Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0">Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
Several weeks ago, a call for white papers was announced to provide the broadest possible input into shaping SCORM 2.0.
We have this framework that most E-Learning content and Learning Management Systems use as a basis for their data tracking, communication and delivery — it’s called SCORM. You may not know how SCORM works, but if you’re involved in any way with E-Learning, you must know that its very existence affects you; specifically in how it sets the parameters for the learning experience you can provide in Learning Management Systems and Learning Environments (like Moodle or Blackboard) that support the framework.
10 years ago, it was a sketch on a chalkboard (literally). Today it permeates every way in which organizations of all kinds approach distributed learning and its technologies.
And we’re going to do it again with SCORM 2.0. We’re willing to start from scratch and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.
Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater discussion about what people feel is wrong with E-Learning. What the community is missing are the solutions… how do we fix it? How do we transform the field into something better/appropriate/right/good?
This is the opportunity I present to you. SCORM affects you as a purveyor of E-Learning, whether you create it, manage it, believe in it or loathe it. There is a real honest-to-goodness effort to bring in voices from outside the mainstream of standards development and produce an open (read: source) model for how learning takes place.
I am chairing a Program Area for LETSI, which means I’ll be helping to field, promote and review ideas presented about Interaction, Collaboration and Community.
I ask you with the whole of my heart: if you have a gripe about E-Learning, write it down and send it on — that is the basis of a White Paper for our purposes. This is not the academic or government world “white paper” — you don’t even need to propose the solution — just help us define the particular problem you want solved.
If you have a solution (but can’t figure out the problem exactly) — at least capture your pondering about what scenarios your idea could address. Direct me to your blog post — that works, too.
Your voice NEEDS to be heard. I/we at LETSI need to hear it.
Please consider the following…
- 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.
There are no constraints on format. We’re calling this kind of briefing a “white paper” — but if you want to produce a video or audio podcast to get this information to us — hey, that’s awesome.
Please send your white paper to scorm2@letsi.org — and if you’d rather send it directly to me, I’ll be happy to handle it from there.
Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, scorm, white paper, standards, letsi, interaction, collaboration, community
So, would gripes about how lms’s deal with content in the repository be an option? I just dealt this week with 2 lms’s that in 1 case could not handle datafromlms in a multi sco manifest and another that imported fine but then bombed out with errors as the repository part of the LCMS put requirements on the manifest that were optional under the standard. I know at a certain level this is not what scorm deals with but there has got to be a better certification process. These issues take away the “interoprability” of the standard. Has it been thought about including some CMS requirements in the standard?
You know, one of the things that I (think I) have been vocal about is how late in the game content developers and Instructional Designers were invited into SCORM 2004.
I would assert that by lacking any definitions around presentation of content, SCORM has really failed in delivering Sequencing and Navigation (though the guy that led that effort is really a genius, in my personal esteem). If you’re talking about SCORM 1.2, then you’re probably noticing the ill effects of having there different levels of conformance for certification in SCORM 1.2 — that are invisible to most people who just aren’t in that know. They got it right with SCORM 2004 — but made adoption impossibly hard with a Sequencing and Navigation spec that’s really hard to implement — let alone implement interoperably.
SCORM 2.0 definitely has to address the universal nature of interoperability; I personally think it has to address it from the business need of content that endures but with systems that may be transient. From a pure content development perspective, I’ve been thinking about approaching a CMS requirement as a white paper topic if only to publish “content” as XML with an LMS-provided “skin” to content — which helps to solve presentation issues.
But I’m also really interested in some learning 2.0/web 2.0 topics I want to write on.
Maybe I need to post my interests to the blog and see if I can get takers for collaboration on one or more topics. I can get some ideas started as white papers, but I’d really like these ideas to be vetted and improved with the perspective of others.
Proof that there’s an idea worth exploring…
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita-learningspec
“content that endures but with systems that may be transient”
You know, I started with our runtimes using all the latest and greatest stuff but i find we have less problems and calls if we take more of the functionality internal. Not a surprise that the Easy Bake software we talked about usually produce a single sco pkg. It’s kind of like .eps files. Encapsulate postscript gave art the ability to have print instructions embedded in it so pagemaker, quark, etc could a) not worry about it and b) not screw them up. This was back in the days of quark 2 and 3. It just gave the printer more flexability in their preflight software. And reduced the corruption potential of the file.
Not sure if that’s the issue you were going at but if we could better separate the advanced scorm stuff where the LMS couldn’t mess it up that may be a start.
I’d like to help you out but I am not a writer by any means and not sure where to start.
Yeah the different levels of 1.2 are rough, i thought datafromlms was in all levels but i should double check. But with the CMS stuff it may be we need to apply some stricter manifest and/or pkg structure that are based on CMS standards. And the test suite would need to test for it.
I’m just rambling now, so i’ll stop…