On Pinax-LMS and SCORM

[Rob Hudson]

Hi All,

Interesting ideas for Pinax and LMS. Are there project goals laid out
already or is this the forum to discuss those?

At my work we build health based educational websites. If a project
of ours targets the business user, a SCORM package is the defacto way
to "ship" our content since most businesses have already invested in
an LMS and they usually integrate into their personnel/HR systems,
etc.

Is Pinax-LMS considering SCORM? Something like Moodle does for PHP?
The Wikipedia entry for Learning Management Systems covers a lot,
including SCORM and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

Interested in hearing more.

-Rob

[Rob Yates]

IMHO if you want anything to do with e-Learning (or electronic delivery
of self-paced content) you need consider SCORM. Unfortunately, as
discussed on the Pinax list, it's a big hairy creature. I've done a
full LMS SCORM 1.2 and 2004 implementation once - not sure I'm up for
another one in this lifetime. :)

-Rob

[James Tauber]

On Mar 20, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Rob Hudson wrote:
> Interesting ideas for Pinax and LMS. Are there project goals laid out
> already or is this the forum to discuss those?

I have my own goals, but this is really the forum to discuss what we
should be doing, when and how.

While I have used LMSes as a teacher (WebCT as a university professor
in late 90s) and a student (online courses at Berklee Music) I am not
the person to drive the requirements for a large scale LMS
implementation. I have a lot of interest in computer-based training
but don't have the experience in the administrative side.

Two additional things drive me to do this, though, and why building an
LMS has been a goal of Pinax from pretty much the beginning:

1. I believe an LMS built on Django has significant advantages in
terms of extensibility and maintainability than, say, PHP
2. I believe a lot of the pieces in an LMS are useful outside of the
LMS domain (and vice versa) and so Pinax can serve as the foundation
by which LMS and other domains can share more generic functionality

> At my work we build health based educational websites. If a project
> of ours targets the business user, a SCORM package is the defacto way
> to "ship" our content since most businesses have already invested in
> an LMS and they usually integrate into their personnel/HR systems,
> etc.

Integration with personnel/HR systems is a great example of a non-LMS-
specific feature an LMS might need. There's a lot an intranet edition
of Pinax can share with Pinax LMS for example.

> Is Pinax-LMS considering SCORM? Something like Moodle does for PHP?

I have no experience with SCORM or ADL but it is sounding like SCORM
support will be important for many applications.

James