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Welcome back to the ADL webinar series Creating Reusable Content Using SCORM 2004. This is
Part Five, Designing for Reuse. Probably the most important rule in designing for reuse
is to design smaller SCOs. That just gives you greater flexibility in terms of mixing
and matching parts, and it enables tracking and sequencing at a more detailed level. So
back in the example we talked about in one of the earlier parts, we were talking about
changing a flat tire and had a SCO that was specific to a particular type of car, like
a 4x4 SUV. So we had a SCO for that audience, a SCO for sedan owners audience, and so SCOs
at that level that cater to a particular audience can be really helpful because you can deliver
just the right content to a particular audience. So designing smaller SCOs that meet those
particular needs of particular audiences are generally a better thing. There is a slight
downside and that is it complicates the authoring process a little bit; you have more SCOs to
deal with and uh, manage but generally designing smaller SCOs is really important to enable
reuse. Context-neutral SCOs are very important. You want to avoid numbers that refer to a
specific location. So you wouldn't want to say “As we learn in Lesson Fiver,” well
Lesson Five might be a different number lesson in this new collection, you’re reusing these
SCOs in a in a new context, so Lesson Five is now Lesson Fourteen, the title of it may
be different, so you don’t want to refer back to names and numbers of things that existed
in the original collection of SCOs. You want to keep it neutral. And you also want to be
careful about naming files. So you don't want to name a file, you know, “Module Four,
Lesson Five,” “M4L5.html,” you want to name it “ChangingAFlatTire.html.” Continuing
along the theme of designing context-neutral SCOs, you want to avoid references to previous
course material. We basically talked about that, not saying “As you learned in Lesson
X.” Instead of doing that you can actually make contextual SCOs separate. So you can
do your referring back to earlier lessons, which is instructionally a good thing, reminding
students of material they’ve learned previously. So you can keep those, but make them separate
SCOs. It might only be one screen, that’s OK, uh, but you can keep those SCOs separate
so that when somebody's reusing it in a different context, they can swap those out with the
SCO that says “As you learned in Lesson Fourteen,” if that's now what the lesson
is. So that's an option, you can make contextual SCOs separate. You also need to ensure that
the background of media assets doesn't have contextual information, so if somebody is
being interviewed in their office, you wouldn't want a corporate logo behind them identifying
them as working for “Company X” and now you're reusing this SCO in another context,
“Company Y.” So you wanna be careful about that contextual information. You want to use
sequencing to deliver the appropriate context-specific SCOs, so if you want maintain that context
reminding students of material they've learned or recapping material, you can keep those
separate, and then in the new context they can be swapped out. And that swapping happens
using SCORM sequencing. You want to avoid references to particular features or names
of your organization, so if you have an audio track or text on the screen, you wouldn't
want to say “PHP is used by the ACME IT department to create webpages,” you would
just say “PHP is used to create webpages,” something that takes out that specific context,
uh, you just want to keep it as context-neutral as possible. As we mentioned earlier, you
shouldn't name files using “Module number X, Lesson number X,” because those numbers
can change. So you're gonna need to think at the outset of the project how you’re
going to optimize the potential for the content to be reused. What kind of style sheets are
you gonna use use to allow other people to replace those style sheets with their own
look and feel? It deserves some careful thought in the beginning of the project. You need
to define your data collection and tracking requirements, so what data model elements
are you going to use? Create the content structure and flowchart for sequencing and determine
the information that's required for formal reporting. So are you just satisfied with
knowing that learners have completed a SCO, or do you need assessment results reported
to the LMS? So all these are issues that you need to think about, not just for reusability’s
sake but for general e-learning purposes, um, although the sequencing rules obviously
apply to SCORM. You need to decide whether the SCOs will cover a single objective or
multiple, and ADL recommends generally that to you keep it to one SCO per objective, and
that just makes things easier to manage and that way you can assess against that objective,
you have a score or whether the student has mastered that or not. So it's generally easier
to have SCOs cover of a single learning objective. You need to decide whether the SCOs will include
an assessment as part of the SCO or whether the assessment is the SCO. And generally we
recommend that the assessment is a separate SCO. Again, it just makes things cleaner and
easier to manage. You need to decide how SCOs will be divided, structured, chunked, and
sequenced. There’s lots of options there; there's lots of sequencing paradigms, there’s
lots of data model elements that you can use, there's a lot you can do. So you need to think
about that. What media types will be incorporated? Are you using just static images, video, etc?
Other organizational policies and practices like Section 508. When, where, and how you're
going to collect data. Are you gonna collect it at the level of SCOs for the whole content
package, or for the curriculum? And this relates directly to your use of data model elements.
You're gonna be choosing the data model elements that will enable the particular data collecting
requirements that you need. So you need to identify where the navigation options are
going to be provided. So, if you're going to display your content in a separate window
outside of the LMS, then you need your navigation options embedded into that window, embedded
in the content, but some people use the LMS navigation options, so they have their content
displayed within an LMS window and they just use the built-in LMS navigation options. So
that’s something you have to decide, and that relates a lot to how much real estate
you want to use. If you're using the LMS window, you may be pretty severely limited to a smaller
space, rather than displaying it in a separate window. Uh, what colors and layouts are working
best in your target LMS, and then thinking about other LMSs. If you’re in a large enterprise
that has multiple LMSs, you might want to do some research and see what these other
LMS interfaces look like and try to work out a look and feel that will work not only in
your LMS but in these other LMSs as well. Lastly, uh, you need to use replaceable skins
and templates where possible. Skins and templates are sometimes delivered dynamically by an
LMS, other times, you know, you have to use the authoring tool to do that. But, just making
the look and feel of your e-learning an object that can actually be wholesale replaced by
some other look and feel. So you need to design your e-learning in such a way that it can
be swapped out. And really the most important thing though in designing for reuse is to
use cascading style sheets. As any good web designer knows, CSS is really the way that
you can have the most control over the look and feel of your website, and it applies to
e-learning. So everything to do with formatting control: use CSS, don't use HTML control formatting.
And that will enable you to then change those parameters in the CSS to make it more closely
match the content that your content’s being reused with. You may not get a perfect match
in the look and feel but you may be able to get a lot closer by changing the parameters
in CSS, or using the style sheet or some other piece of content for your content. And here's
some references. The ADL Guide, what we call the ADL Guide, the full title is the ADL Guide
to Creating Reusable Content with SCORM 2004. Uh, it’s a downloadable PDF file, it’s
up on our website. A lot of information in this video webinar is taken from that. This
is kind of a presentation of that document. The ADL Registry, there's a document on the
ADL Registry site that talks about how you can upload your metadata to make it available
for others to discover your content and reuse it, and also for you to search on content.
The DoD Instruction 1322.26 is the document that mandated use of SCORM in the Department
of Defense. You can learn more about us at ADLnet.gov, you can subscribe to our newsletter,
you can follow us on Twitter, and you can join our Linked in group. That concludes the
video webinar Creating Reusable Content Using SCORM 2004. And I want to thank everyone here
in the audience, and thank you all for watching.
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