Flash For Learning

I’m at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting and the first exciting thing I’ve heard so far has come from Valerie Smothers with MedBiquitous, talking about Virtual Patients — a model for reusable case studies to be exchanged for medical simulations around the world. Each Virtual Patient has metadata describing their patient data, media resoures, model for data availability, activities and the player that’s needed to play the simulation — that connects to the user interface, the learner profile and tracking.

And they are working with universities in Sweden (I think — maybe Finland) and the US on having working prototypes — and they work in SCORM-based Learning Management Systems.

After about a full day’s worth of talking about cleaning SCORM’s past, we finally get a taste for the future.

LomPad is a Metadata generator for Windows, Mac and Linux that will simply generate all the metadata you need, either to the IEEE standard LOM (Learning Object Model) profile or, specifically for many of us, the SCORM 2004 profile.

It’s pretty straight up and easy to use so far. I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces. It’s default language is French, but there is support for English that you can turn on pretty easily from its menu options.

I’m in the phase of our project where we need to update all our SCORM 1.2 content to 2004 and add metadata to the content package itself and for each SCO (I don’t think we’ll go down to the asset level yet). There isn’t much, if any, metadata in the original manifests and I’m not sure where to start. Do you happen to have any good examples of manifests with lots of embedded metadata (especially 2004 conformant packages)? We are planning on filling in info on all of the mandatory fields, but our customer also wants to be able to store information on SCO dependencies, source files, and/or related SCOs. I have no idea where to store this information under. Maybe you know a good starting point for us? We’re using the latest RELOAD 2004 editor.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Angela

Hi Angela,

My advice would be to quickly get started by entering meta-data using the latest version of RELOAD 2004 editor. I don’t know of any content examples (SCORM 2004) that are rich in meta-data – even the beginning ADL content examples were admittedly weak in this regard.

I have been using Reload Editor to enter Meta-data into the manifest, as you’re describing. I found it as easy to use as copying/pasting information out of an Excel spreadsheet into a web form. A little cumbersome, but definitely not difficult. Certainly better than hand-cranking XML.

There are a number of places to put the SCO dependencies, source files and other information. I think what you’ll want to look at it is putting that information under the element, with specific regard to and under that element. More on this can be found in the SCORM 2004 CAM Version 1.3.3, Section 4.2.5

As far as related SCOs, there’s a lot of ways to implement this. One way I would employ (being that I’m a big fan of emergent systems) is to utilize the elements that describe the learning object. Take a folksonomy approach (see http://del.icio.us for examples of folksonomy in action), using similar keywords to describe similar learning objects. Information on using the element under the element is located in the SCORM 2004 CAM Version 1.3.3, Section 4.2.2.5.

Good questions, Angela. I hope this helps get you started.