Monday, October 22, 2007

What's really in the SCORM spec!

There is nothing in the SCORM spec that requires a FINAL assessment, or
any other kind of assessment. A course only needs to Initialize and
Finalize the session. It doesn't need to even report anything else.
That is why you will see tools that claim to be SCORM conformant, but
you author from Word, PowerPoint, Notepad, or MS-Paint.

Most authoring tools only have the concept of a FINAL assessment,
whereas you can actually have multiple assessments, surveys, etc. in
your course, and SCORM allows this. Many LMSs only store the minimum
SCORM data (score, status, time), so the authoring tools don't feel
compelled to push beyond. These LMSs tend to report even less about
each student. "Beyond" means including what the correct answer is, what
the student answered on every question, how long they took, how many
times they answered it, what they answered each time, etc.; information
that is useful for the course developer to know if they wrote good
questions. This probably explains why these tools only produce SCORM
packages if (and only if) you include a final assessment (and nothing else).

ReadyGo WCB will produce the SCORM package whether you include zero, one, or five hundred assessments.

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