When you create and publish e-Learning content through scorm packages you always encounter some problems. In essence scorm is a wrapper around your content giving you interoperability between systems, but at the same time making your content more rigid, you are limited by the bounderies of scorm. In the spirit of the recently announced e-Learning piranha network A New Spring and easygenerator have combined forces to solve some of this problems.
Publishing and updating. Publishing a scorm package to a LMS is often a lot of work. Due to security settings (firewalls, procedures) it often costs a lot of time to publish (or update) the content. The result is that e-Learning content is not regularly updated and the learner has to cope with ‘outdated’ content.
If you need to publish your e-Learning content in more than one look and feel, because you use them for different brands, companies or audiences, the problem increases. The look and feel of a scorm package is set within the package itself; therefore you have multiple packages to publish and update, multiplying the time you spent.
A lot of content is published to different platforms (more than one LMS, mobile, intra- and extranets et cetera). All the content for all these platforms has to be updates separately.
Capturing user feedback. Another issue is that there is no connection between the learner and the author. This means that there is no easy way for the learner to give feedback on the effectiveness of content, additions to the content or remarks about the content to the author.
Tracking and tracing. Tracking and tracing is one of the main reasons why people use scorm. It logs the progress and results of the learner in the LMS. The problem is that these logs are not always reliable and they are quite limited in their possibilities. Reports with an management overview are often not available.
Dynamic Publication Platform. We have created a solution for these problems with our Dynamic Publication Platform. It addresses both the update and republishing problems as the capture of user input.
Publishing and updating content. We (A New Spring and easygenerator), created a publication server that resides between the authoring system and the learning environment. The author publishes his scorm packages to this platform. A second scorm package is created which contains a link to the content, but not the content itself.
When the learner activates the scorm package in the LMS, it is automatically served from the Dynamic Content Platform. The learner won’t even notice this.
Whenever the author updates the content on the Dynamic Publication Platform, the learner will automatically get the current version. You don’t have to update the scorm package in the LMS! If the content is used in different Learning Management Systems or in different look and feels, a single update of the Dynamic Publication Platform will automatically update the content of all courses and publications.
Capturing User feedback. Within scorm you have very limited possibilities to capture user feedback. With the Dynamic Publication Platform you can add likes/dislikes to your pages and create the possibility for learners to comment on pages and courses. All the corrections, additions and likes/dislikes are fed back to the author, who can adjust the content based on this input. This functionality can also be used for remarks between learners.
Tracking and tracing. Because our Dynamic Publication Platform is a webserver were you can log and monitor usage and progress in far more detail than you can with your LMS. Not only the individual information regarding a specific learner, but also all kind of management information about groups of learners, courses and other subjects. We have standard reports available, but we can create custom reports. Finally you get more than a fail or pass, you get real management information about the usage and effectiveness of your learning material.
Adaptive learning. Not all your content will be relevant to all your learners. Even on a personal level each learner can develop a different learning need based on their progress and results. The dynamic publication platform makes it possible to add smart technology, which would not be possible within a standard scorm package, to deliver a personalized learning path to each learner. We will go into more detail about this adaptive learning facility in an upcoming blog.
This blog has been written by Martèn de Prez (A New Spring) and Kasper Spiro (easygenerator)
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