building scorm packager tool

Question

I have recently approached by my co-worker about creating our own SCORM Packager. Honestly I have little clue about SCORM. I have look into Adobe Captivate and also Articulate Presenter. But unfortunately things that we worked here are highly customized. Our shop are half HTML and the other half is Flash.

Here are my questions:

1. Any suggestions to where I can get better understanding about SCORM (beside http://scorm.com)? I am looking something more hands-on approach.
2. is there a tool out there that can take our products (either HTML or Flash) and wrap them into SCORM 1.2 zip compliant file?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

For your course to be truly integrated with SCORM, you need to modify your ActionScript to report activities/status throughout the life of the course. This can't be achieved with a packaging tool, because it would have no way of knowing how your custom ActionScript is built and where to hook into it.

Adobe Captivate and Articulate Presenter have SCORM integration built in to their ActionScript, but it's under the hood where you can't see it unless you decompile their SWFs. The bits that are public -- the SCORM JavaScript, the manifest, etc. -- are only part of the story.

If you'd like to see a simple example of how to add SCORM code to a Flash file, see http://pipwerks.com/2008/04/27/how-to-add-basic-scorm-code-to-a-flash-movie/

It doesn't cover packaging, though.

Answer 2

1. To better understanding SCORM, I think you shoud go to the place where it born: http://legacy.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/SCORMSDocuments/Forms/All%20Documents.aspx
2. ActivePresenter may be a good option.

Answer 3

I actually made a SCORM packager for my work. It's a bit of a process, but I think the best place to start was to study some working examples. You say you're doing SCORM 1.2, here are the reference files that you'll need; it has the CAM manual which tells you how the manifest file should be built. It also includes the SCORM 1.2 test suite you'll need to use to make sure your package conforms to SCORM, and that the content launches and communicates with the API correctly. The Test Suite is a bitch to setup though, and I recommend setting up a windows XP virtual machine image to test with(I used Parallels).

About your second question, I'm sure there is some public Scorm packaging applications out there, but we didn't find any that fit our needs (hence the need to build our own). You may want to look some more before creating your own from scratch; it will be a lengthy process.