SCORM and maintainable CSS and JavaScript
fsele...@gmail.com
I'm relatively new to SCORM, so hope you may be able to help.
From what I can gather, a SCORM content object should be self-
contained, and include all the CSS, JavaScript files etc which are
required to present and run the content as a stand alone package.
What I'm struggling with at the moment, is how this concept works with/
or could work with, the development of master CSS and JavaScript files
which will control the presentation and behaviour of a number of
courses. It seems to me that whenever a change is made to the design
or presentation of our courses, that I'd need to go back and manually
update all our SCORM packages (courses) individually. If that's not
done, the SCORM packaging process essentially locks that course at a
specific point in time - leading to variations in design and behaviour
as future changes are made to the CSS and JavaScript.
I'm interested in how others have resolved this issue - is there
software available that would help in assembling a SCORM package on
the fly - if that's the case, should a SCORM package only be developed
at the point a course is shared with another organisation, and
internally we'd run our LMS more like a traditional website - with
CSS, JavaScript, imagery etc all located in a central spot?
Matt Philipps
If you are a course developer, and you need to sell your course to lots of different clients whose LMS are different, you need your course to be self-contained. That's also part of why you can't use any server side language in your course. You don't know if you course is going to run on a PHP server, or .NET, or Java or Coldfusion, or CGI, etc.
That said if you are an internal resource for a company that has bought an LMS, sure you could stick jQuery (or whatever javascript) and a shared CSS file at the root of your website, and just refer to it from your course. Your course would not "technically" match the ideals of SCORM compliancy, and would probably fail the ADL Test Suite. But then again, it would probably work just fine within your LMS.
Should your company choose to move to a different LMS, or upgrade, you would need to know to move the files to the root of the new server (obviously), and in the worst case, you have left the company and no one knows to do this when the upgrade happens, and all the course suddenly stop working after the upgrade.
But that said, it would probably work, as long as you are an internal resource for your company.
Philip Hutchison
SCORM suggests you package everything so it will work independent of external resources, but it is only a suggestion. If you think about the sheer number of LMSs that include a content management (CMS) component, you'd see the self-contained SCORM package rule is really not a hard and fast rule.
The idea behind a self-contained package is that it's portable and you can take it anywhere -- offline, intranet, whatever -- and it will work. All the resources travel with the course. This is great, but... if you have 20 courses about repairing cars and use the same car photos, diagrams, videos, stylesheets, etc in your courses, you'd run into the exact problem you described: incredible redundancy.
So the answer is YES you can use external resources. But you need to be very careful about how the external resources are used and the availability/reliability of the externalized content. For starters, you'd need to be sure that the server hosting the external content is reliable and available 24/7 for all of your LMS users. If you store content on an intranet-only server, your learners might not be able to see those portions of your content when they take the course from home unless they have VPN. Same issue if you decide to share courses with another organization that can't access your intranet-only content server. If the content server has downtime or network lag, it can affect the availability/quality of the course.
Personally, I *do* externalize almost every portion of our courses, but I do it for practical reasons: our LMS makes it incredibly difficult to update content in a course (even something as simple as fixing a typo). Having direct access to the files on our content server makes it easy as pie to fix stuff quickly.
- philip
rsug...@sugels.com
Hello,
Matt is correct, when SCORM talks about self-containment it is an ideal. I have accomplished exactly what you're attempting on both the Meridian, KSI and Pathlore LMS platforms. The only hard and fast SCORM requirement is that your imsmanifest.xml file be at the root of the packaged content. So, taking a folder structure:
MyDev
css //style sheets
images_com //common images
images_ui //user interface images
includes //JavaScript includes
course1
images_crs1
includes_crs1
sco1
images_sco1
includes_sco1
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
sco2
images_sco2
includes_sco2
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
course2
images_crs2
includes_crs2
sco1
images_sco1
includes_sco1
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
sco2
images_sco2
includes_sco2
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
courseN
images_crsN
includes_crsN
sco1
images_sco1
includes_sco1
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
sco2
images_sco2
includes_sco2
page1.htm
page2.htm
pageN.htm
imsmanifest1.xml
imsmanifest2.xml
imsmanifestN.xml
The package (zip/pif) for course1 would include the folders css, images_com, images_ui, includes, course1 and the file imsmanifest1.xml (remove the number). The package (zip/pif) for course2 would include the folders css, images_com, images_ui, includes, course2 and the file imsmanifest2.xml (remove the number). The package (zip/pif) for courseN would include the folders css, images_com, images_ui, includes, courseN and the file imsmanifestN.xml (remove the number). Updating is then accomplished by updating the applicable files in the package (zip/pif) and re-importing into the LMS.