The inconvenient reality that we should stop using SCORMs

I have been writing this blog post on and off for the last 2 years, but up until now have not had the confidence to publish – as I expect what I have to say here, won’t sit comfortably with many, and as a freelancer, labelling yourself as a potential heretic isn’t always deemed as good business sense.

However, the well respected and really experienced Dan Marsden recently published a similar post titled ‘SCORM Expert: Stop publishing new SCORM content‘ which has spurred me into finishing off this series of posts, as I believe the education and training sectors really need to have this conversation.

Dan’s post goes into a bit of the history of SCORMs, which I won’t repeat here – but the underlying message is that the SCORM format is about 20 years old and created for a completely different era – most notably, the iPhone/iPad hadn’t been invented at the time, and as such SCORM didn’t need to consider the potential for small screens, touch access, and people learning whilst mobile.

There are many issues with the SCORM format:

• Once you have set up and used a SCORM item in a course – to make any changes to this is really tricky.
• If you don’t manage and keep the source files that create them, they can become impossible/very expensive to update.
• SCORMs don’t work well on small screens
• SCORMs are generally not good for accessibility
• SCORMs work best when there is a good internet connection. If accessing on a poor connection or one that dips in and out, the learner may think they have completed something, but (due to the lack of connection at the time) this information may not be fed back to the VLE – this causes all sorts of problems, with students getting frustrated at having to redo things they have already completed once in order to complete a course.
• SCORM files are large – this has an impact on the VLE hosting (you need a slightly bigger server) but has an even greater impact on a learner who if accessing via mobile data, can eat into their monthly allowances.

The big question

Given the above list of horrors, why is SCORM still so widely used and effectively the industry standard? The simple answer is that it is too easy to just follow suit and not challenge the Status Quo. If an organisation doesn’t have the finances or resources to create their own learning content, it is very easy to outsource this to someone else – and there are lots of individuals and companies out there, who make a living by taking your raw content and converting it into a SCORM for you. It is this behaviour that has allowed this out of date format to perpetuate for so long, and when something is the industry standard (as SCORM is), it takes a lot of confidence and a real depth of understanding to call out against this standard – most managers (and freelancers) don’t have this level of confidence or wisdom.

The better alternative

Having established that the SCORM format is not fit for purpose, what is the alternative format? This is easy to answer; well written and clean html is the best alternative – which if using a VLE like Moodle, can easily be achieved by building the content directly using the native functionality – e.g. an appropriate combination of Pages, Books, Lessons, Forums, Quizzes, Assignments etc. maybe with a few H5p interactions as appropriate. Doing this overcomes all of the problems listed above – but it does take longer to do well and requires more skilled people to do this (which in turn increases the cost). It does also present the risk of tying you to the platform which is one of the arguments that have been used previously in favour of SCORMs, but hopefully by now, organisations will know which platform they have and be confident it is there for a few years to come. This approach does make it harder to outsource the process to external people – as you either have to give them direct access to your system to build directly in there, or they have to build in their own systems and then export/import into yours which can be slow and not always 100% reliable.

The drivers for change

One of the big drivers for change here could be accessibility. Lots of education providers will have these wonderfully worded (but sadly hollow) disability statements declaring how they don’t discriminate – and then they produce content in SCORM format – which just the process of opening can be an accessibility challenge for many, and once in – unless really well produced can be very hard to access via a screen reader, and many won’t work with the various inclusion tools available to learners.

I was horrified when WADA (the educational organisation responsible for the fight against drug taking in sport) recently updated their content (spending big bucks), and switched from Moodle based content to what can only be described as truly horrid and totally inaccessible SCORM based content – and a significant number of their users will be para athletes. When I discussed this with WADA – they weren’t very interested in my assessment of the situation, and told me they had employed a consultant who had advised them to go down the SCORM route for accessibility reasons! So a large global organisation like WADA was duped by a low quality consultant, misguiding them, and the mistake wasn’t realised until too late. This mis-understanding contributes to the SCORM issue, and I expect many other education providers have been badly adivsed by consultants to follow the well-trodden path, rather than create your own.

I was speaking with a colleague who for a living creates SCORMs using a widely used rapid authoring tool. The creators of this tool claim that the output can be made to be accessible – but to do so takes a lot of time and skill which most people won’t have (and it stops the tool from being a ‘rapid authoring tool’). When my colleague speaks to clients he offers them a basic rate for content creation, and then a higher rate to make the same content in a fully accessible format – his higher rate is typically 10 times that of the basic rate, as that is how much longer he reckons it takes him to make something fully accessible.  Unsurprisingly he doesn’t get many takers for the accessible versions, and I expect most people out there producing SCORMs don’t even know what they need to do to make things accessible, let alone have the time/inclination to do so. So just because the companies who make and sell these tools tell you that the output can be accessible and can meet various technical accessibility standards, does not me than it will.

Have we been here before?

If some think that what I am saying is ridiculous, then I only have to look back to the early 2000s when Flash was everywhere – learning content was being built in it, and even entire websites were flash based. These were totally inaccessible so I quickly came to the conclusion that Flash wasn’t suitable and we needed to stop using it. I came up against huge resistance back then (some organisations had entire teams of flash developers) and was given a hard time for suggesting something so outlandish. It took longer than I expected and we are grateful to Apple for forcing the issue but thankfully, Flash did disappear, and we were able to move forwards as a result. I hope/believe that we are at the same situation with SCORM. I know there will be resistance, the companies that make these tools are not going to like this, the companies that produce ‘off the shelf’ compliance training will struggle, and there are thousands of people whose main and only skill is creating content in this format who will have to retrain to update their skills. It also forces people to decide which beds to lie in – I personally went down the Moodle path, others will choose Blackboard, or Canvas or will choose other non-SCORM tools such as H5p or Xerte to specialise in – obviously people may choose the wrong path to follow, which will be a concern, but it will favour those who are adaptable and open minded.

Conclusion

SCORM will disappear at some point – the very nature of it, means the standards cannot be significantly changed, so it is currently on a slow and painful journey towards its own obsoletion, what I don’t know is how long that will take. Will it be slow like the demise of Flash, or will it be more rapid like the redundancy of film cameras, VHS or DVDs. I expect that I will be having these conversations with clients for at least the next 5 probably 10 years – but what I do know, is that the organisations that make the step forwards to move away from SCORMs sooner, will find themselves ahead of the game when the inevitable final happens.

In my next post, I will unpick some of the more practical steps of how to start this change in direction.

Image source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/grim-reaper-death-scary-creepy-5535651/