I think people are really getting the wrong idea about AICC and SCORM ‘formats’. Folks appear to talk about them like there are capable actually holding all of a course’s information. They can’t. AICC (a collection of .ini and .cvs files) and SCORM (an XML file) only hold the most basic of information common to all (online) courses.

AICC only holds a title, id, and description for the course and title, description, and URL for the individual units. That’s it! All other fields are related to CBT launching and tracking. SCORM offers little more in terms of actual inputted information. Even the most basic information such as duration, credits, notes, meta-tags, vendor, prerequisites, versioning, questions/responses, skills, materials, etc., do not exist within these files.

I think folks might want to seriously look at what they would actually get from this. Anyone using the AICC export/import functionality quickly realizes that it is all but useless in transfering information around. It simply doesn’t store much. SCORM would do little better.

Within our market our SW is well-received and generally considered the “go to” solution. In short, while we might be evil money grubbers to the greater LMS community, we are also no newcomers or slouches when it comes to the general problem/issues/technologies/etc.

We recently agreed to add SCORM-compliant export to our Authoring tool, primarily because product managers, sales, and marketing insisted it would be sexy and it would generate sales (and a lot of customers have to be able to say to their own chain of command that “Yes, this solution can generate SCORM compliant courses!”, even though none or very few of them have any intention of jumping into the SCORM quagmire.

Our overall experience with SCORM and most the LMS standards is that while the goals are lofty (and worthy) and there’s no lack of effort to pull it all together, that overall the situation is a colossal hairball and that at least SCORM itself is, as one other poster put it, a tar pit.

Personally I fail to see the advantages of a standard that isn’t even a true standard because it keeps changing and they routinely abandon backward compatibility (in small but significant ways), when it is so monstrously complex that interoperable (much less certified complaint) implementations must therefore (and by definition) be monstrously complex, and a standard whereby any useful solution in the end devolves to one that is compliant but offers (and encourages) so many non-compliant extensions that they are essentially proprietary solutions themselves.

I feel great empathy for the Moodle community. We have avoided Moodle altogether because like others we scanned the glossy print, realized it was not a SCORM compliant implementation, and moved on. So I both have no experience with nor any comments about Moodel specifically.

My observations are directed more generally at the space as a whole and at the SCORM community in particular.

I have developped a CMS for a school and I would like to know how to go about exporting in scorm in PHP.

Any library or code that could help..?

Cheers

Happy Moodling

In fact, that makes Moodle itself a nice free tool to develop IMS CP content for other systems:-).