Moving Toward SCORM Compliant Content Production at Educational Software Company: Technical and Administrative Challenges

The Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) aims to standardize electronic course content, its packaging and delivery. Instructional designers and e-learning material producer organizations accept SCORM’s significant impact on instructional design/delivery process, however not much known about how such standards will be implemented to this process. This paper presents a project at an educational software production company that has decided to change its production line to conform to the SCORM standards. The paper provides the technical details of the project such as technical platform and the infrastructure for related components. The technical issues and decisions of asset management system, SCO development and repository will also be mentioned. Secondly, administrative issues of this process will be discussed. Administrative issues can be summarized as the changes in the work practices of the instructional design/development process, organizational resistance, and new roles and responsibilities of people in the standards compliant instructional design/development process. Introduction Today many universities and organizations offer courses through online learning systems. Especially, e-learning or Internet-based distance learning have gained significant importance and it is the most rapidly growing aspect of education and training in the world (Cagiltay, Graham, Lim, Craner, & Duffy, 2002; Lytras, Pouloudi & Poulymenakou, 2002). According to Murray (2000), “In the future, education will increasingly utilize distributed learning technologies” (p. 1). While he and other researchers argue that there is promising future in the use of personal computers and the Web in education, there is no satisfying answer for the question of how these technologies can best be used to develop instructional materials in an efficient and effective way. Educational materials for online learning environments generally include a computer interface, several different data formats (e.g. text, graphics, image, voice and movie), an evaluation system to assess students’ progress, and several other support tools to support the learning environment (Robson, 2000). As stated above, preparing online educational systems has several unknown issues. An important issue is “how to produce and deliver quality content for online learning experiences” (p.1) (Robson, 2000). Generally the volumes of the materials that are prepared for online learning environments are very high. This makes it so hard to keep the content up to date and most of the times it is hard to update the content regularly. Formatting these materials in several different ways for different purposes is another difficulty. There are always portability and compatibility problems among online educational systems. Actually similar problems were also faced in software development field. Until early 80s creating new information systems were very clumsy work. For every new software project, programmers had to write a new code. Software developers’ solution to this problem was using object-oriented approaches. This brought modularity and speed to the software development process. A similar approach called