What is the big difference between SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004?

So what is the big difference between SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004?  SCORM 1.2 greatly simplified the effort to deploy eLearning courses to an LMS; but even with this support, it still had tangible areas for improvement, and the ADL made some of those improvements with the release of SCORM 2004.  Since SCORM 2004’s release in January of 2004, it has continued to evolve, with the most recent edition (the 4th Edition) being released March of 2009. 

The specific changes that ADL the SCORM standard with the release of the SCORM 2004 include:

1. Made changes to the command names:  for an undisclosed reason, the ADL decided to change the acceptable commands that a SCO can make when communicating to the LMS.  Primarily, they dropped the “LMS” prefix from the commands, but they also changed “[LMS]Finish” to “Terminate”.
2. Mandated previously optional elements of the Run-Time Model:  this means that all LMSes now need to support the elements which were optional in SCORM 1.2 in order to be SCORM 2004 conformant.  Thus, in SCORM 2004, course creators and administrators are guaranteed to have the ability to store data for item analysis (via the Interactions object) or Objective information, whereas in 1.2 that information was only available if the hosting LMS had decided to support these elements.  Unfortunately, the standard does not require the LMS to supply reports for the efficient retrieval of these data, and I have yet to see an LMS that manages this in any usable way.
3. Added IMS Simple Sequencing rules:  this is the big one.  What it means is that course creators can now define, in the imsmanifest.xml file, the way that the SCOs comprising a course must be structured and displayed by the LMS, and enforce rules about how/when they can be accessed by a learner.  For example, a course can be configured not to allow a user access to SCO #2 until he/she passes SCO #1.  Implementing this complex set of sequencing rules has been a significant hurdle for many LMS vendors in supporting SCORM 2004.

With SCORM 2004 4th Edition, the ADL has added the ability to pass certain data between SCOs.  This means that data stored by one SCO can be retrievable in another SCO.  Using this functionality, course developers will be able to create very complex behavior by using learner actions or responses in one SCO to drive behavior and/or display in other SCO.  This had been one of the main reasons that custom content vendors would often choose to build single-SCO courses: creating sophisticated and effective eLearning relies on having a certain amount of control over course-internal dynamics and display.  Unfortunately the developer community will have to wait a while before starting to leverage these new tools, since no LMS supports SCORM 2004 4th edition yet.

If you are interested in delving deeper into the SCORM standard, you can access all of the SCORM documentation on the ADL site at http://www.adlnet.gov.  Also, you can check to see if your LMS vendor is SCORM certified at http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/Custom%20Pages/Certified%20Products.aspx

* I would like to thank Ted Blanchard for contributing to this entry.