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My SCORM Quest

I first heard of SCORM in June of 2004 at an ETOM retreat. I didn't fully understand it at the time. I thought it was a set of standards to make learning content more accessable to those with disabilities and although I would want to do that as much as possible, I didn't see how it could work for some of my programs. I was concerned that we would deprive those without the disability of some wonderful learning tools in the name of fair access to all.

In April 2006, I started asking about making my PHP software communicate scores to Angel (the learning management system that my school uses). Someone said something about loading it as a SCORM package, but it didn't really go much further than that at the time. I guess it just didn't click with what that had to do with anything and how it would work.

While teaching a trigonometry course in the fall of 2006, I was making extensive use of my learning objects in class. My students would run the programs and I would check off that they had completed the activity on my grade sheet. If the student didn't finish in class it was not a problem because most of my programs had a print feature so they could finish at home, print their results and then bring it to class. I realized that this was fine for a traditional class, but I knew that when I taught an online version again I would need a way for the programs to record the results in a learning management system automatically. I started asking how to make my Flash programs communicate a score into the Angel gradebook. Again I was told that I needed to use SCORM. This time, I started searching for more information. I found two books: e-Learning Standards by Carol Fallon and Sharon Brown and Using Flash MX to Create e-Learning by Sharon Castillo, Steven Hancock, and Garin Hess, but I still didn't have enough information to get things working. I looked into going to SCORM school. The SCORM school website recommend familiarity with XML and javascript, so I took an advanced web development class and learned a little about both of these in the spring semester of 2007. I went to SCORM school in late June and July of 2007. This was a four week online course offered by the Academic CoLab. As the session neared its end I was disappointed to find that I still wasn't learning how to turn a learning object developed in Flash into a useful SCO. I was determined to get something working before the class was over so I started making a sample SCO and I worked night and day to get it to retrieve a name from the Test Suite and to use that name in the program and to set the score in the LMS. Here is the chronology of my progress taken from a discussion board where I was posting the results of my experiments:

• July 21, 2007:
  I have a Flash SCO that is passing the SCORM compliant test, but I am having troubles using values that I get from the getValue calls in the program. Maybe someone can help, but if not, you might still be able to use the code as a start point for doing your own experimenting.
  
  The attached zip file includes the actual flash fla and swf files as well as an edited version of the html page that is generated when you publish the fla file as a scorm 2004 sco. I included a couple of alert commands so you can see what is going on while you are experimenting. Of course for an actual sco, you would want to remove those.
  
  Again if you can help with converting getvalues to strings I would really appreciate it!
• July 25, 2007:
  1. Before, I couldn't get any values for getValue calls to actually show up in Flash if I tried to read those values into a variable and use them. In the javascript wrapper, I had tried to turn those values into a string before giving them back to flash. This wasn't working. The fix is to simply add a plus and then an empty set of quotes ("") to the end of the string. This forces the value into a string that Flash can read. See "function giveNameValueToFlash(nam)" in the html page.
  2. Before, if I turned off some of the alert commands in the html page, the get value for the learner name function wasn't called. I guessed that this might be because the LMS was still initializing when flash attempted to make that call. In other words the alert boxes slowed the program down enough for the SCO to finish initializing with the LMS before making further calls. I fixed the problem by adding a new scene in flash to allow time for the initialization to take place. Probably a more sophisticated way of doing this regardless of how slow the initialization is would be to have some function that is called every few seconds (using a timer interval command in actionscript) and checks to see if APIOK() is true yet.
• Later on July 25, 2007
  Okay, I now have a working SCO that is both setting and getting values to and from the LMS and it is using those values to display messages to the learner. This version includes a scaled score element. Also, I have deleted a lot of code from the javascript wrapper since much of the code was designed to deal with the fscommand which I am not using. If you are not using Flash 8 you may need some of that code or another alternate way to communicate with the LMS. I hope some of you other actionscript programmers find this useful.
  
  My next tasks are to get a score communicating back and forth and then to package the SCO into a content package and test it in a real LMS.

Later, I made a SCORM 1.2 version of the sample program and began experimenting with loading it in Angel. Things weren't working right at first, so I had to do a lot more experimenting. It was beginning to look like things would not work out in time for my online course to start in the fall. I had to take some time off of my experimenting to set up my course with my new policies and syllabus. I left the idea of using the SCOs open because I still wanted to do it. I finally got them to partially work. At first I had to check my students results one student at a time. I also had to warn my students about some of the error statements that would pop up. Angel fixed their end of things and now my SCOs will record grades properly without the error statements. I no longer have to check my students results individually. I can just go into the gradebook and check them all at once.

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