The learning curve blog

Helpful advice for online course creators, businesses, and entrepreneurs

Who Needs SCORM? Organizations with Multiple Departments

by | Aug 21, 2019 | eLearning Tools

If you’ve been following our recent blog posts about SCORM, you’ll remember that SCORM has had a surprisingly long lifespan. For 20 years, SCORM has defined how online training content is packaged, delivered, and launched. SCORM’s longevity is really amazing, considering the rapid rate at which technology develops these days. If it followed the same trajectory of many other technologies, SCORM would be obsolete. But it isn’t. 

So why is SCORM still so relevant? There are a few answers, a couple of which that we’ve answered in past blogs. Overall, SCORM’s interoperability is its current greatest allure. While that’s certainly it’s most prevalent attribute, there are other, equally beneficial attributes of SCORM that deserve as much attention. While we will still discuss interoperability some, we’ll also discuss reusability and affordability, which are results of interoperability in this case. 

For our purposes in this post, we’re going to provide an overview of one specific circumstance where SCORM is the most advantageous content model.  

When Is SCORM the Most Useful Content Model?

One instance is when large organizations with multiple departments need to deploy content across every department. Most likely, several, if not every one, of these departments delivers training content via a different LMS than the other departments. In fact, the problem of different departments in a single organization utilizing different learning platforms is what SCORM tried to solve, and it did so mostly successfully. 

There’s a history behind this issue. In the 1990s, eLearning began to take off, especially in the business world. With wider access to the internet, content creators began to shift from disc-mediated Computer Based Training (CBT) to online training for their course authoring. However, organizations with multiple departments all with their own learning platforms could not deliver course content to the whole organization because learning platforms didn’t have a singular, universal set of technical standards. Before SCORM, the solutions were much more expensive and difficult to implement. Either the organization had to transition the entire organization over to one learning platform, or it had to purchase unique, expensive course content for every individual department that couldn’t carry over to other departments.

Most notably, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) ran into this issue. To try and solve the problem, the DoD commissioned the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) to create a reference model that would unify technical standards. Thus, SCORM was born.

SCORM enabled organizations like the DoD to implement the same training across all departments without having to purchase unique content for every department or standardize the learning platform for each one. Likewise, organizations with multiple departments no longer have to spend inordinate amounts of money on content or learning platforms. Because SCORM can operate across different systems, it’s cheaper for organizations to purchase SCORM content because they can reuse it across multiple departments.

Choose the Right Learning Platform

Maybe you have SCORM content ready to deliver to learners, or maybe you want to create course content using SCORM.  Choosing a learning platform that supports the creation and management of SCORM is critical. DigitalChalk conforms to SCORM 1.2, which is the most popular and widely used version of SCORM. With our state-of-the-art learning platform you can create, deliver, and manage your SCORM content from a secure centralized location.

Still have questions about whether creating course content with SCORM is right for your training business?  Read these other two blogs to learn about other ways SCORM proves advantageous for content providers: 

Who Needs SCORM? Content Providers with Extensive Reach

Who Needs SCORM? Businesses with an Internal LMS

And as always, we’re happy to answer any questions you might have.

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