Happy Birthday SCORM!

eLearning has experienced significant growth in recent years, and one of the key technologies contributing to this is SCORM. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the latest version of SCORM. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to celebrate the last 20 years.

What was life like before you arrived?

Life was hard for eLearning course developers. No sooner had they built a wonderful course for the learning management system (LMS) that everyone seemed to be using, than ten new LMS types would suddenly appear on the market which either could not run the course or ran it with huge inconsistencies. What a nightmare for the creative bees that had put all that effort into making a course.

Course developers were in need of a hero.

We needed a hero to unite all the platforms and LMS types so that courses could run on them. Like a translator enabling people to come together and understand each other. A single unifying standard that ensured seamless course functionality no matter how exotic the system it was placed in.

SCORM was born

SCORM stands for "Sharable Content Object Reference Model," meaning "Reference Model for Sharable Learning Content.". Until today, SCORM ensures
a) that course content operates in new environments like a pro, and
b) learning can be tracked to see whether a course has been completed or not.
It was indeed the hero the scene had been waiting for. Finally, it became possible to develop eLearning courses without compatibility concerns for an indefinite number of LMS types.

It was a marvel. It was the talk of the town. `How does it work?` everyone asked.

SCORM operates with two main components:

• the Content Package and
• the LMS.

The Content Package is essentially the course content, be it a video, text, or interactive quiz. The LMS is the platform, this content is played on and where learner progress is monitored.

SCORM integrates into these components by establishing rules on how the LMS should interact with the Content Package. For instance, SCORM instructs the LMS on how to recognize and save the completion of a module.

You can’t have too much of a good thing so then there were two.

Those deeply involved in eLearning will eventually encounter the two versions of our hero: SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.

SCORM 1.2, developed in 2001, focuses on essential functions needed for the interaction between learning platforms and course content. Three years later, SCORM 2004 was released, offering additional features, including more detailed tracking of course progress.

It's not that the newer standard has completely replaced the older one. Both SCORM versions have their pros and cons and coexist side by side on an equal footing.

SCORM‘s still got it!

Even after 20 years, SCORM is still turning heads and plays a significant role in eLearning, despite the competition. Alternative standards like xAPI, AICC, or IMS Global Learning Consortium are challenging SCORM’s dominance these days but we still need to wait and see if one of these will rise to same level of all around success enjoyed by SCORM.