Some learning experiences may rely on content that exists beyond organizational boundaries. Learners should be able to transition seamlessly from one piece of content to another within a learning experience, even if the content pieces may come from different sources, and even if none of the content exists within the organization or system where it will be tracked.

Running content from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or even a separate content server (cross domain) within the organization are other examples of this use case.

SCORM as it stands lets you do anything - it is a toolkit. That's great if you know what you are doing but for a lot of content it is too complex.

Often they just want a simple presentation with a quiz top and tail.

Do we know enough about the forms of content that SCORM is being used to track to be able to produce off the shelf templated courses?

Sometimes a learning experience may occur with a computer device that does not have continuous access to network connectivity. Learning experiences should be able to continue without continuous connectivity.

We often have problems with content because it relies on the LMS implementation it was designed for - that shouldn't happen.

Either the content should run in a sandboxed, standards driven environment, or there is an automated testing environment to assure portatbility.

The driver here is for content to be written once and run anywhere.

I should be able to go to an 'app store' and download a course for my LMS and not have to worry about reporting and functionality.

Different systems present SCORM runtime data differently, and may not make all data available. There should be a standard way to extract this data.

Being new to SCORM, but experienced in existing data / communication protocols. SCORM communication seemed quite alien to me, almost a bespoke protocol.

It might simply be because SCORM was developed before these newer protocols came into existence.

Looking through the docs, the SCORM communication protocols look like to use existing standards for data types etc.

Perhaps the new SCORM should be based around today's comms standards?

This would also have the added benifit of being able to use todays tools e.g. Visual Studios ability to generate web service proxy classes.

Learning content or systems should be able to support multiple-users and multiple-roles. The users may be able to interact concurrently.

Many content developers find the current SCORM sequencing too complex, or limiting, and decide to handle their own sequencing. Practically, this requires a single-SCO course, since there is no good way to get enough information about the state of other SCOs to make sequencing decisions in a multi-SCO course.

Custom sequencing should be enabled without the user of workarounds like creating a single-SCO package. A solution would most likely involve the ability for a SCO to read other SCO's data.

The current SCORM runtime effectively requires that a browser session is kept open for the duration of a learner session. This makes it difficult to use SCORM for simulations, or any content that does not run in a web browser. This is also a problem for long running or sometimes disconnected content. The solution to this problem will most likely involve web services.

I would like to see SCORM as a service in may be web service or RPC or both forms. I should be able to utilize the power of SCORM in non-browser applications as well.

When we talk about LMS based courses it means that the content as well as the tracking is handles at the LMS. In developing coutries wehre bandwidth is an issue it is sometimes useful to have contnet played from the client machine and just send the tracking data such as score, completion status back to the LMS.

If the SCORM api is web service based this can be done easily. It would also allow an additonal means for authentication.

It would also allow desktop based applications to be SCORM compliant.

The SCORM API does not provide an authentication mechanism, so anyone who can execute javascript (say, by launching a bookmarklet) can set runtime values such as their score.

Instructors, other participants, other systems, etc. should be able to interact with learners during training, and observe or modify runtime values such as scores, or modify the content delivered. (with appropriate authorization)

A lot of our clients are tracking competencies for their users. For example annual fire safety training.

I would be handy to either allow the content to be tagged with our own skill definitions, but for portability (of either skills acquired or for the content) a set of industry recognised skills.

Please keep it simple though.

I would like to see global variables the developer can define, set and get throughout the course. This would give the developer (be it a tool developer or courseware developer) more control of the learning environment.

I want to display a Table of Contents (ToC) within my content. It should be possible for a SCO to display a ToC along with the status of each node in the ToC.

There is still too much variation in how compliant SCORM LMSs implement UI associated with the SCORM RTE. Will content be loaded in a new window? A frameset? How large a window? How will the table of contents be presented? What navigation request does closing the browser imply?

Content authors should be able to rely on a consistent set of UI expectations.

When testing courseware / LMS compatibility. It is sometimes difficult to gauge if everything it working as intended. If something breaks, it is tricky to know if it's down to the courseware or LMS.

I realise that there are existing certification programmes.

But it would be nice to have validators that can quickly and simply validate every aspect of the SCORM standards.

I'm envisaging something similar to the w3's html validator.

Some learning activities need to track more data than can be contained in 250 interactions, particularly with single-SCO content. This limit should be increased. Simulations or games might need to store many more, or more detailed interactions, possibly storing every control input.