does not address issues related to the communication of information, such as student scores, to and from the Learning Management System (LMS). These issues are addressed in the run-time lessons. Although basic course metadata are discussed in this lesson, the details of how to package course metadata in a course manifest file are described in the metadata lessons.

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

       recognize the purpose of each of the three major content packaging components,

       identify when a simple XML file is "well-formed,"

       distinguish between an XML file that is "well-formed" and one that is "valid,"

       list the basic elements of an imsmanifest file, and

       given a set of plausible manifest files, identify the correct file for SCORM version 1.2.

2.     content packaging is one of the three major components of SCORM. Content packaging is used to document three essential course characteristics:

       Course Description (course metadata),

       Course Sequencing (navigation), and

       Course Resources (SCOs and Assets).

This information is placed into a single file with the label imsmanifest.xml. As you can see, this is an XML file, which means that it is a simple text file containing XML syntax. In this course we use the term manifest file to refer to this file.

Content packaging in SCORM is derived from the IMS Content Packaging specification, version 1.1.2. SCORM places a few simple restrictions on the packaging metadata and adds an ADL attribute to the file descriptions. Other than that, the syntax described in the IMS packaging specification is identical to that used in SCORM 1.2.

In this lesson, you will learn how to read the information contained in a SCORM manifest file. However, to do that, you need to know a little about the syntax for that file, which is based upon the XML.