Having worked on the business and academic side of e-learning ("online learning" in academia, of course), I am still looking for an effective use of the reusable learning object model in education. Of course, if whole courses are treated as "reusable learnign objects" the applications are easy - and in wide use today. But the more traditional approach of using smaller pieces of instruction over in multiple courses or training "packages" is much more difficult to use in education. It just doesn't seem to fit well with faculty/teacher control over specific course content. Is higher education ready for a completely new way of thinking about course delivery? What implications would this have for intellectual property rights? Course quality control? etc. Where are the brave pioneers in the education sector?

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it out to AECT this year, but I would like to add some of my thoughts to what Rovy and Brian have said.

I work for a custom e-learning company that delivers content via a SCORM-compliant learning delivery system. I agree with Rovy and Brian that SCORM itself has not prompted much new thought on instructional strategies and mostly focuses on delivery and reusability. However, I have found a use for it that, in my mind, supports an instructional approach as well as making content management and reusability easier to implement.

I’m currently building a sales simulation that is accompanied by several e-learning lessons. The lessons cover concepts and principles that the student puts to use in the simulation. The lessons contain about 8 hours of content and are made up of 40 – 50 SCOs per lesson. The simulation takes approximately 1.5 – 2 hours to complete and (for now at least) is one SCO. In the simulation, the student (in the role of the salesperson) must meet with different customers, uncover needs, defuse objections, and create a business case for a sale. The simulation is very dynamic and no two students will have the same experience. Without getting into too much detail, one of the ways in which the simulation provides feedback to the student is through a “coach”. The coach program assesses the student’s performance and provides guidance as well as recommendations for topics in the e-learning that the student should review in order to perform better in the simulation. For example, after a meeting with a customer in which the student made some poor decisions, the coach might recommend 5 or 6 topics in the e-learning for the student to review… and here’s where following SCORM standards pays off:

If the student decides to review the topics, he clicks on the “e-learning” button and exits the simulation. A new course map of e-learning content then appears in the learning delivery environment which contains the SCOs specific to the topics which were remediated by the coach. This “linking” to the e-learning content does not break SCORM standards since it is handled by the SCORM manifest (which knows where each of the SCOs reside) and not by a “hard” link. In addition to creating customized course maps of SCOs from the e-learning lessons designed for the simulation, SCOs from other courses which also cover the remediated topics can also be accessed and presented as part of the course map. In this way, targeted remediation can occur using SCOs across the entire sales curriculum.

I’m not sure if this would be a considered an instructional strategy, or merely a content management strategy, but it does allow for remediation to specific SCOs which in my opinion increases the instructional value of the simulation and e-learning. Because of this, the student can proceed through the course in different ways. He can take all the e-learning and then the simulation, being remediated to topics in the e-learning he is still not grasping… or, using a problem-centered approach, the student can choose to take the simulation first and learn by failure which topics in the e-learning he needs to study. In this way, the simulation becomes a performance-based pre-test, as well as a post-test for demonstrating mastery. There are other benefits of SCORM that we’re taking advantage of as well, including SCO completion tracking, gap analysis, and allowing students to search for relevant SCOs when they want to learn about a given concept or principle…. but I won’t get into them here. Suffice it to say, they are useful from a learning management perspective.

I’d be interested in your thoughts about how we’re using SCORM to support our remediation strategy. Perhaps, as I mentioned before, this is not entirely an instructional strategy… but with that said, it would be difficult to implement without SCORM, especially with the amount of content we’re dealing with. Ultimately, I think using SCORM can really help facilitate targeted, instructional feedback for learners. I’ll be the first to say that there definitely need to be some additions to the SCORM standards, including how to make simulations SCORM compliant (without making them one big SCO), but I’m now finding SCORM more useful than I ever thought I would.