Re: [school-discuss] SCORM: was: more about sif

["Michael A. Hess" <mhess@miraclec.com>]

mike eschman wrote:

> so you are starting with a first line of code?
SCORM isn't a way of programming it is a way of designing CBT 
courseware. It has more to do with how Instructional designers organize 
and construct the flow of a course. How the various pieces of 
information need to interact. Everything is organized in SCO (Sharable 
Content Objects). This defines that portion of the course that can be 
shared and reused in another course. The devision could be by chapter, 
module, or right to the page level. It all depends on the ID.

Then the next important things is the manifest file. This is an XML 
construct that contains ALL of the information about the course it 
contains each of the SCO's and how they relate to each other. The flow 
of the course from SCO to SCO. What resources are required in each SCO 
such as video, images, external files, etc. They can be assigned to just 
one SCO or they can be shared resources between several SCO's.

That manisfest file was for the course as a whole. Next you need to 
create resource manifest files which are found along with the resource 
be it video or image or whatever and this contains all of the 
information describing what the resource is, license, copyrights, size, 
shape, detail description, etc. etc. Each resource needs to have an 
accompaning resource manifest file.

Are you getting the picture here. So far there has been a great deal of 
work and several megs worth of content and files and you haven't written 
one line of code.

The only portion of code that is really required is the pieces of code, 
usually Javascript, that talk to the LMS. Each SCO can talk to an LMS 
and nothing else. It can't be linked to anyother SCO or control user 
flow outside of itself. In other words you can go page by page within 
and SCO but no SCO could call another chapter or module. Only interSCO 
linking is allowed no intraSCO linking.

Also SCORM is for us with WBT only. It isn't for stand alone courseware. 
It is designed for courseware to be delivered over the internet or 
intranet using a standard browser.

The coding to make a course SCORM complicant is the smallest portion of 
the effort.

The link that was provided in the other email is a good place to start 
to learn about SCORM and how it is used and how to design for it.

--
==== Programming my first best destiny! ====

Michael A. Hess      Miracle Concepts, Inc.
mhess@miraclec.com   http://www.miraclec.com
Phone: 570-388-2211  Fax: 570-388-6101