SCORM Compliant Software: How to Find an LMS That Checks All the Boxes

 Here you are, looking for an eLearning platform that is a perfect match for your SCORM content. Forveryone who has been into eLearning for a while, the search term “scorm compliance” seems to pop everywhere. Still, it’s easy to run into a solution that doesn’t support it.

 

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through some SCORM technical refinements and provide you with a checklist for making a smart choice in an LMS.

 

SCORM Explained

Shareable Content Object Reference Model, or simply SCORM, is the gold standard for e-courses. Thanks to it, a SCORM compliant LMS runs any SCORM file just like a DVD player plays any DVD disc. So, if a company uses this format and decides to switch to another learning platform, there’s no need to worry about losing any content, as any other SCORM compatible LMS will recognize it too.

 

What does a SCORM course look like?

For an LMS admin, a typical SCORM-compliant course looks like a ZIP archive. This archive contains all the text, pictures, videos, and other assets that you’ll have in your course. But what makes a SCORM file different from the usual archived collection of assets is the strict hierarchy of files and the code that governs their interaction. And that’s a game changer

As a mechanism of interaction between an e-course and an LMS, SCORM allows you to set rules for moving between learning units. For instance, you can make learners study the text content first and only then let them watch a video lecture. It also saves learners’ progress and tracks their results.

 

Lucky for us, the times when only tech-savvy professionals could build SCORM files are in the past. Now, almost anyone can do it with a special editor that automatically creates a package ready to be uploaded to an LMS.

 

What Is SCORM Compliance?

SCORM compliance stands for technical compatibility. This implies that software supports this format of eLearning content so you can open, edit or deliver SCORM courses with it. Basically, you use authoring tools or converters to create a SCORM course. As for its delivery to learners, you need a scorm lms compliant  Below, we’ll elaborate on what SCORM compliance is in more detail.

 

What Is a SCORM Compliant LMS?

A SCORM compliant LMS is an online platform that recognizes SCORM. Seems to be a no-brainer, right? Yet, there is a tricky part to pay attention to.

 

SCORM compliance is actually a general term, but in fact, there are three levels of SCORM support. An LMS can be:

 

SCORM conformant

SCORM compliant

or SCORM certified

The distinction between compliance and conformance isn’t obvious for most users, unless they’ve scanned the specifications closely, as an e-course will work and statistics will be gathered in any case. The difference is in the number of CMI elements that a SCORM compliant, conformant, or certified LMS supports.

CMI stands for “computer managed instruction”. The list of CMI elements is like a list of character abilities on each level in a video game. In the context of eLearning, it is the list of commands the LMS can follow and the types of data it collects.


 

As we mentioned earlier, compliance is a general term that refers to a wide range of solutions of different quality. But usually, SCORM compliant software supports the most basic level of interaction between courses and the LMS. That includes basic commands for communication initialization, saving progress, and finishing. Basic doesn’t always mean poor or insufficient; there are hundreds of “level one” solutions good enough for most people.

 

SCORM conformant LMSs support a wider set of CMI elements, allowing a more detailed analysis of the data gathered. For example, assessments published in SCORM 1.2/2004 allow you to obtain detailed question-answer level results. At the same time, not all LMSs enable this level of support, but this doesn’t mean that they are non-compliant.

 

Both conformant and compliant mean that an LMS supports SCORM standards. It wasn’t confirmed by a third-party certification, but the vendor has most likely performed its own tests.

 

SCORM-certified LMSs provide you with the maximum level of SCORM support. Their compliance is verified by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), a third-party organization. Its engineers use special testing tools that allow them to check almost every possible use-case for SCORM courses.

SCORM Courses

SCORM performance also depends on the authoring tool you use to create e-courses. For example, we can guarantee that iSpring Suite flawlessly supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 formats, as it was certified by ADL. But usually, it makes sense to test a course before putting new learning platforms through their paces.

 

The SCORM format appeared in 2001, so it’s actually a bit like a dinosaur in 2021. Each version of SCORM has its own set of testing suites; the challenge is that these testing tools haven’t been updated since then. In the iSpring QA dept, we have special virtual machines for testing SCORM compliance after any changes in the authoring tool.

 

If this seems too hardcore, there’s SCORM Cloud service, a good platform for testing SCORM content. The foundation of the platform is SCORM Engine. Although it doesn’t catch some minor non-conformances, the tool allows you to track the whole process of course interaction with an LMS, from initializing to terminating.

 

The Perfect Match: SCORM Compliant Courses & LMS

So, how do you find out whether an LMS will work with your SCORM compliant content? First of all, find out what type of SCORM the LMS supports. We’ve already mentioned that there are several versions of SCORM; you can learn more about the differences in this blog post.

 

If the LMS supports only SCORM 1.2, then e-courses in SCORM 2004 will be a waste of resources and vice versa. The logic of these two formats is similar, but they use different CMI elements. Let’s take a look at the most significant ones.

 

Status Value

In SCORM 1.2, there’s one type of status: completion. SCORM 2004 has a more advanced reporting system. There are two independent values submitted: completion (view progress) and success (test score).

 

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What are the benefits of using SCORM?

 

Better quality Content

It can create personalized learning content for the individual as well as organizational learning needs. It supports interoperability between different e-learning software products. The best course creation tools are compatible with SCORM compliant LMS, and so you can easily create interactive online courses using various LMS tools.

 

Cost-effectiveness

With this, you can create content and share or migrate it from one system to another at a low cost. Moreover, it can reduce the overall cost of training delivery as you don’t need to create different LMS systems courses. SCORM compliant courses can run on any SCORM LMSs and boost overall learning efficiency.

 

Create an interactive learning environment

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