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:-).

IMS CC does sound like the ideal export/imort/interchange format (and certainly much more flexible and complete than SCORM, by including IMS QI etc…) - but does anything implement that yet? The IMS site for the spec still seems rather draftish. When it goes “live” this summer, things could really get interesting!

Open source projects generally don’t run with large profit margins or capital funding, so new features need to have either a source of funding or a source of development, documentation, and QA resources.

Moodle hasn’t had the benefit of large, open ended grant funding, so larger scale development tends to be very focused on the goals of the funding sources - generally larges institutions like OU, NZVLE, Intel Education, CIE, etc. who need specific functionality added to Moodle on a tightly managed budget and timeline - these projects are more focused on adding more functionality to Moodle than to building export formats - esp. because Moodle’s existing export format is not that hard to read and if need be convert from one XML format to another.

The SCORM format is so limited in it’s ability to support the full range of Moodle (or Blackboard) features that my personal opinion is that building a SCORM export tool would be more of a marketing talking point than an actually useful feature for most people using the LMS- folks would constantly be complaining about all the functionality that can’t supported in the SCORM specification:-(.

If D’Arcy or others can put together a grant or other source of the development resources to build and release a solidly coded and well tested and documented IMS CC export for Moodle, then folks in the Moodle community would be happy to include it - a decent export format would really need to be IMS Common Cartridge, though, IMO.

We in the Moodle development community are really working very hard to give the user community the best LMS we can with the constraints of time and resources - we would love to work on a project to provide a good IMS CC export from Moodle - I’ve been trying for years now with Jason Cole, Jim Farmer, Martin Dougiamas, Martin Langhoff etc. to put together a project to provide IMS CC export for Moodle - the lack of it is not for lack of good faith or desire on the part of the Moodle development community - however it is not a trivial project and generally non-trivial projects need to have a way to provide dedicated resources over the lifetime of the project to be successful.