Regards
Rao

It’s really a hard decision… I hope someday SCORM will achieve such kind of functionaly — especially considering the direction browsers seem to be headed to. Today, it’s just to limiting.

Yours, is an interesting solution. I think I would implement something similar if I were in your place. Maybe using Java instead, but it would work the same.

Well, apart from doing a Web LMS, you can use Java or XML remoting in your system. The only problem would be cross-domain issues. I don’t know how they would play in a local system. But I think it would be possible, with some configuration.

I don’t know of SCORM API implementations in PHP, but I will ask in a SCORM list I’m subscribed to (in Portuguese). Maybe somebody knows. I haerd that ILIAS, an open source LMS, would be implementing SCORM in its new release, but I don’t know the state of the implementation. today.

In my case, we have a sophisticated non-programming authoring system that creates highly interactive lessons with any type of content without programming. The system is now around 20 years old (updated through various op systems etc) and has been specifically developed for education and training.

While security between client and server is important and data transport can be frustrating, an executable program run from a browser has no connection to the client or server. Our lessons are in fact a single Zipped file that uses an installed player (on Windows) to run. So we can easily start them from a link on a web page or anywhere.

The only way I could confer SCORM compatibility was to write a ActiveX control that is used from Javascript to start the lesson and read and write information locally so that the player can read it when it starts. I also added AICC compliance but it suffers from needing to know the URL used.

This works fine as long as you can use ActiveX. While I have developed a Windows network based LMS, we were reluctant to do a Web LMS so I am now looking for an Open Source PHP based implementation of the SCORM API or perhaps PHP/Javascript is a better description to fit into a PHP based LMS.

I would appreciate any info on SCORM API development in a PHP environment.

About your question, some LMSes do indeed support non-SCORM courses, but in many cases they won’t provide any run-time support to the course. Anyway, if you want to run a course under SCORM-compliant LMSes, you’d better create it using the standard. As SCORM is now mainly a market requirement, you will be investing in your courses’ marketability.

I found this site searching information about SCORM. We are investigating
everything about this standard and we want to create online courses under
SCORM standard, but we know a few information.

We know that we need the next files:

manifest.xml
imscp_v1p1p3.xsd
imsmd_v1p2p2.xsd
ims_xml.xsd
adl_cp_rootv1p1.xsd

to store all information about course for any LMS that support SCORM.
My cuestion is: if we create a course that isn’t under SCORM can we
enroll it at any LMS under SCORM standard?
If the answer is yes can I tracking the course progress?

Thank you for your answer
Luis E. Garcia

About your questions, if you decide to go with SCORM, it will probably mean a big change in the way your courses are implemented. As you mentioned, the standards places a big emphasis on the client side of the courses, and many thing you take for granted in a server-side environment are simply not possible.

You will have, as you said, to drop PHP and go with simple HTML and JavaScript under the SCORM run-time environment. Data transmission is limited, in most cases, either to 255 or 4096 characters, depending on the data you are working with. You can, of course, ignore those limits in your our LMS, but if your courses need to work in other LMSes, you will have to abide to those rules.

As for branching, you can do it inside a specific module. Of course, the restrictions aforementioned apply, which will make the task a bit difficult. However, navigation between modules from inside a module presents a big problem in the current version of the standard (1.2). It simply doesn’t exist. You will have to code you own non-compliant navigation inside the module; implement the 1.3 version of the standard and hope it doesn’t change; or ignore it, forcing the user to navigate externally, using the mechanisms provided by the LMS itself.

Assessments are another trick part. The current version of the standard has a very limited support to them. In case of self-assessments and simple tests, you can implement them without much problem. Secure assessments, which will be used for real credit, are not entirely possible however.

In short, SCORM compliance can be as much an asset as a liability. It’s a hard decision, to be taken with great care.

I hope I helped. If you have further questions, feel free to continue this discussion.

I found your post on the web today and it is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been looking for a SCORM expert (or at least somebody who has implemented it) to ask some questions to so I hope you don’t mind my asking. I’m the system admin for a company called Targeted Learning and we’ve built a rather extensive elearning course called Making a Difference using php/mysql. The course is not SCORM compliant. At the time of its creation it was determined that what we wanted to do either couldn’t be done with SCORM or was not worth it. Now we are having second thoughts and are trying to determine what it would take to rebuild this thing as a SCORM compliant course. You can see the course I’m talking about by going to http://www.targetedlearning.com/wbt.php and logging in as user=b@b.com pass=b. I believe I understand how SCORM works with having many SCOs and using javascript in the html pages to call the API to get and set data. What if I wanted to get/set large amount of data (maybe an array of strings)? What if I wanted to do complex branching (that is going to different SCOs) based on the user’s input (and not just a single user input value but a combination of user inputs). Can SCORM handle this. Currently all of the code to handle this is in the PHP server side code and from what I understand SCORM would force me to do everything on the client side instead? For a good example of what we are doing, go to Lesson 4 and then click on the “Self Assessment” button on the left side. Go ahead and try the self assessment a few times and see how dynamic of branching we are talking about here. Thanks for you input and I look forward to learning more about this. Feel free to email me if you so desire (jason AT targetedlearning dot com) -Jason

Greetings from Kolkata, India.

I came upon your blog searching Google for
“javascript scorm”.

Regarding usage of server-side resources the
“HRef” of a Resource may point to any URI
(say a servlet call). Can this be considered
usage of server-side resource?

Regards,

Diptendu