The world of e-Learning content development is still a complex and inconsistent place. In many ways, content is still the “Wild West” of learning. There is a variety of tools available for companies to use to develop e-Learning. Many of these tools can be used to produce simple to complex e-Learning courses.
These tools are valuable to companies because they are designed to simplify the process of packaging SCORM content for use and tracking in the Learning Management System (LMS) of your choice. In my experience with developing content for various corporations, the tools are often not well understood and the people responsible for using them are offered limited training. While the tools are easy to use, they all have features and nuances that the training never seems to cover. I always joke with people that the most important questions you will have about a tool will never occur to you during training. This means that the communities supporting the tools, and the experiences people share, are the most valuable assets available to a content developer.
In this article, I will discuss the very common practice of developing content with the intent of getting it to seamlessly integrate with a LMS. The value of this article will be in the tips and tricks for making SCORM 1.2 conformant content that you create with Trivantis’ Lectora Professional Publishing Suite v. 2007 SP5 (5100) work properly. Specifically, I will focus on content that includes a scored assessment, and I will address communicating achievement of the required minimum score to the LMS. This should prepare you to build similarly structured content that will work in your LMS.
(Editor’s Note: If you are not familiar with Lectora, you may want to read Len Perkins’ article, “Using Lectora to Repurpose e-Learning Content — Can It Really Deliver?” published August 7, 2006 in Learning Solutions Perkins’ article provides a more introductory view of working with Lectora.)
Templates and content structure in Lectora
In my experience, one of the elements you must master for success with Lectora is the proper use of course templates. The version of Lectora Professional Publishing Suite described here provides the option to “Save Title as Template” on the File menu. This is important, as it allows you to build a shell that is common to all of your courses, and to save it for use as a starting point in future content development. This should be very exciting for anyone interested in rapid e-Learning development, or content development standardization.
Lectora offers a wide variety of options for creating custom e-Learning content. In this article I will limit discussion of specific presentation layer objects, such as buttons, pages, and actions, to instances where the use of the objects is critical to the performance of a course loaded into a SCORM-conformant LMS.
A basic template would contain these basic elements, and I will describe them as you would use them to build a SCORM-conformant course:
- A Title (Course container) and an Assignable Unit (Lesson)
- A Chapter and one or more Pages (Module)
- A Test
I’ll also describe what it takes to communicate with the LMS, and the publishing process.
The Title and Assignable Unit
In Lectora, the Title is the container that holds all the course objects. A Title can contain multiple Assignable Units. Assignable Units will be explained in more detail shortly, but basically they are lesson-size learning objects.
The Title has a variety of properties on various tabs (see Figure 1), but there is one critical value. To add an Assignable Unit to a Title, the Type of Title radio button on the Content tab in the Title Properties window must be set to: AICC/SCORM/CourseMill (3.x and above) Published Title, as shown in Figure 1. Lectora automatically creates an Assignable Unit when you do this.
Title: Child objects
The Title has child objects defined for the entire Title. You can build these objects into a Lectora template to avoid further modification. A typical example would be creating actions and a text block that defines variables used to display a page counter. You can use the value of the variables set by the actions to assign a modifiable page count value to a Text Block object. The Assignable Unit can then inherit these objects, and use them to display a page counter such as “Page 1 of 25” on the screen.
The Assignable Unit
The course must contain an Assignable Unit to be SCORM-conformant. The Assignable Unit defines the maximum score on the Test, and the mastery score the learner must achieve in order to receive completion credit. You can track each Assignable Unit in a course.
For the example in this article, the course will contain one Assignable Unit with one graded test. The required values set for the Assignable Unit can then become part of your template. This makes it possible to enforce consistency between courses, and to ensure proper configuration of items built using the template. In my experience developing content in Lectora, I have found it desirable to structure content this way to simplify the build and tracking of tests. You can also build untracked knowledge checks into the courses as needed to help the learner master content and prepare for successful completion of the test at the end of the course.
It is important to understand that the Assignable Unit needs the values shown in Figure 2 for Maximum Score and Mastery Score. The Maximum Score is the best score the learner can receive on the test for this Assignable Unit. The Mastery Score is the score the learner must get in order to receive credit for completing the course in the LMS. The defaults, 100 and 75, respectively, do not appear in the Properties Window when it opens, and the developer can leave those fields blank (see the labels in Figure 2). However, I personally prefer to explicitly define these values (by typing them in) to avoid confusion. All of the other values shown in Figure 2 are the defaults that appear when the Window opens. In this case, there is no time limit for the Test.
Assignable Unit: Objects
A series of objects can be added directly under the Assignable Unit object to define global features such as user interface images, navigation buttons, a progress bar, and the table of contents. (See Figure 3.) You should build these objects into the template and not modify them. If you built the template properly, these objects will be sized, positioned, and formatted as needed in the template. You can also add pages as children to the Assignable Unit if desired.
Chapters and Pages
In Lectora you can use Chapters to organize the content of the course. Every learning organization generally will use their own language for groups of pages. Others might refer to a Chapter as a Module or Lesson. Each chapter will consist primarily of Pages and the objects for those Pages. Chapters can also contain Actions if variable manipulation is required. For example, if you have a Chapter that does not connect linearly to the content, you may want to hide the page count. An example of this could be Course Help. You would organize such a feature in a Chapter, but it would only be accessible through a link from within the course.
For the purposes of building a template in Lectora, you would want to provide a sample Chapter that shows the developer the base formatting. This may include any Actions for a typical Chapter, as well as critical Pages within a Chapter that have specific formatting. An example would be the first and last Pages of a Chapter. If they are the same in all content Chapters, it is beneficial to build their layouts into the template.
If the content has a specific Help Chapter, or other content that is consistent across all courses, these Chapters should be built completely and be part of the template. Typically the course will have a Help Chapter for items such as navigation, support, assessments, and so on. The more work the template can eliminate for the developer, the better.
Pages
The Page in Lectora is the presentation object. The Page allows you to present content to the learner in the form of text and graphics, audio, video, and animation, to name a few of the more common options. As with the Chapter, the Page itself requires little formatting once set up. As a development team, you will determine whether Pages appear in the Table of Contents, the naming convention for each Page, what objects the Page does and does not inherit, any transitions for the Page as the course moves from page to page, and the use of metadata for the Page.
The children of a Page object include all the items positioned on that Page. Typical objects would include text blocks, images, audio, and video.
Page properties
The name of each Page in Lectora is important. You should give each Page a descriptive and unique name. No two pages should have an identical name, as duplications can generate warnings during the publishing process.
Using the Inherit tab (see Figure 2), the developer determines which objects the Page will include or exclude. What is available to that Page is dependent upon what the parent object has inherited. For example, suppose you have built your navigation buttons as children to the Assignable Unit. If you want them available on a page in a Chapter within the Assignable Unit, the Chapter cannot exclude the inheritance of those buttons. If the Chapter has excluded the buttons, the Page does not have the ability to include or exclude those buttons.
Metadata can be added for every resource object (that is, animated image, audio, document, image, video) or page object. For SCORM-conformant courses in Lectora, metadata publishes as standard XML metadata into the accompanying imsmanifest.xml file. Lectora has very useful help documentation for creating metadata for an object. You can manage metadata from the Property tab for an object.
Objects in Lectora
Lectora allows the developer to incorporate a wealth of objects into the content of the course. This section will briefly identify the objects that Lectora v. 2007 SP5 supports. There are two classes of objects (more or less), and I will refer to these as Lectora objects and Imported objects.
What does that mean? There are objects that are already fully built within Lectora (see Table 1). There are also files that are added to the course in Lectora but which require externally imported files to complete the object build (see Table 2).
Tests
While Lectora offers both Tests and Surveys, the current example only includes a Test. The simplest way to describe the difference between a Test and a Survey is that a Test has scoring options on the Results tab of the Properties window.
There are nine tabs on the Test Properties window, but for our purposes I am only going to focus on four of the tabs. These are control properties that support the SCORM conformance of the course.
Test Content Tab
The Content tab in Figure 4 offers options to the course developer that determines how the test will function. For the purposes of this example, I chose to show the learner feedback for each question, and to require that the student answer all of the questions on the test.
Test Results Tab
The Results tab in Figure 5 is important to ensure the test communicates properly with the LMS. (You do not need the Results Submission section of the Results tab for SCORM communication of the test results.) SCORM-conformant content uses SCORM communication to pass values to the LMS. In this example, we chose to show test results to the learner at the end of the test. To meet customer requirements for presentation, we customized the results. We selected the option to Grade the test. Each test question has a weighted value, which the system tracks to determine if the minimum passing score of 75% is achieved.
When Completed/Passed Tab
The developer has the ability to control the path of the learner through the course, depending on whether the learner has passed or failed the test. In my examples in Figures 6 and 7, you can see that we chose to allow the learner the opportunity to retest as needed. The flow of the course was controlled by creating a Chapter for pass and fail scenarios. Each Chapter had unique content based on their result. Achieving at least 75% on the test takes the learner to a page within the success chapter. That page informs the learner of their successful completion, and provides instructions for exiting the course. More importantly, we added two actions that modified the necessary course variables to the success page as children.
Communicating with the LMS
In this course, we needed to capture and communicate to the LMS two critical pieces of information. The first variable tracked was AICC_Score. As defined in Lectora’s help, “AICC_Score has the AICC score for the title that is the sum of all of test scores in the course. If you modify the value of this variable within the content of a course that contains more than one automatically graded test, the modification may/will be lost whenever the student completes an automatically graded test.” We chose to create an action on the success page to force the value of this variable to be set as shown in Figure 8. This ensured that we send only the final score from their attempts to the LMS.
The second item we chose to track was AICC_Lesson_Status. Again as defined in Lectora’s help, “AICC_Lesson_Status contains the current status of the course within the AICC LMS. Lectora sets the value of this variable to "incomplete," and leaves the completion status of the course up to the LMS to determine, based on the current AICC_Score for the student and the value the instructor used for the Mastery Score when the course was published.” We chose to set parameters around this variable as shown in Figure 9 to control when the value is set to complete.
For this course the Condition shown in Figure 10 demonstrates how the LMS would not display a Completed status until the learner received at least a 75% score on the course test. The variable in Lectora ties to the value set in Figure 8. During our negative testing we found this was the most consistent way to ensure our required functionality held with the LMS tracking the courses. Not to assert it was a Lectora limitation, as it could have been some other customization we made, a condition of the LMS we were integrated with, and so on.
Publishing
The final part of producing SCORM content in Lectora is publishing the course. The Publish menu offers a variety of options, but the relevant choice for this discussion is Publish → Publish to SCORM/Web-Based. There are two steps to the publishing process.
The first step is a high-level error check that ensures the content is consistent to the point it will not immediately fail the publishing process. All errors and warnings should be resolved to ensure a published course will function properly in a LMS.
Errors are the more severe of the two. An error might display if you build a course with an Assignable Unit but without a scored assessment. By definition, a course with an Assignable Unit, intended to be SCORM conformant, needs either a scored test or a manual modification to the AICC_Score or AICC_Lesson_Status variables, so the LMS can track the score or the completion.
Lectora will not allow you to publish with any errors present. A typical warning will appear if you have two Pages with the same name. Again, these should be resolved before publishing.
Once the first publishing step has completed without issue, a Publish button appears. Clicking the Publish button opens the Publish SCORM Location window shown in Figure 11.
Not all the values shown are required, and many are the default values. For our purposes, we chose to make our content SCORM 1.2 Conformant, to have the course send Test/Survey Question Interactions to the LMS, and to prompt to restore the last viewed location within the LMS. Each company will decide what data to track and functionality to enable. The version of SCORM is important to ensure the content will function properly with your LMS.
The other critical tab for our development was the Options tab shown in Figure 12. Again, we left many of the defaults as is, but it is important when you publish to ensure the Publish All Pages/Resources in the Title radio button is selected. Store the Published Title in a Zip file is also helpful as this is the most common method for sharing a SCORM conformant package with an LMS administrator for upload.
Conclusion
While we did not disclose the nuts and bolts of our development in this article, I hope that the information presented is helpful and potentially useful for other people working in Lectora for the first time. Lectora is a very easy tool to learn and build with. You can make many of the features complex, but with just the information in this article you should understand the fundamentals of SCORM development in Lectora, and be capable of putting simple, SCORM conformant content together. Using some of the power features of Lectora, such as the Title templates, can allow you to produce these simple SCORM-conformant courses in a very rapid and repeatable way.
