If you’re new to eLearning or Learning Management Systems you’ll often hear or see the word SCORM. It’s a piece of jargon we use that means nothing to people outside our industry. So, let’s explain SCORM in layman’s terms:
- SCORM is the most common standard format that eLearning modules are published in. It allows content to be uploaded to and tracked by a Learning Management System.
Why do we need a standard? Well, there are two main steps to delivering eLearning. First you make the content, then you put the content online. Typically, you make the content using a computer program called an ‘authoring tool’. There are many authoring tools on the market; Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline or Elucidat are examples. The next step is to put your content online. You do this using a Learning Management System (‘LMS’). Example LMSs are Totara, Moodle or Docebo. It is critical your content can ‘talk’ to your LMS so that you can track how your learners are doing. You want to capture data such as; Who has done which course? How long they looked at the course? What score did they get? Which specific questions did they get wrong? This is the magic of SCORM. The SCORM standard defines how this data is captured and communicated.
Having a standard allows learning and development teams to use their preferred choice of authoring tool and their preferred choice of LMS without compatibility issues.
SCORM is not a standard for the technology that the eLearning itself is built with. So, you can have eLearning built in Flash which is packaged into SCORM format or eLearning built in HTML 5 packaged into SCORM format or any other technology.
A SCORM file, typically looks exactly like a zip file. If an LMS asks you to upload a SCORM file you upload it in whole – don’t unzip it. This is very easy on Docebo.
Things are slightly complicated by there being more than one flavour of SCORM e.g. SCORM 2004 and SCORM v1.2. There are also other competing standards e.g. AICC or Tin Can/xAPI. These formats are less common. xAPI is gaining traction, however, it is still a bleeding edge technology that we would avoid for now. Whichever you use Docebo LMS is compatible with ALL these standards. We’ll do another article on the different types in future.
Whether you are looking to buy SCORM content, build-your-own SCORM content, or find an LMS to host SCORM content we can help you. eLearning is what we do. Please feel free to get in touch.