Should I make my homegrown LMS SCORM compliant? (Volume 2)

In the last post I examined what it would take to add SCORM functionality to an existing homegrown LMS.   Now I'm going to look at the alternative, which is to migrate to a new system.  This is often a daunting task and companies will often stay on an inappropriate system for years, just to avoid having to go through this  process.  It is not an insignificant task, but with proper planning and implementation support you can avoid many of the pitfalls.

To move from you homegrown LMS, you will need to take several components into considerations, specifically:

1. You will need to determine what historical data is essential to migrate to the new system.  Most of the time this will simply be user completion and score, but sometimes there is a need to migrate more specific data.  This completions and scores should migrate easily and most LMS vendors have tools to support this.  To migrate additional may be significantly costlier as it is less common for vendors and often they won’t have tools to support this custom data.  That said you may also need to make sure that the LMS can easily report on this additional data.  Vendors often won’t have an easy way to run reports outside of their usual data sets.
2. You will need to recreate or update any external system integrations.  This most often will include integration with HR systems, but it may also include external course tools such as Adobe Connect and Pedagogue, among others.
3. You will need to understand what it will take to migrate existing courseware to a SCORM compliant format  This may be as easy as creating a simple SCORM wrapper for the course to rebuilding the courses in new tools.
4. You will need to determine how you will structure your learning in the new system.  This will be core to how users access the content and what it takes to administer and maintain the content.  The more complicated this structure is, the more expensive it will likely be to implement.
5. You will need to look at how the new system will affect your current training process, deployment and reporting.  How does the new system alter your training options/solution?  Although this does not have an easily quantifiable cost, it can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of your training.
6. Finally, you will should to account for additional costs of the system, such as licensing and support.

Although both adding SCORM to your homegrown LMS and migrating to a different LMS may look like expensive solutions, with the rise of low cost Learning Management Systems, this may no longer be the case.  Once you remove the expensive annual licensing fees and, since you have more control over the implementation costs, you can make migrating to a new system as viable an option as keeping and maintaining the current system you may have.

Every situation is different and there are many additional criteria that will affect your decision, but I think it is essential to look at several options before you decide which direction to go and I hope this breakdown may provide some guidance in determining your optimal learning solution.

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.