A scorm odyssey: the University of Wisconsin's journey through standards has lessons for anyone about to embark on e-learning

T+D, August, 2002 by Bill Shackelford

Not too long ago, an e-learning project manager I know jokingly referred to SCORM as "a happy place in the future." In the minds of many e-learning developers, standards are a bitter pill--providing little in return for the effort. But that view is turning around. Standards is a hot topic. Even though there's much work ahead in defining universal standards, a solid foundation is in place upon which to build your e-learning strategy. For e-learning project managers, that points to certain considerations for every project.

SCORM--sharable content object reference model--promises to bring together the best of current standards and provide a common ground for e-learning in the future. Such seemingly diverse bodies as the U.S. Department of Defense, major academic institutions, and rival vendors of e-learning products are working together to get to that happy place in the (not so distant) future.

In the meantime, one group's SCORM odyssey can serve as an itinerary for your own journey into the world of e-learning standards and help you focus your efforts.

Lots of acronyms

In November 1997, the DoD and the White House Office of Science and Technology established the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative to promote collaborative development of common standards for e-learning. The first ADL Co-Laboratory opened in 1999 in Alexandria, Virginia. Another, the Joint Co-Lab in Orlando, Florida, was set up to encourage collaborative development of ADL projects and systems acquisitions. During 1999, preliminary versions of SCORM specification began to appear. In January 2000, the Academic Co-Lab was established on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, with Judy Brown as executive director, to serve the academic community. At roughly the same time, SCORM version 1.0 arrived.

The University of Wisconsin Learning Innovations was created in 1997 by the UW Board of Regents to serve all 26 of the UW campuses and support their online degree programs. In addition, UWLI offers consulting and course development services to organizations outside the university, whose close contact with the ADL operation provided the opportunity to be an early participant in the Academic Co-Lab's activities as a contributor of staff time and resources, and beneficiary of the co-lab's efforts.

But first, let's break down the acronym SCORM and define its parts:

Sharable. The goal is to make learning content readily available, without adaptation, to virtually all members of the learning community. That means that the content should run on multiple platforms and be launchable from any number of SCORM-conformant learning management systems. It also means that the content should carry information that enables identification and search of the content. That identifying information is called meta-data--data about the content rather than the content itself. To draw upon an analogy from the world of digital music, meta-dara would be the title, performance date, and artist for a song. Putting aside the complicated issues of intellectual property and copyright, such meta-data might someday enable the free flow of learning content a la Napster.

Content. The choice of the word content rather than course is especially important. A piece of content can be as small as a single page, a single image, a single audio file, or even one word or character. This broad spectrum of granularity provides great flexibility for learning developers.

Object. This term, from the world of information technology; implies that, as standards evolve, the existence of learning chunks or objects containing data and behaviors will make it easier to develop reusable content. Reference model. This term reminds us of SCORM's role as a roadmap to standards work, similar to a bookshelf of reference materials. SCORM-based standards depict, or model, the learning content so that everyone needing to access or combine that content into larger composites can understand it thanks to its description through the SCORM framework.

How it all began

SCORM grew out of a series of events that started back in 1996, when the DoD began exploring ways to increase readiness and reduce duplication of training efforts through the use of network and Web-based technologies. During that same period, a growing number of colleges and universities launched initiatives to add e-learning (a.k.a. distance education) courses to their curricula. Meanwhile in corporate training, e-learning began replacing many instructor-led offerings. Suppliers of courseware, course development tools, and learning management systems fought for market share.

Standards usually take years to develop. Rather than draft and dictate an arbitrary set of new standards for e-learning compliance, ADL took the SCORM approach, emphasizing the reference model. That built on a foundation of the best current standards to define key aspects of e-learning, giving developers and tool vendors an evolving de facto standard until final versions of the reference model could be presented to standards bodies such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for adoption. By drawing from the work of several key consortiums, SCORM provided time-tested industry specifications that could be honed into a comprehensive reference model for the testing and certification of e-learning products and content.