Marc My Words: Beyond SCORM – A Welcome New Direction

In the mid 90’s,before there were commercial LMSs, we built one. At a major U.S.company, management tasked me with reducing the cost of our trainingregistration call center by moving typical enrollment, studentrecords, and classroom management online. We succeeded, except forone thing: at the time, we could not figure out how to seamlesslymanage all the online content we were starting to buy from a varietyof emerging e-Learning courseware firms.

As you mightimagine, the burgeoning online courseware marketplace presented greatopportunities for a global company like ours. Visions ofefficiencies, economies of scale, and cost reductions danced in ourheads. But as we spoke to e-Learning content companies, we becameacutely aware of a major problem – each company’s product linecame with its own, proprietary management system. We askedrepeatedly how we could use and share courseware from multiplevendors in an integrated environment. And each time we got the sameanswer, “if you buy our courses, you must use our deliveryplatform.” And who could blame them? It was a brilliant way tolock-in their customers and keep out competitors.

OK, we blamed them.Like the fictional Howard Beale in the movie Network, we gotmad as “you-know-what” and we weren’t going to take it anymore!Lots of other companies felt the same way we did.

Enter ADL,the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative of the U.S. Departmentof Defense. In 1999, it established a laboratory to develop technicalinteroperability standards for e-Learning. The result was SCORM,ADL’s “Sharable Content Object Reference Model.” SCORM allowedcourseware from multiple vendors to run on the same platform andcommunicate seamlessly through a single LMS. Today, online coursewarethat is “SCORM compliant,” created by SCORM-compliant authoringtools, is pretty much assured of working with SCORM-compliant LMSs.With SCORM, the online courseware and LMS markets exploded.

SCORM’s successdepends on strict observance of standards. While this is great forinteroperability, it creates problems for instructional design. Likeany set of rules, there were things you could and could not do. Afterall, if everyone did their own thing, how would SCORM be able tomanage and track everything? It wouldn’t. Yet instructional design,by its very nature, is as much art as it is science, andinstructional designers are, by their very nature, artists andexperimenters, as much as they are technical specialists. Building toSCORM standards often meant eschewing more engaging creative andinnovative approaches. Over the years, new versions and updates toSCORM offered more flexibility in course design in an effort to keepup with the advances taking place in the field, but the speed of theadvances outpaces these efforts.

The emergence of newtechnologies and the rise of informal and social learning create newchallenges for ADL that go beyond the purpose and capabilities ofSCORM. As learning strategies expand and as the very nature ofe-Learning is redefined, standardized interoperable coursewarebecomes just one of many tools in an ever larger e-Learning toolbox.Knowledge management, social media, and performance support are notSCORM compliant; they were never intended to be. As information,collaboration and real-time support solutions become as important asinstructional solutions, if not more so, it’s becoming clear that,going forward, SCORM may be too limited for these new approaches.

Recognizing this,ADL has launched its FutureLearning Experience Project. According to theproject’s Website, “Learning experiences involvingnon-traditional electronic content, distributed content, sharedlearning data, team-based learning, and multi-modal delivery arebeyond what SCORM was architected to enable. ADL supports new workthat meets distributed learning needs beyond SCORM.”

That ADL willcontinue to support current SCORM standards is good news. That itwill be embarking on a new direction beyond traditional coursewarestandards is great news. At DevLearn last fall, when AaronSilvers, the Community Manager for ADL, noted that the initiative“…is on the design of these future experiences, rather than onthe architecture,” he was signaling ADL’s recognition of thecomplexities of new learning design strategies and theirtranscendence of technical standards.

Back in the day,cries for interoperability fell on deaf ears until ADL came along andbrought SCORM to reality. SCORM’s usefulness remains, but its rolein an increasingly complex e-Learning future may be less critical.Today, smart designers and e-Learning specialists, and ADL itself,recognize the need to go beyond SCORM. One of the most intriguing andvaluable qualities of any organization willing to change is itsreadiness to stop what it is doing, no matter how valuable and lovedthat work is, and move in a new direction, to re-channel its energieswith pride without abandoning its accomplishments. Beyond SCORMitself, this may be one of the main reasons for ADL’s staying powerand its continuing influence on our field.

AlexanderGraham Bell once said, “When one door closes, another opens; but weoften look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we donot see the one which has opened for us.” As ADL moves us in a new,interesting, and important direction, Bell’s comment is somethingto keep in mind.

(Editor’s Note:Marc Rosenberg is hosting the Foundations Intensive Program, March21-22, and delivering the session “Learning 2.0: Implications forManagers” as part of the Management Xchange track at The LearningSolutions Conference & Expo in Orlando, March 23-25. Both ofthese offerings deliver information and skills that will be criticalto your success during the next 12 to 18 months. Please see theprogram information online athttps://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/content/1780/learning-solutions-conference-2011-home)