Should I make my homegrown LMS SCORM compliant? (Volume 1)

Over the past year I have run across this question several times. After thinking about it, I realized that many companies have an existing training solution in place that has been growing organically for years. At some point every company needs to look at their infrastructure and decide whether maintain/upgrade it or migrate to a new solution.  To help determine which way you should go, it is essential to look at what it takes to move in either direction.

In this post, I will look at what it takes to add the SCORM functionality.  In the next post I will look some of the requirements to migrate to a new LMS.

To add SCORM functionality to a homegrown LMS, I see there being four primary steps to adding this functionality:

1. Determine what version of SCORM you will be compliant to – SCORM 1.2 or 2004.  Although 2004 is more recent than 1.2, it is also more advanced and has more requirements.  I would recommend SCORM 1.2 simply because you don’t need to worry about SCO sequencing and you don’t need to support interactions or objectives (unless there are other requirements to support them).  So with SCORM 1.2 you can get compliance with less effort.
2. Establish the data-model and tables to support the SCORM data. Likely, it will be easier to have separate tables for the SCORM data than the prior content.  This will limit your need to shoehorn SCORM data and code into existing tables as well as needing to add new tables or fields for data that doesn’t already exist.  You will still need to have the system populate appropriate fields in the old tables for completion, score, et cetera, but I believe it will be easier overall.  This strategy does require separate reports to pull any granular SCORM data about the course.  This is a technique that I have seen some of the enterprise LMS vendors use when they had both legacy proprietary course structures and newer standards based courseware supported by the LMS.
3. Add the ability/process to import the SCORM course to your LMS.  This requires a strategy to upload the courses to a web server, create the appropriate course structure and SCOs, populate with database with details specified in the course manifest, and establish any other configurations of the course that your system requires.
4. Create the SCORM run time environment.  This will need to launch the courses, provide sco-to-sco navigation, store and retrieve course data in the database via a SCORM API, and trigger course and sco completion appropriately.

This is clearly a non trivial task to add to any system and would take a significant amount of planning, managing, development, and QA time to get it in place and working.