Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♫ Music ♫
Welcome to the ADL video webinar Part Two of Creating Reusable Content Using SCORM 2004.
Part Two is talking about key terms, so we're going to try to level the playing field so
that you’ll know what I’m talking about in the further parts of the webinar. So the
first term is sequencing. Sequencing came about in SCORM 2004. It allowed content developers
to prescribe the way learners received the content and do it in interoperable way. So
in tools like Flash, dHTML, we've always been able to do sequencing and, uh, branching and
navigation, uh, types of paradigms like that. But this allows you to do it in an interoperable
way. The advent of SCORM sequencing was very important, um, to the e-learning industry
because now you could do it in a way that would work the same way on every LMS that
was SCORM certified. Uh, so here's an example of SCORM sequencing; it's one of the templates
that we have in one of our documents, the ADL Guidelines. We call it the ADL Guidelines,
but it's ADL Best Practices for Reusable Content. So this is Template Seven. It's a very simple
and very common scenario for having sequencing in content. So, you would start with SCO one,
that's sharable content object one, with the pre-test. You'd move on to Aggregation-A,
which is a collection of SCOs, SCOs Two and Three. Based on your results on the pretest,
you might not need to see SCO Two; you might have passed the, uh, assessment for SCO Two
so you're only needing to see SCO Three. So the pre-test would send you directly to SCO
Three, you don't need to see SCO Two, and then to the post-test, and based on the results
of the post-test, you may need to go back to, uh, one or both of those SCOs. So that's
a very common sequencing scenario, one of many. Asset is another important term, and
it's an electronic representation of data. So, it really just means a file, usually a
media file like a JPEG or a video file, an audio file, it can also be an HTML file. Uh,
but it's basically, uh, just a file; it's the most basic form of content. It's below
the level of SCOs, so it does not communicate with an LMS. And it can be reused in many
contexts and applications. As you see here, uh, the radioactive symbol is being reused
in three different media assets. So sharable content object, SCO, is comprised of one or
more assets. So here you see on the right side our color coding scheme that we use,
and uh, yellow cubes are SCOs, blue cubes are assets. So you see assets being contained
within SCOs. So SCO is comprised of one of more assets and it's the smallest logical
unit of information that you can deliver to your learner. The important word there is
logical. So, it is not a physical thing, uh, like an asset file, it’s something that
is described in a file that I’ll talk about later, called the manifest file, and the manifest
file says uh, “These particular assets or files belong to SCO One; these other files
belong to SCO Two.” That is all described in, uh, a manifest file. By looking at a collection
of files and an e-learning package, uh, you wouldn't necessarily have any idea what the
SCOs are; you'd have to look in this XML file to tell you which of these files are SCO One,
which are SCO Two, etc. So it's a logical unit, not a physical unit of information.
Aggregations are collections of SCOs; also you can think of it as a parent and its children
in a tree structure. It's also known as a cluster. Here on the right side of the slide
you can see the green cubes are aggregations, and then the yellow cubes inside of them,
and the blue assets inside of them. So green stands for aggregations, yellow SCOs, and
blue assets. Aggregations are used to group content for sequencing, so you can apply sequencing
to a particular part of your content. Uh, your sequencing rules don't have to apply
to the whole thing, they can apply to a particular part, so you can have different parts with
different sequencing rules. Aggregations enable that. Aggregations contain SCOs and also other
aggregations. Here’s back to that same template that we saw, the Sequencing Template Seven;
here’s an illustration of an aggregation. The dotted line shows you that SCO Two and
Three are part of Aggregation-A, and sequencing rules are applied within that aggregation.
So the entire organization, the entire course, has a particular sequencing paradigm, but
then within Aggregation-A you can have a particular sequencing paradigm. Learners have to see
SCO Two before SCO Three, or the other way around, whatever. Organization is the next
level up in the hierarchy of objects or concepts that we’re talking about here, and the organization
is where the SCOs are organized into a tree structure and the sequencing behaviors are
assigned to them. So, the organization really is the entire course, the whole thing. So
represented by the red cube, um, on the right side, uh, it outlines the entire structure.
Again it’s the whole course. And then we have a content package. The content package
was, uh, a big boon to people like me, instructional designers, who at the end the day had to deploy
content on an LMS, and before SCORM, you know, you might really be faced with hours of work
trying to configure and and tweak the LMS and the content so that it would upload and
configure itself properly. The content package is a very, very convenient way to do this.
Everything goes in a zip file; you can see the icon there of, uh, of the .zip file. Everything
goes into that zip file, and you can upload it to the LMS, and the LMS, because of the
SCORM rules and specifications, the SCORM LMS knows what to do with the package and
configures everything automatically, so there's really almost nothing you need to do other
than just upload the package. The content package contains, the most important thing
that it contains is the XML manifest file, we’ll talk about that a little bit more
in a second, and it also contains the physical SCO and asset files, so the actual media files,
HTML files, etc., flash files, whatever, they go into that package. So the XML manifest
file, which I’ve talked about a little bit, contains a list of resources or assets, so
it names all of the particular parts of the course: SCOs, assests, etc., organization,
aggregations, and it describes the content structure. So SCOs One, Two, and Three are
part of Aggregation-A, Four, Five, and Six are Aggregation-B, etc. It describes all that.
Uh, it has a section that describes the sequencing rules, so back to that template we were talking
about, it would describe all that whole scenario that we described, where users take a pre-test,
based on the results of that they would be able to skip certain SCOS, um, they have to
take SCOs for the objectives they failed, etc. etc. So all those rules are described
in the manifest file. All the metadata for the SCOs, the aggregations in a package, that's
all contained in the content package. Here’s an example of uh, a manifest. On the left
side, you can see the list of files inside of that zip file; you can see that dotted
line around the actual manifest file. That’s imsmanifest.xml file. And then on the right
side there's the contents of that manifest file. So it's XML, standard XML, but there’s
a particular schema to it that has to be followed. Curriculum is outside the scope of SCORM.
SCORM courses and SCOs, etc. etc., SCORM objects, can be part of a curriculum, but the curriculum
can include lots of other things outside of SCORM. It can include support tools, assessments,
references, anything else. Curriculum is not defined or dealt with in SCORM. And to learn
more about us and SCORM, you can go to any of these resources: our website, subscribe
to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, and go to the Linkedin group. And that’s the
end of this part. Coming up we’re going to be talking about data model elements.
♫ Music ♫