SCORM not suited for higher-ed?

September 5, 2006

CETIS-Dan Rehak: "SCORM is not for everyone"

Dan Rehak, one of the  ‘chief architects’ of the SCORM specification, was quoted as saying "SCORM has nothing in it about collaboration. This makes it inappropriate for use in HE and K-12".  This is not news - the quote is almost 4 years old.  However, it still seems that there was/is quite a push for SCORM compliance in distance learning systems.  A project I was involved in - Logicampus - had people requesting SCORM functionality years ago, and more recently some requests have come in for Logicampus proposals, all requesting SCORM.  It seems it’s primarily a bullet point on a check list for people investigating distance learning software.

Logicampus doesn’t have enough mindshare or developer effort these days, but packages like moodle and sakai do.  I would prefer to see a real spec for content sharing come out of these projects through collaboration between the major open source players, and simply ignore the larger players like blackboard.  It seems far more good would come out of real world people coming up with real world specs to solve real world problems rather than trying to implement rehashed specs for a dated technology that was never intended for collaborative/distance-learning environments.  But that’s just my two cents.  To the extent that more recent SCORM specs may address some of these shortcomings, it feels like trying to squeeze a round peg in a square hole. 

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