Does LMS provide Scorm Tracking without creating an authoring package for beginners?

Question

Before creating an eLearning solution, I determine whether to use an authoring package, such as Captivate or Storyline, or to create HTML pages that use JS queries to track. If I avoid using the development tool, I get the flexibility to maintain and reuse existing assets. For example, Storyline displays SWF files that I cannot transfer to my team as a simple HTML page for review. However, I am new to SCORM .. and I wonder if it’s possible to speed up the implementation of SCORM LMS JS calls along with my own HTML pages, or is the preferred approach to start with a development tool?

Answer 1

Yes, it is very possible if you like HTML and JavaScript.

SCORM supports many complex scenarios, but the dirty secret of most e-learning development tools is that they use only the most SCORM barebones: bookmarks, completion status, and ratings. Adding this barebone level SCORM support for the manual HTML / JS course is very simple, and in the simplest cases it only takes a few hours.

There are many libraries that will help you get started, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and not get into some details like jQuery vs vanilla JS.

The organization that created SCORM provides the shell. They updated it in 2011 ; it is now much better, although it still suffers from global pollution of the namespace.

Andrew post defends Rustici Software tools (he works there). They are great guys, SCORM and xAPI (Tin Can) experts, and their code is solid, but their code is not open source, if that matters to you. (FWIW they have an excellent online table for SCORM time calls , I use it all the time.)

I have heard good things about JCA Solutions products, but have not used their code myself.

In 2008, I wrote my own SCORM shell (open source available on GitHub ) that met my own needs - your mileage may vary, I wrote this in part because I was unhappy with the wrapper provided by ADL at the time. Their shell suffers from global pollution of the namespace and does not provide error handling. I noticed that I continued to write the same error checking and conditional logic on my courses again and again. I decided to move some of this to the shell to keep the minimum course code and DRY. If you're interested, I wrote a simple tutorial to add SCORM to an HTML file using my cover (note that this is a single HTML page, if you use multiple pages, you will need to use iframes to prevent accidentally killing the API connection).

My wrapper is old and not perfect, and I am not a self-promoter. I suggest you try all the wrappers mentioned by the other posters and find the one that seems the most natural / intuitive for you, best suits your coding style and meets your licensing requirements. All of them protect you well from difficulties and help you start your course.

Bottom line: you don’t need to use ready-made development tools, HTML is a great choice, and as you can see, there is a decent community that can help you.

Answer 2

There is a way to use both methods and support reuse. You can create small pieces of reusable content in a development tool, such as getting involved. And bundle them together in SCORM packages. But looking retrospectively at my own experiences, I would like to first learn about SCORM. Captivate and other development tools cost money, while creating and coding your own packages is free, and in most cases it takes as much time as knowledge. There are resources for learning quickly, I used JCA Solutions and completed the course in about a week. I found it faster and easier than Captivates coaches. But what am I.

Good luck.

Answer 3

There are several mid-range options for you:

• Use the development tool and customize the output if you need to go beyond the standard features. Most authoring tools have built-in extensibility features.

• Use Driver to handle tracking and create content from scratch.

• Consider using Tin Can if you are creating types of training. Conventional creation tools are not meant to be created.

Knowing a bit about SCORM is useful, but don't reinvent the wheel.

Answer 4

There is little that comes with custom packages based on your needs. You can decide what browser support you want to use if you want to use the template system if you use your (minimize your) API or third parties such as pipwerks, SCOBot (mine) or Rustici.

Lack of accessibility, Flash content and other parameters / restrictions can lead to the fact that third-party systems will not be violated.

And, of course, the budget. You may need to navigate through Lectora, iSpring, Captivate, and any number of possible systems to fill in the time and budget span.