Assignable Units
June 13, 2006 12:00 AM
This is a deep one that's compounded by the variables of given authoring tools, LMS capabilities and SCORM standards.Most of us do just fine with SCORM 1.2 courses consisting of a single Assignable Unit (SCO in SCORM-speak) and build most of the modularity we need within our courses in Lectora. So we can take a chapter from one course, drop into another with doing little or no rework, and we've just repurposed content we made before. That's within the context of using the authoring tool.The same thing applies to SCOs at the LMS level. In an LMS, a course is an outline consisting of one or more SCOs. Here, you can make a big course out of lots of smaller courses. Why? Well, say you want to assign a prerequisite to one SCO to make sure it's completed before the next. There's one reason. Another reason has to do with limits on suspend data. SCORM 1.2 designates that the suspend data max for a single SCO is 4096 bytes. If you overfill it you'll get an LMS set value error. Big, single SCO courses can also be slow trying to push a large amount of suspend data to the LMS, even if it's under the limit.One of the other virtues of using multiple SCOs is that each will maintain its own bookmark, as that is SCO specific. So if you had a course that allowed multiple entry points into the content, say one dedicated SCO for module A, B, C, and D, the course would remember your place in each of the module SCOs.Data reporting and tracking can be another advantage of multiple SCOs. Maybe you want to track the test results or other performance data of one of your SCOs on an ongoing basis, yet want to use it in another course. By assigning it as a SCO to another course in the LMS, different courses can use and report to the same SCO, even though it's placed in different courses. This can be advantageous in tests, where you may want to use the same question in different test forms without losing the overall performance data on just that question. Because of this, we've built a 30-question test for our industry, with each question built as an individual SCO.The only real fly in all this sticky ointment, is getting from one SCO to another in a course. Lectora, example, does not allow you to publish SCORM 1.2 or 1.3 (2004) courses with navigation from SCO to SCO. Trivantis maintains that this is a violation of SCORM for both standards and the navigation is the job of the LMS. While it's true for 1.2 courses, SCORM 1.3 (2004) does allow for SCO-to-SCO navigation through a model called simple sequencing. If you wanted to build such navigation in Lectora, you'd have to build it using javascript commands to speak with your LMS for the adl.nav request simple sequencing commands. Hope that helps.
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