SCORM with custom menu built in Flash

I’ve been researching into making a training course SCORM compliant. Been quite a learning curve, and to be honest the whole system seems quite outdated and excessively jargon rich. Reading the documentation is like trying to swim laps in a swamp…

ADL(responsible for SCORM) have built a javascript library(libscorm) that works with the latest version of SCORM(ironically called 2004), and can also be called from Flash.

I was tasked with the challenge of retaining the course as it was with a custom menu within Flash. I encountered problems trying to consolidate the idea of a custom menu within Flash with the concept of SCO’s.

There are ways described out there: (see here for a pure html solution) but there still seems to me to be less flexibility.

I was directed to the examples built by Philip Hutchison, which was an interesting take on the problem. He says in his blog:

In my opinion, SCORM only becomes difficult if you try and use it to handle a course’s sequencing and navigation, which even SCORM experts are hesitant to do (it’s considered a “broken” feature by many key figures in the industry).

What he is saying, and the elegant solution he proposed in a nutshell, was to build the system into just one SCO and use the perpetual data variable ‘suspend_data’ to record status information about modules within the course.

This works well, however there are some problems with his source:
1. It uses an old version of SCORM (1.2)

2. It uses a pipwerks javacript wrapper, which is great, but I fear as it’s a 3rd party product may not be maintained as new versions of SCORM come out, and may be more limited in functionality than the ADL developed LibScorm.

3. The Flash coding is a little strange(sorry Philip), using an include statement rather than an application class, something I haven’t seen since AS2.

So I took on the challenge to build a proof of concept example that addresses and resolves these three points. Download a zip file here that contains the source and SCORM ZIP package. It uses:

1. SCORM 2004 Fourth edition
2. the ADL developed javascript library LibScorm

About craiggrummitt

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