An important SCORM Technical Working Group meeting will be held in less than two weeks at the ADL Co-Lab Hub in Alexandria, Virginia. During this meeting we will begin to plan the future of SCORM. Our proposed agenda follows.
If you plan to attend in person or on-line, please contact Schawn Thropp (throppS@ctc.com).
For those that will not be able to attend in person, please let Schawn know if you would like to attend remotely. ADL has a limited number of Adobe Connect seats available and it is important to let us know so that we can reserve the slots for remote participants. More details will follow on Adobe Connect and Conference Call-in information.
Dress attire for the meeting is business casual.
Proposed Agenda
Monday, October 15, 1:00-5:00pm - SCORM® 2004 3rd Edition
The ADL has worked out an agreement with IMS that removes any concerns about Intellectual Property (IP) litigation regarding SCORM 2004. As part of the agreement with IMS, there will be a joint release of an updated IMS Simple Sequencing Specification, which will reconcile the specification with SCORM and allow us to patch up some known "sub-optimalities." Earlier TWG discussions of these changes will be reviewed, and final decisions made. A minor update of SCORM 2004 will occur next year which will incorporate the IMS Simple Sequencing harmonization effort. During this time we will also take a look at a few other outstanding issues (e.g., user interface/experience interoperability concerns) for inclusion into this release. No further changes to SCORM 2004 are anticipated.
This stability in SCORM will give us several years of increased adoption of SCORM 2004 and the instructional design principles it supports. It will also give us ample time to create the next SCORM.
Tuesday, October 16, 9:00am-5:00pm - The Next SCORM
SCORM is showing its age in many areas. This period of stability will give us time to address a number of new ideas emerging across a broad range of SCORM communities of practice:
- The ADL Initiative (government training)
- SIFA (K12 schools interoperability)
- AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee)
- MedBiquitous Consortium (healthcare education)
- Masie Consortium (enterprise training)
- KIEC (Korea
The new SCORM, which we are optimistically calling SCORM 2009, will allow communities of practice the maximum flexibility in choosing among alternative specifications or defining new ones. It will be designed to support anticipated trends and to intrude minimally on innovation. Everything about SCORM is on the table: sequencing, content aggregation, data model, metadata, competencies, software architecture, and new learning technology standards and specifications. Backwards compatibility and consideration of the realities of implementation in products are as important to the adopters as they are to the implementing software firms.
Plan to have dinner with other TWG members to prepare for tomorrow's organizing session.
Wednesday, October 17, 9:00am-Noon - Planning the work to be done
The next step for SCORM 2009 will be the formation of several working groups, jointly with LETSI (Technical Roadmap Working Group), AICC, IEEE LTSC, ISO/IEC SC36, OASIS, and others. Study groups will start immediately after the TWG and will finish next summer.
As SCORM stewardship transitions to LETSI over the next year, the ADL SCORM TWG and Configuration Control Board activities will also transition. The ADL will continue to support SCORM through this transition. A year from now, it is expected that LETSI will organize additional financial and technical support to produce the SCORM 2009 release (documents, Sample Run-time Environment, Conformance Test Suite and vendor support).
We hope you can join us in person for this key discussion of the future of SCORM. If you can't attend, we will send a follow-up report to the TWG. Please consider participating in the work that needs to be done through the TWG or the LETSI Technical Roadmap Working Group.
