Being relatively new to the online education industry, I quite naturally have a lot of catching up to do with my more education-savvy co-workers. My personal background is in IT in medical and pharmaceutical companies, which allows me to complete our courses relatively rapidly (since as of this date they are mostly medical-related), but it also means I have a lot to learn about the latest trends and ideas in online teaching.

The buzzword I most frequently hear is "SCORM," or Sharable Content Object Reference Model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORM). SCORM comes from the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative from the government and has some nice ideas about abstracting content so a standardized platform can take the package and display it in native format. Thus, an LMS (or Learning Management System) that is SCORM-compatible should, by definition, be able to retrieve the content and display it correctly. Fine so far.

Unfortunately, SCORM also describes a mechanism for returning content-related values (such as the score achieved by the user taking a test in the content) back to the LMS from the content. This is where it gets tricky. Generally speaking, an LMS and the content being served are not hosted by the same company or entity (if they were, there would be no need for SCORM as the entity could just use a proprietary format). SCORM calls for the use of Javascript to transmit this information. Unfortunately, security systems in place on almost every major browser prevent Javascript calls from one host to another (cross-site scripting). This is a Good Thing - can you imagine random websites being able to run Javascript that affects your machine or site? No Good. So you can't use Javascript. Unfortunately, what that means is that the industry will have to provide a different method and not everyone will choose the same thing....you could use web service calls, cookies, old-school file transfers, or CPIP (http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/).

My hope is that I have simply misunderstood the SCORM standard and there is a solution. It would be a shame if a standard with potential like SCORM were to fall flat with such a glaring flaw.