In Google Trends, if you search for people’s interest over time in SCORM, the results do not look so promising. SCORM is fading out, and it is evident in the falling interest of people. So what has gone wrong? Why is SCORM, a gold standard for eLearning industry, facing this decline? A Quick Recap on Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model. It is a collection of standards and specifications that define how your course content interacts with your learning management system. In a nutshell, if your content and LMS are SCORM compliant, your LMS will be able to track the consumption of your course content. Also, SCORM compliance on both sides (content and delivery) makes the eLearning content portable, reusable and durable. As an analogy, think of your content as a “DVD”, the LMS as a “DVD player” and imagine the difficulties you would have to face if the DVD worked with just a selected type of players! What Went Wrong? Developed by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), an initiative by the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, the first version of SCORM (SCORM 1.2) soon became the industry standard[1] in education technology. Since then, although many advanced versions of SCORM have been released in the market to improve its features, its popularity has seen a drop. What are the reasons behind this? Let’s take a look: Content Creation The first step in setting up an eLearning course is creating your course content. With SCORM, this process becomes costly and difficult. SCORM content is designed in SCORM authoring tools (an additional step for the users) that give you a .zip file as an output, and this .zip file is then uploaded in the LMS. SCORM content authoring tools are not light on... Read More
