A compressed history of SCORM
AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee) serves the people who operate, maintain, and build airplanes. The AICC’s constituents required, for a host of reasons, training that was easy to distribute and reliable in its ability to report on the progress of on-the-job training.
IMS takes a little more explaining. In 1997 there was a trade organization for higher education specifically for promoting the use of information technology; this group was (and still is) called the National Learning Infrastructure of EDUCAUSE. As its members spanned a variety of different organizations, each facing a common set of problems, a specialized consortium grew out of EDUCAUSE to specify how its members could share the expense of research and development in a common way. That consortium is the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS/GLC or simply IMS). IMS is “a global, non-profit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technologies in the education and corporate learning sector worldwide" (you can learn more at http://www.imsglobal.org/background.html). IMS has a diverse membership including corporations, K-12 education, and government organizations, and much investment in IMS comes from higher education organizations.
As far back as 1992, AICC had what we now call a Learning Management System (LMS) – then called Computer Managed Instruction (CMI) – and, with it, its data model. This provided the ability to track information about the learner's experience with learning content. AICC's specifications even provided the means to sequence discrete pieces of learning content and the pre-requisites needed for a learner to experience that content, all those years ago (see AICC CMI draft specification, May 1992, http://www.aicc.org/docs/tech/cmi001v1d1.pdf ).
For its members, IMS specified a number of things. Metadata and Content Packaging solved specific problems for their members. How each member of IMS might apply those specifications for their own organizations was still pretty subjective. A university that produced Computer Based Training (CBT) and used the Metadata spec, might not use Content Packaging if they were running CBT off of CD-ROMs. A larger, private university might have built their own custom learning portal, employing both Metadata and Content Packaging. IMS produced other specifications, for use as needed. The advantage to this system is that the members traded sweat equity for the specs they really needed. The types of needs for each member might be different from the needs of other members, but where they were similar, each member could participate and share the result of their collective effort. That tends to happen with grassroots organizations, and that diversity is healthy.
That diversity, however, comes at considerable expense – one that could be mitigated if all the beneficiaries of such efforts could be aligned. In the late 1990s, that was almost impossible to think about in the field of higher education. However, the U.S. government saw a potential to save hundreds of millions of dollars in training the military and its workforce – and the government had the ability to align their various organizations. So, in 1998, then-President Bill Clinton issued an Executive Order that created the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, with the purpose of oversight, research, and development of online learning. The Executive Order has mandated use of ADL for the last several years by all military and federal agencies. ADL is situated in the U.S. Department of Defense, but there has been a strong civilian presence in the organization throughout its history, serving in various leadership roles. One of those leaders, ADL’s original Chief Architect, was a man named Phillip Dodds.
Dodds was very interested in the body of work that was coming out of IMS, and connected a need the U.S. Government had for accelerating training through distributed learning and its need to cut the cost of training. He also recognized how the specifications that IMS produced, namely Metadata and Content Packaging, could help fill those needs – if the way in which they would be applied could be mandated across all the different parts of the U.S. government. ADL made a handshake agreement with IMS to allow ADL's use of their specifications. A similar accord was made with AICC.
ADL's framework that combined AICC's CMI data model and API with the IMS Metadata and Content Packaging specifications is SCORM. As a document library all on its own, there have been several major revisions to SCORM since its origins in 2001, generally keeping SCORM aligned with the revisions to its specifications and standards.
The most widely adopted version of SCORM is Version 1.2, which also leveraged the IMS Content Packaging, though at the time of this writing the 4th Edition of SCORM 2004 is current, and it leverages the IMS Simple Sequencing specification.
Shifts in orbit
Over the years, the relationship between ADL and IMS became strained from the accord that brought the IMS specifications into SCORM. Much is left to one's interpretation of what exactly happened, but I will attempt to offer some perspective, noting that from 2003-2006 I worked on the technical team for SCORM 2004 as the content developer for ADL.
A considerable investment of effort and money goes into producing a specification. ADL agreed to join IMS, and to make its resources and people available to IMS working groups to participate in the evolution of IMS specifications. This was a clear success for IMS: the largest possible adopter of specifications was adopting and committing to help evolve their works. With no less a partner than the U.S. Department of Defense, IMS members could count on their works to evolve and expand.
Such heavy investment carries costs in ways that aren't financial. Once SCORM Version 1.2 was heavily adopted, both inside the government and in the public sector, the specifications now impacted far more organizations than the members of IMS, as a consortium. Until ADL became involved, the users of the specifications IMS produced were also, in large part, the members themselves. Now the number of users who had adopted the specifications was in the millions. SCORM users were around the globe, and in all manner of organizations beyond the higher education institutions that (at the time) principally made up IMS' membership. As it was the most widely adopted implementation of IMS specifications, gravity around SCORM and its steward ADL tilted the relationship with IMS. Before SCORM Version 1.2, organizations, including ADL, orbited around IMS. Now, IMS was in the tenuous position of adjusting to the new orbit around ADL, both as an adopter of their specifications, and as the steward of SCORM as a framework adopted by millions.
This gravitational shift was complicated by the inclusion of another specification by IMS into SCORM: Simple Sequencing. The idea behind Simple Sequencing was that the navigational rules of learning objects (granular units of learning content) could be external to the learning content itself. This was desirable for two reasons: removing navigational rules from a unit of content would make that content piece infinitely more reusable, and, if content was discoverable with the use of Metadata, it would enable the automation of tailored learning – possibly enabling intelligent tutoring systems.
In 2003, when coupled with the implementation of the other specifications in SCORM [Version] 2004, IMS Simple Sequencing was incompatible as specified. ADL needed to modify the specification heavily to implement Simple Sequencing. ADL and IMS eventually came to an agreement by which ADL would provide a resource, as a member of IMS, to revise the Simple Sequencing specification so that it could be implemented into SCORM 2004.
Hindsight making all things clear, this was a tipping point in the relationship between ADL and IMS. In 2006, IMS wanted to resume their activity on Simple Sequencing, as it was interdependent with another IMS specification called Common Cartridge. The problem was that the work that ADL put into Simple Sequencing, for SCORM, was never fully harmonized with IMS' Simple Sequencing specification. Assuming the best of intentions on both sides, this was a huge miss. The debate over which version of Simple Sequencing was actually "correct" became a schism that affected a series of decisions about the future of SCORM.
The controversy over SCORM: the beginning of LETSI
Even in 2004, the understanding inside of ADL was that there would come a day in the (then) not-so-distant future when the U.S. Department of Defense would no longer shepherd SCORM. It would be turned over for another steward to continue to evolve and grow it. ADL was then, and still is today, interested in a number of pursuits beyond just SCORM.
By 2007, the acrimony between ADL and IMS had become fierce. Even the announcement of a partnership between ADL and IMS was delayed almost 90 minutes with last minute arguing by the principals involved. I was at the meeting. It was like attending a wedding where the bride and groom are already seeking counsel to handle the divorce, even while they're committed to going ahead with the ceremony. At the time, I had been away from ADL in any official capacity for a year. It seemed to me to be a tense meeting.
Before this, it was pretty commonly held, even within ADL, that the eventual steward of SCORM would, rightly, be IMS. Except for CMI (from AICC), every other part of SCORM was at one time an IMS specification. As the relationship spiraled downward, there was no clear steward organization. The relationship was so tense that I doubt anyone inside of ADL trusted that IMS would shepherd SCORM to satisfy the needs of the U.S. government.
ADL, as an initiative under the U.S. Department of Defense, has a mission that concerns itself primarily with adoption inside the U.S. government. This put the stewardship of SCORM, within ADL, at odds with the global community. All manner of educational institutions, commercial enterprises, and foreign governments and militaries all around the world depend on SCORM as their technical framework for online learning. The notion of the U.S. government "owning" SCORM was becoming more and more controversial as global adopters wondered what was next.
In late 2007, global adoption of SCORM (across all versions) meant. that as a community of SCORM adopters, the U.S. government was but one large member. This view (the U.S. as a member of a community of SCORM adopters) spurred the decision to support a new, non-governmental organization dedicated to shepherding SCORM: this became LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability). In 2008, LETSI officially began as an international federation, sponsored by a number of organizations – only one of which was ADL.
This decision to hand SCORM over to LETSI was controversial. While there are pending legal challenges as of this writing, ADL decided in May 2009 that it must maintain stewardship of SCORM. This presents an interesting opportunity for LETSI.
What does a community of enthusiastic learning technologists do when the reason for getting together no longer exists? In LETSI, a grander purpose was always with the group.
