I thought I had referenced this earlier, but maybe not….CETIS had an short article posted earlier this month that contained remarks from Dan Rehak around the appropriate use of SCORM in its current state. There were a few comments posted, one noteably from Don Johnson who is involved with DoD’s efforts around SCORM. Finally as a follow up to the original article, Mark Ohlert [puuurple shiiiirrt] from ADL, was given the opportunity to respond and clarify to some of the statements in the article.
While there are obvious shortcomings with SCORM (its not a silver bullet, and never intended to be), it does provide an additional point of discussion around issues with interoperability of content. I’ve long held the belief that ALL of this *stuff* boils down to people wanting more choice. It seems reasonable to want more flexibility with the content developed so that it does not have to re-engineered to work in another system. We recently (past couple years) went through a conversion process for some of our online academic materials. I can’t help, but wonder how much time would have been saved if the materials (and the system[s] that support them) were based more in standards. The entire process, from my perspective, started out of a simple desire by some to choose a different environment, LMS, or whatever.