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SCORM Compliance

In the late 1990s, sectors within the Department of Defense felt that their training system was woefully inadequate. Each branch used its own computing system when devising online training, used its own programming and bookkeeping language, and rarely had any sense of a coherent goal. In response, the Shareable Course Object Reference Model (SCORM), was created. SCORM envisioned a unified Web of training materials that could easily be blended into one whole--regardless of which military service devised the original training. The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative was born with the goal of gathering all the disparate distance learning projects under the umbrella of SCORM. More and more sectors of both the government and corporate worlds have started to embrace SCORM’s vision. Thus, any organization seeking federal funding for distance education needs to be familiar with SCORM and ADL.

SCORM was still in its embryonic stages when the CLASS™ grant expired. Thus, it did not play a large role in CLASS's™ development.

For a project starting in 2003, following the ideas within the SCORM document would be a politically intelligent (and marketing-savvy) decision. Vendors of learning management systems (LMS) are working diligently to establish SCORM compliance of their software development packages. This means you could change LMS vendors down the road is you so choose – without needing to rework all of your online courses to fit the new vendor.

In a nutshell, SCORM demands that courseware be useable on various platforms and browsers, be modular (meaning that it should be able to be broken down into small chunks and not only available as an entire course), and should be easily and rapidly updated to fit the audience. Following are the accepted terms of adaptability:

• Reusability: the flexibility to incorporate instructional components in multiple applications and contexts.
• Interoperability: the ability to take instructional components developed in one location with one set of tools or platform and uses them in another location with a different set of tools or platform.
• Durability: the ability to withstand technology changes without redesign, reconfiguration or recoding.
• Accessibility: the ability to locate and access instructional components from one remote location and deliver them at many locations.
• Maintainability: the ability to update and upgrade viable content.
  

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