Some Notes on SCORM 2.0

This wiki page reviews many of the issues we've discussed over the last few months and some we haven't.

Please edit or comment towards the goal of producing our white paper solicitation.

A 9-Month Gestation Process

Here's our current plan for reaching an initial draft of SCORM 2.0 by year's end:

With input from the ADL TWG and other SCORM constituencies, we will draft a solicitation of white papers about the requirements and architecture of SCORM 2.0 in April.
White papers will be due in August, reviewed, and the best will be invited to a 3-day SCORM 2.0 workshop in September. Probably in Washington area. Open standards, broad applicability, and maturity of R&D (e.g. running code) will be considered in evaluating the white papers.
A first draft of the SCORM 2.0 architecture and specs will be put forward in December.
In January, we will hold a SCORM World Congress to bring the SCORM community together, celebrate our achievements, and present a path forward with the vendors who have committed to implementing SCORM 2.0. Further working group meetings will be scheduled in conjunction with the World Congress.
LETSI will manage the subsequent development of SCORM specs and vendor support services (website, help desk, tech forums, sample software, conformance testing, PlugFests and other meetings).
LETSI will not develop specifications itself. LETSI will work with IEEE, OASIS, AICC, and other standards and spec development organizations that are committed to open standards. We foresee an open source community developing around the SCORM 2.0 specification, sharing code and tools. It is hoped that beta implementations of SCORM 2.0 in major products will emerge by the 3Q09.

Goals and Constraints for SCORM 2.0

When the above process is completed, we want to have an interoperability model that can be used strategically across market sectors and geographical regions. Our final product must:

Be implemented by most of the major vendors by being realistic about their costs and schedules and by enabling functionality that will be demanded by their customers in several diverse market segments
Be seen as an elegant and powerful way forward by the SCORM technical community. We need to win their hearts and minds.
Enable improved quality, reduced risks and costs, and promote broader adoption of learning technology
Support all teaching/learning functionality that can be envisioned and allow communities of practice maximum flexibility to profile and to experiment (modularity and extensibility)
Support legacy content and long transition periods
Level the playing field for innovators and encourage innovation in both content and software systems.
Move the learning technology community towards modern service-oriented enterprise software architecture
Move the learning technology community towards the use of open standards

What is SCORM intended to do?

SCORM 2004

Assumes

Content developed by instructional design teams, including programmers
Content is delivered to a central LMS as a package (permissions and billing at the package level)
LMS tracks and reports student progress and performance
Delivery of instruction is on a standard browser

Enables

Content portability across learning systems and authoring tools
Instructional design (activity/assessment trees), also portable across LMS's
Browser-based delivery
Modular, plug-and-play content - maintenance at the SCO level
Personalization of student's learning sequence at the SCO level
Finding relevant content online: metadata

SCORM 2.0

A web-centric model of learning, where assets are not necessarily packaged and where learning activities may be delivered by a web service
A flexible model of what product categories may emerge in this space in the future (across market sectors): LMS, LCMS, work flow for authoring, catalog, billing, web-based learning activities, mobile delivery, team training portals, HR/skills management, repositories/catalogs, lesson planners and other tools for teachers, simulations/games, virtual worlds, self-study guides, etc.
A flexible model of permissions and billing. For instance, billing for online learning activities by the student hour
Incorporate into content search and learning activities knowledge about competencies and learning objectives, as practiced by each community (corporate HR and skills management, healthcare professional certification, for-profit educational institutions, personnel jackets, ...)
A better way to enable portability of instructional design than Simple Sequencing
Beyond the browser: fat clients including embedded/downloaded players, simulation, games, virtual worlds (e.g. disease modeling in healthcare training; simulations in aviation training; multi-player games in military mission rehearsal)
Authoritative content sources integrated in learning materials distribution (S1000D)
Mobile computing - diversity of delivery platforms
Accessibility - Access for All
Team Training activities, where multiple students and team performance must be monitored
Course catalogues and future permission and billing paradigms
Repositories and distributed content management
Collaborative learning
Support for activities all along the life-cycle of training materials (e.g., instructional design, version control, billing, ...)
Intelligent tutoring systems and intelligent agents generally

See also Clark's Learning Functionality Framework