What is the minimum requierment of SCORM?

A few SCORM Questions:
You describe the other tools as rather weak when it comes to real Scorm support, in the real world they seem to be able to produce Scorm-compliant courses as promised. Is this because the minimum requirement/the minimum of information wanted by most organizations is low?


Answer:
If you only have one interface for SCORM, then that is all the course author has access to. By doing less, you can avoid supporting the customer, and can simply push the course author to ask the other vendor (LMS vendor or authoring tool vendor) to make up for the behavior that you would like. Most authoring tools and LMSs only support the lowest common denominator required to claim SCORM or AICC compliance/conformance. If you do this, you can create your sales/marketing material, and the customers will not look beyond this. As you are seeing, many of the issues become difficult to visualize unless you have experience in the field. For a large number of trainers, producing anything beyond PowerPoint is either too difficult or just not of interest. So imagine trying to ask a course author whether they want to set the lesson status based on number of times a test has been taken. For the vendor support department, the best approach is to simply provide one interface behavior. If the customer wants more, they can take the 6 week course on programming in Flash. This will repel most course authors, and simultaneously will minimize support costs. Unfortunately, it also discourages the learners because their experiences are bland.

Question:
Do authoring tools other then ReadyGo have LMS packs? How do other tools fulfill the different needs of the customer?

Answer: Yes, ReadyGo is the only tool with LMS packs and behaviors. This is because the other tools believe that their customers don’t have needs beyond the single behavior. They think the only reasonable score is a value between 0 and 100? (With SCORM 2004, the score is now required to be between -1.0 and +1.0.) They think the only reasonable behavior is to have a student pass one test at the end of a course? Other common assumptions are: Why should a student ever come back to a course once they have completed it? Shouldn’t there only be one test question per page of content?

Question:
What is the minimum to achieve scorm-compliant certification?

Answer:
Call LMSInitialize() and LMSFinish()
Two fields, one tells the LMS the course has been started, the other tells the LMS the course is complete.

Question:
What is the difference between AICC-compatibility and Scorm-conformance?

Answer:
There is no real AICC-compatibility certification. You go to an “independent” agency of your choice, and pay money for them to write something that says you comply with the specification as you have chosen to interpret it. With SCORM there is an official test suite you can use. The test suite is better, but only checks for the minimum requirements (see above).