• SCORM 2.0 Content Authoring Standards & Services
• Engagement, Collaboration and Community in SCORM 2.0

1. Trying to take on too much by doing innovation by committee instead of codifying exemplars of best practice.
2. Working behind closed doors.
3. Losing the “vision.”

• Evolution - SCORM looks like relatively the same animal as before. It has the about the same scope and it solves very similar problems, but perhaps in new and innovative ways.
  
  
• Revolution - SCORM is a new beast entirely. It tackles new problems, increases the scope or completely changes the conceptual model.

There are at least two ideas I’ve had brewing that I’d like to write a white paper on, but I probably won’t have the gumption in me to finish both of them by myself by August 15. I’m posting them here in the hopes that you or someone you know might be interested in collaborating on a white paper topic through helping edit, research, add some other ideas and/or even to help write.

I think there are many people who feel a little nervous about the idea of writing a whole paper on their own. I’d feel a lot more comfortable myself if someone else thought I had a decent idea before I submitted it.

So if you’re interested in either of these ideas, let me know. I’m going to really try to draft up a brain dump on these topics by the beginning of next week, and we can take a stab at collaborating through Google Docs or the web 1.0 way of emailing Word Docs as an attachment.

My interests…

• Exposing a content authoring feature as a service to support subject matter experts and user-generated content, resulting in XML with media attachments packaged that can be “skinned” according to LMS-administered settings for organizational presentation rules.

  • DITA has a schema proposed for Learning and Training content.

  • Having E-Learning content that validates to the same schema helps with interoperability.

  • A standardized content authoring platform allows user-generated content to conform to organizational norms.

  • Separating out the “content” from the “presentation layer” allows organizations to control the presentation of interoperable content.

  • A market for LMS or service vendors opens up to compete on the strenth of the user-experience in authoring such content.

  • Services are already proposed to package content for SCORM “from the cloud.”

• Expose a service for tagging content (a la del.icio.us) and elevating the relevance of content (a la Digg/Pligg) to engage a community of learners to both assist in the metadata collection on content.

  • Metadata is still important, even if the implementation has been crap to this point.

  • Elevating the relevance of specific content over others in a repository helps with connecting to talent management systems, automated intelligent tutoring agents, etc.

  • Martin Ebner helped spark this specific idea and has agreed to help, but there’s room for a couple more collaborators if there’s interest on this topic.

• State the business, learning, or technology problem you want to address.
• Identify an existing or new service, specification, model or standard that should be incorporated into SCORM 2.0 to solve your problem.
• Explain how the solution could be implemented and tested by early 2009.

“Our company is starting to venture into creating SCORM modules.
What is the Best Mac software for developing SCORM content?

One option was Lectora? Any good?”

SCORM on a Mac… it’s tough. I assume you’re looking for authoring tools. On a Mac, there aren’t a lot of options at the moment. There’s no Captivate for the Mac. There’s no Articulate Presenter, no Lectora or Adobe Presenter for the Mac either. The only authoring tool I’ve seen that works straightforward on the Mac is eXe - http://exelearning.org/ — which produces standards compliant XHTML/CSS and a SCORM 1.2 content package.

The other option if you’re using a Mac is… and it pains me to say this as a longtime Mac user and advocate — is to run Windows on your Mac, and install one of the content authoring tools of choice (I feel best about Articulate’s suite of products if you’re not into “coding”). If, however, you are into actually coding, there are lots of options that are Mac native for beautiful multimedia — and if you have the requisite ability to tie everything together with HTML, JavaScript and feel comfortable using a packaging tool like Reload – I’d be happy to direct you to some fantastic tools.

And what tools would I point you to? I’m glad you asked.

• ScreenFlow
• Snapz Pro
• Keynote
• iMovie

LETSI, Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability, the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology.

Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28th, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA.

The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI’s goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology.

Open standards reduce life cycle costs and risks, and promote innovation. SCORM allows content developed in one system to be shared and fully functional within any other SCORM-conformant system. SCORM has been successfully used to develop sharable content in self-paced military training; automobile sales force training; healthcare professional re-certification; K-12 after-school tutoring in South Korea; and many other types of e-learning applications. Over the last decade, SCORM has become the de facto international software standard for learning systems interoperability.

SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM.

“Given the demands for harmonization across international technical learning standards, Core SCORM will be based on unencumbered open standards to maximize market growth and global adoption and implementation.” — Paul Jesukiewicz, Deputy Director, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been the advocate and steward of the first ten years of SCORM’s development, will continue to support the SCORM community and will maintain the current version, SCORM 2004, 3rd Edition. LETSI was formed by the ADL and eleven other organizations to provide an international, balanced, open forum for SCORM development and to harmonize activity across the diverse communities that are investing in learning technology: public education, higher education, for-profit education, military training, professional development/certification, corporate training, and on-the-job performance support.

To accommodate these diverse market needs, SCORM 2.0 will have two components:

1. A general reference model, Core SCORM, based on widely adopted, accredited learning technology standards that support basic interoperability.
2. Additional components that support broadly applicable LET functionality and instructional capabilities based on specifications that are not yet standards.

SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.

In mid-October, LETSI will host a 3-day SCORM 2.0 Workshop where participants will discuss alternative future learning technology solutions. The results will be incorporated in the next release of SCORM, which LETSI will announce at year’s end. It is expected that new products that are SCORM 2.0 conformant will begin to appear in late 2009.

LETSI is sponsored by a dozen organizations with commitments to SCORM and to the development of open learning technology standards. LETSI is organized as a program under the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. For more information about LETSI, please visit: http://www.letsi.org.

LETSI’s White Paper Solicitation is available here.

For more information about the white paper solicitation and the SCORM 2.0 Workshop, visit: http://www.letsi.org/SCORM2/

I’ll be the first to admit, this project could’ve gone wrong from jump in so many ways. We had an internal client who, like many clients, was very risk-averse, so the thought of doing a “game” was a risky move and required a lot of handholding. They could have bailed at any time. We had an incredibly tight deadline for a project like this. Normally, a multimedia-heavy project like this one, you’d like a solid six months to develop it out. We gave our vendor three, and by a lucky break for all of us, the delivery was delayed by a month which was needed.

We used a brand new vendor who was brought to us initially by our CLO. I’ll be the first to admit based only on the sample products they provided that I would not have chosen them — mostly because they seemed more like an Agency than a game development house and the look and feel of the products I saw were similar in nature, and I felt their production would be a disconnect with our audience (and our internal client). When the project was emerging from the Instructional Designer on the project, I ballparked the project at a certain cost. I expected the vendor to come in high and then we’d have to haggle and negotiate. I expected that working with the vendor, like many vendors I’ve both worked for and worked with, would be a painful tug-of-war, followed by some finger pointing, followed by relief that the project just “got done.”

I could not have been more wrong about this vendor, and I’m very, very happy to say so. They came in so close to the number I ballparked, I began to think they were taking us seriously. I waited with baited breath to see their first draft of the storyboards indicating the look and feel for the game, and having taken the time to visit and talk with one of our branch stores close to their office, they produced storyboards that I felt so perfectly blended my expectations for how to be at once “cool” and at the same time “mindful” of the people we were looking to instruct, as well as the complexity of the subject matter we were looking to demystify. They made learning the material (and the subject itself) “fun” and still “tasteful.” I was very impressed, and I’m the kind of person (as you know on this blog) that doesn’t run out of opinions. I became hopeful that this really could work.

They created the project in a very complete Alpha state. We tested it in our network and found that the bandwidth required would be a major obstacle for the target audience. We talked with our vendor about reducing the audio and video quality a bit and retesting it in our network before doing any more work on integrating it with the LMS — because if it wouldn’t perform as “content” out of the LMS, there was no point on troubleshooting the LMS communication. They had new files to us in a matter of days. We retested and got a green light on performance.

Then we moved onto LMS integration. I put together the API Wrapper and the rest of the SCORM packaging for our vendor, because they had not built for an LMS deployment before, and it would be just silly to make them go through the learning curve when I could just do that heavy lifting with little effort. They were able to write and read from the LMS at the prototype level (we did a technical test before they even tried to get the real content working to debug the communication issues). Not looking at their ActionScript at all, when we noticed some issues with suspend_data not being sent to the LMS, even though the code was the same as the prototype. It turned out that the content was sending consecutive JavaScript calls, which goes back to the whole synchronous/asynchronous deal about ActionScript and JavaScript (we had to use Flash 7 Player because my organization had not upgraded to Flash 9 Player at the time). Moving the calls so they were separated and event-driven made a huge difference. I was on the phone for a day and a half with the vendor. In ten years, I never worked as, for or with a more willing partner.

For reasons I’m sure you can understand, I can’t show you the game. I probably can’t talk much about what the game is about or what we’re trying to teach. I probably can’t broadcast the vendor we’re working with (though if you ask me offline, depending on whom you work for, I’ll be happy to tell you).

The point of this posting is to get off my chest in as public a means as I can how happy I am to be able to help make the vision of one of our Instructional Designers a reality — even if all I am is the babelfish (Hitchhiker’s Guide reference). We have our foot in the door for serious gaming. I’m betting it’s going to be a smashing success and will usher in a shift in instructional approach, both as far as what we propose and what our internal clients will consider.

And… I’m just happy as hell that after years of producing cool and not-so-cool page turning stuff, I get to finally be part of something different. I worked with a fantastic Instructional Designer and a really incredible Project Manager (I actually am gushing over Project Management and Instructional Design) — both of whom really “get it.” I had a boss who was willing to take a chance and a CLO who was ready to be a sponsor on something different. Best yet: I had an internal client who, despite their concerns, was willing to trust us and get the job done right.

And one more thing: I’m very humbled that there are vendors out there that can really be a partner in making great learning experiences, on-time, on-budget and far-exceeding expectations.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I have a happy project story and it didn’t kill us.

I received a Google Alert this morning from Al Moser’s blog where he basically states it’s time to blast our thoughts of reusability, in terms of reusing content objects into other contexts, and instead focus on reuse of content across learning environments. I urge you to read the original post, but let me riff on Mr. Moser’s thought:

The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled) content from one LMS to another; not from one COURSE to another, or from one authoring tool to another. Right now they are caught between trying to ensure that a course will work well on any LMS (therefore, it pretty much has to be static) and the Web 2.0 concepts of content aggregation in real time from multiple sources (thereby breaking LMS-independence)

I must admit I’m a little torn on the subject, because I don’t think that reusability of content into different contexts is impossible. I think it’s very difficult to pull off without the use of some aids in the form of applications, tools, search technologies and rigid presentation standards, admittedly none of which are used together today. But I can picture it. Others pictured it. Claude Ostyn and Phillip Dodds even pictured it. If you can see it, I’m tempted to believe you can build it when it comes to digital technology.

However, in stating this which I think is in direct opposition to Mr. Moser’s thought, I definitely agree that getting the E-Learning community over the hump of reusability is important, and this notion of redefining reusability by coupling it with “interoperability” isn’t a fragmentary notion. At the big SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, one of the ideas batted around for what to do next was to consider which “ilities” were really relevant.

I agree that it’s near impossible to reuse content in different contexts where we’re at now. We still can barely get tools we use all the time to work all the time. I mean, jeez… I defined Articulate and Quizmaker as a standard for my organization. And guess what? If you have special characters in your Quizmaker assessment, it can break your suspend data on closing the content, and thus it makes it look to the LMS like you didn’t complete content, even though you might have. So you work though that one issue and maybe you inserted a special character into the title of your content — which ends up as an attribute in your Metadata and in your Manifest — and that breaks your content. You fix that, but decide to put in multiple Quizmaker assessments into an Articulate Presentation, but you don’t want to use any of the assessments as a determining factor towards completion — which after much testing you find out will never leave a student’s enrollments because of some weird issue with how Quizmaker assessments are leveraged in Articulate Presenter.

I don’t mean to go off on a rant on issues Articulate has in Vendor X’s LMS. But I want to highlight the issues I see in just getting content from the same authoring tool, with the same code base, working in one LMS in a consistent manner with other pieces of content authored in the same tools and deployed to the same environment with the exact same code base.

See, my point is that as difficult as my scenario above is — I’m not trying to mix my content in with content possibly produced by somebody else — possibly not even built with Articulate. Even using certified SCORM products isn’t good enough. Articulate IS certified. Vendor X IS certified. But that doesn’t mean they work together out of the box.

So maybe for slightly different reasons, I agree with Al Moser about reusability. Because, from my vantage point, we can’t even talk about reusability — even at a technical level, until we can address interoperability. And frankly, we can’t talk about interoperability until we finally settle on compatibility.

Because at the end of the day, you just want the content you buy or build to work in the system you support. And if you’re building the content, this should be a science, not an art.

I’m pretty lucky to be able to narrow down the problem, because I spent many long days and nights side-by-side with Angelo at ADL, who’s the Godfather of Sequencing and Navigation (though I’m sure he’s loathe to go down in Wikipedia history for that effort in lieu of his Level 70 Shaman in WoW). In other words, my problem isn’t generally writing an effective manifest with Sequencing in it. All I want to do for my company right now is create a three-item tree for Pretest, Content and Posttest.

My problem is our LMS. I won’t name it, but it rhymes with “BaBa.” It’s a certified product that we’re upgrading to. It’s certified to SCORM 2004, 2nd Edition. I import content from ADL to run in its content administration. I can see from the debugging window that its handling the data model well (enough). But in between it redrawing the Table of Contents every time I navigate from one SCO to another and (what I think is happening with) the interpretation of what the rule is on the active node in the activity tree — I’m not being presented with any content as a result of passing or failing an objective. It’s recording the SCO itself as being passed or failed in the resulting transcript. But it’s not flowing on.

And that sucks. Bad. It makes me miserable. I have felt and feel for people dealing with these issues in our armed services and in all branches of government, where the decision is made to go with Vendor X for an LMS but the person who has to make the content work in the LMS has no say in the selection.

We talked at great length about this at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting last month. It will be discussed even more. There was talk at the time about the various vendors actually getting together with each other and figuring out how to share the interpretation of what a manifest is instructing a system to do. If you care about this… which is key to “interoperability” that many people are looking for… make it known to whoever your LMS Vendor is via their customer service or sales contacts with you and yours… and let them know that the next time you renew or upgrade, a factor in the decision to spend money with them is going to be how well they’re playing with others.

They won’t come to the same table by themselves, but they will if it means holding onto and growing the investment in YOU as a paying customer.

That’s my rant for the day.

EDIT: That’s not really fair of me to say at all. There were a handful of representatives from LMS Vendors large and small at the TWG. Several of them were very willing to “come together” and commit to working with a shared set of content packages as test cases to tweak their implementations to behave the same way. I won’t out them either at this point (I don’t want to be counter-productive). My main point is that if they’re going to do this, as customers we can hold a great amount of sway by encouraging this activity — either with the carrot or with the stick.

The world has changed since the merry band in the SCORM TWG assembled to cook up SCORM 2004 back in 2002. Back then, there was no YouTube. No Facebook. No MySpace. The iPod was a baby and hardly a product priced for the masses. Cellphones that had cameras were not at all ubiquitous in the US. Text messaging and web browsing certainly were not commonplace on mobile devices. WiFi was hard to find. People only played video games at work if they worked for a dotCom.

And, to be perfectly candid in my opinion, SCORM 2004 wasn’t so much about the way forward as it was fixing what everyone knew was still not right with SCORM 1.2.

It was pretty evident to me, at least, that this SCORM TWG meeting was as much about tidying up the loose ends still connected to SCORM 2004 as it was to start really thinking about what’s next for us in E-Learning. Should we do more of the same, but continue to make things more stable? How important is reusability of learning objects, or anything else we’ve been preaching for the past four years? This was the first SCORM TWG meeting that I attended in-person, and it was the largest attended meeting that I can remember, with the most diverse audience ever assembled. And the question that we’re all left to answer from this meeting isn’t so much “What are we saying to each other?” (We miss you P.D.), so much as it was….

“What do we want to do?”

The passing of both Phillip Dodds and Claude Ostyn this year is very sad, but the timing could not be more impactful (I don’t want to say ironic, but I don’t have a better word to describe it). With the IP issues as resovled as they’re going to be between ADL and IMS and the timetable so tight in order to resolve Simple Sequencing with IMS — we are all presented with a mission and an opportunity now that probably would not exist with the same shining lights leading us before. There were voices heard in this last meeting that have been largely silent before, and it’s a change that everyone has to get used to — but it’s a very good change.

The meeting highlighted how important the framers of online learning believe SCORM is, as it is. But I spoke about (and heard from many others), that there’s more to this picture — and that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to hold on to the past. We may not need to start from the ground up and press the “Reset” button on SCORM, but we also shouldn’t be afraid to do it, either.

We need to figure out what problems educators and learners are trying to work through, and what e-learning looks like in the near and longer-term. And… quite frankly, we need to figure out if that vision can be commercial enough for everyone involved to profit. The government is turning SCORM over to the community that uses it. It’ll be up to all of us to support it in some way. And while it’s a little scary, I think it’s an AWESOME thing. Because when that happens, everyone has ownership. Everyone has skin in the game to be committed to putting out the best specification we can open up to the world. And everyone has a voice in what the future of online learning can be.

I’m much more empowered now than I was before. I’m excited and humbled to be able to work with so many passionate and brilliant people on this. And I’m going to be reflecting quite a bit on how I see the future taking shape.

But the most important thing that all of us involved with SCORM need to know is what YOU think learning should be like. If you could wave the magic wand and participate (or simply consume) your training or learning however you wanted… what would it be? Please feel free to comment.

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.