Monitoring with SCORM

The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) exists, in part, to track content for reuse in other training. The ability to track any SCORM compliant course comes from the extensive metadata, or information that the course is tagged with in the database. This information could also allow for the monitoring of courses during their lifecycle.

During a courses’ lifecycle, periodic evaluation and updating of the content is often required. In addition, it may need an expiration date to indicate when it is no longer needed in order to pull it from availability. A hurdle in this is how to accurately and proactively monitor the massive amount of courses in libraries.

SCORM compliant data, by its nature, already contains much of the needed tracking information. Queries are run against the data in the database to locate courses in order to reuse and monitor them. It is not a big jump then to design similar queries to define when a course needs review.

Some of the SCORM information includes:
• Title of the course
• Description of the course content
• Versions created through updates and changes
• Keywords related to the course content or purpose
• Date it was created
• Status of development
• Author
• Format the course is presented in
• Location

In addition, a programmer could use this information develop alerts in the form of automatically generating reports. These reports could regularly alert the person in charge of the maintenance that an action is required.
With the growth of SCORM compliant course development, it is worthwhile to plan and execute for reuses of the data and the course.