Concerning Open Source, LMSs and SCORM: Correcting Some Common Misconceptions
At first, I thought a recent Xyleme Insider blog post called ‘My Moodle Test’ was an addition to the debate about the relative benefits of proprietary versus open source Learning Content Management platforms. But it wasn’t; properly reading through the article, it emerged that the post’s author Dawn Poulos was advocating the need for open source LMSs (specifically Moodle) to comply with standards for web-based learning management systems in the same way that – in their view – proprietary LMSs like BlackBoard do.
Now read on…
According to the post,
Open source has failed to reach critical mass in a number of technology sectors, and may also fail to do so in learning for the foreseeable future. One reason is clearly a lack of robust adherence to standards that negatively impacts functionality and limits a developer’s ability to create sophisticated solutions.
The conclusions the author reached were that:
- Open source software (OSS) does not align to accredited standards, which…
- Restricts OSS functionality and interoperability, and…
- Reduces developers’ ability to generate sophisticated courseware across multiple platforms, but…
- Proprietary software does adhere to “standards”, ensuring interoperability, enhanced distributability, better learning interventions, and broadened learner reach.
These conclusions are in error. Widely-held misunderstandings about
- the role of LMSs in a learning ecosystem
and
- the purpose of e-learning specifications like SCORM
have conspired to create confusion about the nature of each, and how they interoperate.
First some context.
Moodle is an Course Management System (CMS), sometimes known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a tool for creating websites for learners. Note that is is not a tool for creating content – broadly speaking, Moodle courseware developers must create e-learning content in external, dedicated content creation environments, and import the content into Moodle for maintenance, management and deployment. Moodle supports playback of AICC, IMS/SCORM-packaged courseware.
Like Moodle, the Blackboard Learning System is a web-based server software platform that includes course management, a customizable architecture, and a scalable design that allows for integration with student information systems and authentication protocols. Its main purposes are to add media elements to courses and to develop completely online courses. Blackboard supports playback of AICC, IMS/SCORM-packaged courseware. It also offers a course archive/export tool which seems to support the SCORM specification.
Now let’s return to the case in point. In her post, Dawn compared Moodle with the proprietary BlackBoard solution. She cites D’Arcy Norman’s blog post (2009) where the author expressed their frustration at being unable to “export a Moodle course in a format that can be ingested in another standards-compliant LMS.”
D’Arcy continues:
Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it can never leave.
If Blackboard did that, there would be villagers marching in the streets with torches in hand. The Blackboard SCORM import/export stuff might not be perfect, but at least they try to let people move content out.
With Moodle, it’s currently a vendor lock-in proposition. The only saving grace is that the vendor just happens to be an open source project. But it’s still lock-in. …Standards are only good if they’re used bidirectionally.
The author concludes, alarmingly, with a (somewhat apocalyptic socio-political) warning that “Standards used to promote lock-in are nothing but tools of oppression.”
In the Xyleme Insider Blog post, Dawn takes up the sentiments expressed in D’Arcy’s post:
standards and breadth of functionality are hugely important and to make the assumption that the term ‘open source’ automatically translates into these can lead to uninformed decision-making and projects that don’t reach their expected ROI. Or to put it more simply:
Open source or proprietary? You’re asking the wrong question.
So what is the question?
I don’t know. If it is implicitly communicated in the blog post, I’m afraid that it’s too subtle for my alas! too-meager wit to elicit.
It can’t be do with open source support for standards. While it is the case that many OSS applications in many domains do not support accredited standards, many proprietary applications similarly fail to adhere to them, too. Let’s look at an obvious example: Microsoft Office. Prior to the 2007 edition, the core applications of the Microsoft Office software suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) stored their data in binary files.
Historically, these files were difficult for other applications to interoperate with, because of the proprietary nature of the file types. In May 2004, governments and the European Union recommended to Microsoft that they publish and standardize their XML Office formats through a standardization organization (Jones, History of office XML formats, 2007).
However, the Microsoft XML schema does not align with Office Open XML, a multi-part International ISO/IEC Standard and an Ecma International standard, controlled and maintained by ISO/IEC (Brown, ISO committee takes full control of OOXML, 2008).
Without going into the technicalities of the differences between the vendor-specific implementation of XML and the Office Open XML standard – you can find out about it here – we can say that this is an obvious instance of a divergence between a commonly-used suite of programs and the standard that is supposed to govern such applications.
Perhaps the question is about Moodle’s inability to export to SCORM? If so, that LMS is not alone: according to Blackboard’s documentation:
The Blackboard packaging format follows the IMS Content Packaging Specification with extensions to support content types specific to Blackboard Learning System [my italics]
In other words, Blackboard only allows you to export and archive courses to its proprietary specification Blackboard Learning System CIS 3.0. This feature is not designed for users to export content from Blackboard and import it into a different LMS.
In my view, a much more salient topic to address is “What is SCORM?” and to understand this, we must first discuss standards.
According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), standards, are “documented agreements containing technical specifications or other precise criteria to be used consistently as rules, guidelines, or definitions of characteristics, to ensure that materials, products, processes and services that are fit for their purpose.”
The term standard as it is commonly used actually refers to accredited standards, which have been …approved by an accredited standards body such as the ISO or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association. E-learning standards …are in fact a mixture of requirements, specifications, and implementation models that are in the process of evolving toward becoming accredited standards. It is important that buyers and vendors alike are clear about this distinction [my bold text].
(Fallon & Brown, 2002, pp.25-26)
In essence SCORM – the Sharable Content Object Reference Model – is a collection of a large number of specifications for web-based e-learning.
It defines communications between client side content and a host system called the run-time environment (commonly a function of a learning management system). SCORM also defines how content may be packaged into a transferable ZIP file.
ADL.net
In other words, SCORM is a nice idea, and it will be really useful when it becomes an accredited standard.
Here is what we can accurately say about LMSs, specifications, and standards:
- Moodle and Blackboard support SCORM-packaged and other e-learning specification-based courseware and assessments.
- Moodle and Blackboard do not support export of interoperable SCORM-packaged and other e-learning specification-based courseware and assessments.
- Neither OSS nor proprietary software e-learning platforms align to accredited ISO or IEEE standards.
The establishment of truly accredited standards for e-learning courseware is an important step towards enabling learning professionals to undertake their activities more effectively. But we’re not there yet. But this has not stopped certain interested parties making only partially accurate claims for their products’ or services’ compliance or conformance* to segments of the specification by cherry-picking the parts of the requirements that are already implemented in their particular solution.
By their very nature, specifications and standards are sophisticated sets of information. Understanding them requires a considerable degree of effort and rigor, implementing them even more so.
I think Dawn has raised some very interesting and salient points about some of the foundational tools and technologies used by learning professionals, and I hope she sees that I wrote this reply not so much to rebut her assertions, but more to illustrate how easily discrete and very different ideas can be conflated by the sales & marketing spin LMS vendors put on their products alleged features and functionality. Naturally, companies will say that their products perform in whatever way it takes to help make the sale. As Milton Friedman said:
there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits
(Friedman, 1970)
Caveat emptor, my friends.
—————–
*Conformance: In information technology, a state or acts of adherence to a certain specification, standard, or guideline. Sometimes used as a synonym for compliance. Conformance more often connotes a similarity to the model being followed within some allowed range.
——-
Note: Post updated 20th October to reflect that Xyleme’s Dawn Poulos got in touch and was good enough to let me know her full name and title (see Dawn’s comment below).
PS: Happy Birthday, Róisín!
___________
References:
ADL Guidelines for Creating Reusable Content with SCORM 2004 (2004). [Internet] Available from: http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/SCORMSDocuments/SCORM%20Resources/Resources.aspx Accessed 12th October 2009
Blackboard Inc. Export Course [Internet] Available from: http://library.blackboard.com/docs/r7/70/en_US/admin/bbas_r7_0_admin/export_course1.htm Accessed 12th October 2009
Brown, A. (2008). ISO committee takes full control of OOXML. [Internet] Available from http://adjb.net/index.php?entry=entry080409-221633. Accessed 12th October 2009
Fallon, C., Brown, S. (2002). E-learning standards: a Guide to Purchasing, Developing, and Deploying Standards-Conformant E-Learning. CRC Press: FL.
Friedman, M. (1970). The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. The New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. [Internet] Available from: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp-business.html Accessed 14th October 2009.
Jones, B. (2007). History of office XML formats (1998–2006). MSDN blogs. [Internet] Available from http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/01/25/office-xml-formats-1998-2006.aspx. Accessed 12th October 2009
Norman, D (2009). Moodle and SCORM Export? [Internet] Available from: http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/03/07/moodle-and-scorm-export/ Accessed 12th October 2009
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October 19 2009 03:30 pm | e-learning
14 Responses to “Concerning Open Source, LMSs and SCORM: Correcting Some Common Misconceptions”
D'Arcy Norman on 19 Oct 2009 at 3:44 pm #
My post wasn’t meant to be alarming or confrontational. I was merely pointing out that software without a valid interchange format (a way to reliably, compatibly, and safely get stuff both in AND out to exchange with other software) that there is lock-in. And that since most people aren’t actually hacking on Moodle source code, the lock-in is essentially the same form as used by Blackboard etc. (but without charging money for it).
I get how messy SCORM is – I’ve built SCORM-compliant software and content – and it’s not the magic interchange format. I don’t know what is, but so far, SCORM won’t solve the problem.
Michael Hanley on 19 Oct 2009 at 4:31 pm #
Hi D’Arcy,
Thanks for your comment.
I must say that I did not encounter anything confrontational in your post; in my view, it epitomized the frustration many learning professionals feel when required to migrate digital media resources between platforms. However, based upon the text in your post, it seems as if you were equating content export formats with the SCORM spec, and the two are related only tangentially, at best.
I did chuckle a little at the “Standards used to promote lock-in are nothing but tools of oppression” sentence – it reminded me of the rhetoric used by the more inflammatory type of 20th century socialist revolutionary: if you added the phrase [affects Eastern European accent] “…of the proletariat by the petit bourgoise and their imperialist masters” it would have been perfect. I am very aware that my sense of humour is dark as midnight and dry as dust, and that it might not translate. I think that it’s comedy gold however, and – as the saying goes, IMFB (It’s My Blog)…
To return to my point though, D’Arcy. As you know, SCORM is not an export format: it’s a specification or reference model that tells content developers how their materials should be packaged if they (the developers) what their content to interoperate with diverse CMS/LCM/LCMSs. As I highlighted in my piece, it’s pretty common in the IT industry for software houses to to treat standards as guidelines, or even as suggestions.
As such, my experience is that it’s probably best that content authors create materials in a vendor neutral authoring app, package content offline, and upload it as required, rather than attempting to migrate between environments. Messy, I know, but practical.
Regards,
Michael
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D'Arcy Norman on 19 Oct 2009 at 5:19 pm #
Heh. Yeah. I guess that does sound a bit over the top in retrospect – I had been to a presentation by Richard Stallman not long before writing this, and that language is pretty much in line with his interpretation of Free Software. LMS users of the world, unite!
I agree that SCORM isn’t an export format, but the only other alternatives are proprietary “cartridge” formats and proprietary backup archives.
At my university, we have thousands of courses built in Blackboard. We migrated from WebCT in 2001 (IIRC). The thought of trying to migrate those thousands of courses into any other platform is painful enough to make the university continue cutting large cheques to Blackboard Inc.
Martin Dougiamas on 20 Oct 2009 at 4:45 am #
Hi
Good discussion!
I’m the Moodle founder, perhaps my perspective can help here.
I agree it would be brilliant if all courses were totally interoperable between all systems, but there are two big problems with that.
1) No universal interchange format exists. SCORM is really the very lowest common denominator and is not much better than plain web pages or flash. Most LMS systems have many unique features beyond that. The best we can do is hope for the best migration possible between any pair of systems, and that will generally have to be specific code for that combination. Often this process will have to customised even further depending on HOW an institution was using the given features. Each migration needs to be approached as a project.
2) It’s natural that software developers use their limited resources to produce what their users want most. Moodle users and people who help fund Moodle development are just not that keen on exporting Moodle course to other LMS systems so no-one in our community has had much motivation for that. On the other hand, there is naturally more motivation for all systems to produce ways to import data. Moodle can import Blackboard and WebCT courses, for example, as well as SCORM and IMS CC. This is not intentional lock-in, it’s a just a natural consequence of solving problems as they come up. I would be ecstatic to include exporters in Moodle if someone could fund their development.
As Michael said, content authors who want cross-platform materials should create them in one of the neutral packaging standards from the start (and then add things like collaboration and management using the LMS).
Cheers,
Martin
Josh Jonte on 20 Oct 2009 at 6:55 am #
Hey Michael,
Good thoughts! I’m a fan of looking at things, even open source, with a critical eye.
What you’re probably looking for is Common Cartridge – it’s an IMS spec. http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/commoncartridge.html
At this point, the only LMS I know that supports Common Cartridge is ANGEL – which was bought by BlackBoard 6 months back. BlackBorg has verbally committed to supporting Common Cartridge – but no date was given as to when (and we all know that verbal commitments aren’t worth anything).
I used to be an ANGEL engineer and used to have to reverse engineer BB (and WebCTs) “SCORM compliant” packages. They used to obfuscate the export as much as possible, to the point it only passed the automated conformance check. Any kind of actual interoperability was mitigated by the obfuscation.
So…yeah…no good answer. I’d say let your dollars do the talking and look at something like Sakai.
As someone who’s tried to implement SCORM 2004 – SCORM is a nightmare. The spec was obviously put together by a government body – it’s way over-engineered and counterintuitive.
Michael Hanley on 20 Oct 2009 at 12:00 pm #
Hi Martin – thanks for contributing!
It’s great to get your insight “from the coalface” into the challenges that LMS designers (both open and proprietary) encounter – I guess most of the time regular users don’t really think about how these projects are resourced – they just want the platform to “work.” I think that true interoperability is one of the Holy Grails of content- and knowledge management, but I don’t really see it happening any time soon.
As it happens, the organisation I work for has occasion to migrate large (hundreds of thousands of users) from both legacy ‘siloed’ application platforms, as well as from older versions of our software to newer versions: even when the data “plays well” with the newer systems we still encounter issues. To expect e-learning content created at different times, by different authors, and on different tools to almost ‘magically’ interoperate is unrealistic.
The propensity of software to ‘bloat’ or feature-creep outside of LMSs’ core functionality of administering, managing, tracking, and reporting training events, and into – for example – content authoring, adds what I will charitably call an extra layer of “sophistication” to the issue.
Keep up the good work and best regards,
Michael
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Michael Hanley on 20 Oct 2009 at 12:13 pm #
No worries
I think that we need people like rms to fight the good fight and draw a hard line, as I suspect that most people are really a la carte open sourcers to some degree.
Is it too cynical to suggest that BB like the status quo, where organisations like yours provide a steady source of revenue for their ongoing growth and development?
Best,
Michael
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Michael Hanley on 20 Oct 2009 at 12:28 pm #
Thanks Josh,
British car designer Sir Alec Issigonis famously said that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” – I guess that SCORM falls in to that category. I think that IMS CC has gotten off to a good start and has potential; it remains to be seen how many commercial software houses integrate it – I’m sure that the OSS community will create plug-ins as and when user demand calls for it (see Martin’s comment above).
Cheers,
Michael
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Dawn Poulos on 20 Oct 2009 at 1:00 pm #
Hi Michael, I’m Dawn Poulos, Vice President of Marketing at Xyleme and the author of the Xyleme Voices post you refer to. What might be pertinent to this discussion is the fact that I have been working with native XML technologies for eight years now. During this time, I have advocated heavily open formats and adherence to standards. This is in fact the subject of my next research which I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks.
That being said, thanks for the taking the time to follow up on some of the ideas in my post. You are making some great points. However, I am afraid you misinterpreted a bit my intention with the post. I started with a bold (and self-proclaimed “preposterous”) claim regarding open source software and lack of standards support, that’s true. However, neither did I promote a comparison between Moodle and Blackboard wrt their level of SCORM support, nor did I advocate that open source software is ALWAYS lacking in standards support vis-a-vis proprietary software (or vice versa).
My intention was really to tackle one aspect of the open source vs. proprietary software discussion from a different angle in the learning space. Because, unfortunately, one of the arguments I have been hearing lately over and over is that open source software is by definition more interoperable and more standards-friendly (or specifications-friendly if you prefer) than proprietary software. I do not agree with that and I used Moodle as a case study to show that open source is not panacea when it comes to standards. Hence, my closing statement: “The point that I am trying to make is that standards and breadth of functionality are hugely important and to make the assumption that the term ‘open source’ automatically translates into these can lead to uninformed decision-making and projects that don’t reach their expected ROI.”
There are certain areas where open source software has dominated the market and other areas where proprietary software has been widely more successful in the market. So, maybe the question is not open source vs. proprietary, but what software better meets the needs of a specific market. And what I am seeing with our clients in the learning space is that strong SCORM support (even though not a fully accredited standard), among other standards, is one of those needs.
Michael Hanley on 20 Oct 2009 at 3:55 pm #
Hi Dawn,
Thanks for getting in touch.
The core of this discussion centers on perception.
The core misapprehension seems to me to be twofold: first – the general interpretation (probably, as you point out, by potential clients and their expectations – however misguided – of a platform’s features and functionality) that OSS solutions somehow align to accredited standards in ways that proprietary software doesn’t, and secondly and more specifically there is the common fallacy, that mythical meme: “SCORM is good.”
I’ll address the latter first.
Tell me if you’re familiar with this scenario: a prospect contacts you and asks you to submit an RFI for implementing their new LMS. Somewhere in the body of the text is the innocuous phrase “must support e-learning standards like SCORM.” And so the RFI is duly submitted, including an indication that “why yes indeed, we do support SCORM, AICC, PENS, PDF and whatever you’re having yourself” – this will get you through to the next phase of the tender process and at that stage you can point out that SCORM ain’t what they think it is…
And you go through the tendering process, and you ask pertinent questions about integrating or migrating content, and HRMS / ERP interoperability and their people airily say “Oh, you know, SCORM… it all uses SCORM” and it becomes harder and harder to ask the question “sorry but do you actually know what SCORM is?” and “can we see your best practice documentation and implementation guides?” and as the momentum of the project increases you’re gripped by a sense of panic as you realize that they don’t know what they’re talking about and if you raise it as an issue you may lose the contract and so you try to crowbar a hack into place that will somehow bolt all the enterprise systems together and then you’re in customization hell and you wish someone would just shout “STOP!”
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail, as the proverb tells us.
Or in this case because a customer didn’t know what SCORM is, but still asked for it, all in ignorance. Why does this occur? I suspect (but I have no empirical evidence to support my assertion) that this has emerged because people want to sound knowledgeable. “SCORM” sounds “techie” enough to be credible, both to other ICT types, and especially to non-techies. I suspect that much like “cloud computing” “SAAS” and “SOA”, “SCORM” (as a meme, not in it’s real incarnation as a specification/reference model) now lives in most peoples’ heads somewhere between technobabble and nonsense [click here for Oracle's Larry Ellison's take on this phenomenon (humorous)].
Now the more general bit: I called my blog post Correcting Some Common Misconceptions because misconceptions are mostly what I encounter when people talk to me about standards and SCORM and so on. In a sense, I think that I mostly wrote this post because it’s easier to point people to the post and ask them to read it than to watch their eyes glaze over when I try to patiently explain standards, specifications and interoperability to them.
I think Dawn, that you were making the same point in a different way. Having said that, I have since gone back and re-read your original remarks, and as I said in my post I’m afraid that, sadly my poor, unsharp mind could not sublimate the meaning you ascribe to your post – for example, when you say “preposterous” you append the adjective “seeming” to it, which implies (to me) that you support the proposition.
So, I undertook your research activity by Googling “Moodle and Standards.” The #1 return was a link to a post where, in answer to the query “…in the biggest sense, which standards [are] supported by Moodle?” Martin Dougiamas responded: “In the biggest sense … HTML, XHTML, XML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, PAM, Paypal, Shibboleth, CAS, SQL, HTTP, FTP, Javascript, SCORM 1.2, Excel, Open Document Format, Word, Flash, MP3, Moodle plugins.”
And in the biggest sense, we can say that most platforms would support these standards. Equally, as I said in my post “Neither OSS nor proprietary software e-learning platforms align to accredited …standards.”
Let the buyer beware indeed.
Michael
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Greg Gay on 29 Dec 2009 at 5:01 pm #
Great discussion! I’d have to disagree though with the idea “Open source software (OSS) does not align to accredited standards,” at least from our perspective. I am the lead developer on the ATutor project. It is an Open Source LMS, and adherence to standards has been key in the development process since its very beginnings. Our organization implements and develops standards as part of our accessibility work. IMS AccessForAll is one of ours, as is ISO FDIS 24751 and W3C ATAG. Part of our role as an organization is to introduce accessibility into emerging standards.
We’ve been working with several content interoperability standards since 2003, when we introduced IMS Content Packaging, and IMS QTI a year or two later. From the begin we’ve understood that interoperability is a two way street. You need to be able to get content in and out of a system for it to truly be interoperable. It was not long after CP and QTI were introduced in ATutor, that a SCORM 1.2 player came along, contributed by an ATutor community member. Like others though, we recognized the limits of SCORM in terms of interoperability, and in terms of pedagogy. We still support SCORM 1.2, and there’s a SCORM 2004 player in the works, but our focus has continued on “freeing the content.” When we implement a content standard it includes both critical pieces of of interoperability puzzle: importing and exporting.
Part of the trouble, I think, with uptake of these standards are the levels of conformance that can be attained. IMS in particular has not had a conformance level associated with being able to export content, so there’s little initiative to create export tools. They realize this now, and they are working to fix that problem.
In the latest release of ATutor, we introduced IMS Common Cartridge 1.0 Lite authoring, importing, and exporting (IMS approved). The code is now out there and available for others to examine, and even copy if they are an open source system. Martin, I’d encourage the moodlers to look at ATutors implementation, and even to use our code to add CC exporting to moodle.
Full details of the ATutor CC implementation can be found through the SourceForge news release.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sfnews/forums/forum/1059436
If you want a place to try CC, visit the demo site:
http://www.atutor.ca/atutor/demo.php
greg
Role of Standards in Learning: Xyleme Voices Interview | E-Learning Curve Blog on 05 Jan 2010 at 3:31 pm #
[...] and specifications, a topic I recently addressed here on the E-Learning Curve Blog in a post called Concerning Open Source, LMSs and SCORM: Correcting Some Common Misconceptions. In the interview, I was able to elaborate on my central point about the importance of [...]
Lt. on 03 Jun 2010 at 5:19 pm #
I wonder whether there was any subconscious/Freudian meaning in how you referred to the different authors — the man by his family name and the woman by her personal name?
Michael Hanley on 03 Jun 2010 at 5:43 pm #
Thanks for your comment. To answer your question: no, nothing in it. “D’Arcy” is Mr Norman’s given name…