The costs were orders of magnitude less than when you needed to hire a bunch of software developers to create a proprietary computer-based training platform and get it to work with whatever training content you had.įor SCORM 1.2, a couple of new specifications were adopted – IMS’s content packaging and their joint work on metadata done with IEEE. All that was needed was to make their learning content conformant with SCORM and find an LMS that is compliant with it. Suddenly, there was no need to reinvent the wheel every time a new company wanted to jump on the eLearning wagon and get their own LMS. And when the industry found out how quickly they can ensure compatibility by implementing SCORM compliance, it became an instant hit. The reason for this is that SCORM 1.2 was finally ready to be implemented by both Learning Management System (LMS) and Authoring Tool vendors. Released in October 2001, SCORM 1.2 became such a lasting de facto standard for eLearning that it’s found in over 70% of eLearning content to this day. SCORM 1.2: The Most Supported Version Among Authoring Tool and LMS Vendors And while the former improved the specification enough to turn it into an implementable solution, it was the latter stable release that really made SCORM notorious in the industry.
In 2001, a year after its initial release, SCORM saw versions 1.1 and 1.2 come out. Some of these specifications were merely changed slightly in order to be used together, while others were stripped of many excessive elements that could complicate the implementation of the new “standard” for early adopters.
You see, Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) – the US government’s initiative behind SCORM, didn’t build it from the ground up. Also, at version 1.0, SCORM was more of a collection of disparate concepts than a specification that could be implemented to solve real-life problems in digital education.īut, there was something special about SCORM that allowed it to eventually become the most ubiquitous specification in the eLearning world. As we look back upon this event, it may seem nothing short of groundbreaking, since SCORM eventually became eLearning’s ‘household word.’ However, its initial release didn’t exactly make a splash.įor one thing, the world of digital training already had interoperability standards: collectives like AICC and IMS had released their specifications that aimed to make eLearning more standardized a few years before SCORM. In the year 2000, Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model 1.0 (SCORM for short) was introduced to the public as a new concept for interoperability in computer-based training. In this article, we’ll take a look at these two most notable versions of SCORM so you can choose which one to go with. But, even though they’ve both been around for so long, it’s still hard to pinpoint the precise differences between them and their respective strengths and weaknesses. A few versions of the standard were released over the years, from which only two have stood the test of time: SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.
Additionally, you can sign up for our Daily or Weekly newsletters to receive these top-ranked articles right in your inbox, or you can sign up to be notified when new resources like webinars or ebooks are available.Although SCORM got its most recent update in 2009, it’s still going strong, being widely used by the eLearning community to this day. We use reader data to auto-curate the articles, meaning that the most valuable resources move to the top.
Learn with the Flow: Digital Adoption Tactics That Drive Digital Transformation.