Late last year the ADL reached agreements with several other elearning standards organizations, including AICC, IEEE and IMS. The agreements allow the relevant work of those groups to move forward with SCORM as this portion of the ADL effort transitions to a new stewardship organization.
This is a significant achievement. It indicates the maturity and stability of SCORM, yet also recognizes the criticality of on-going maintenance and refinement. The SCORM 2004 specification is also being formally submitted to ISO, where the technical committees will review it and allow member nations to vote on it. In 2007 we will see more SCORM work being done within other standards work groups and organizations.
The February IMS meeting in San Francisco is an important transition as SCORM moves into this new phase. On February 7 there will be a workshop that is open to the public for discussion of IMS-related work with SCORM. ADL representatives will be presenting and facilitating discussions on how the groups can work together, and on content packaging, a key technical component shared between the organizations. Content packaging includes the organizational and metadata "wrappers" for shareable content objects and is a critical feature for supporting reusable learning object strategies. The ADL will also present information on CORDRA, an architecture for structuring searches and sharing across repositories, and Simple Sequencing and Navigation within courses. See the IMS website for the agenda information, IMS membership is not required, but there is a meeting fee for attendees.
During March there will be a kick-off meeting for a new stewardship organization to coordinate SCORM evolution and maintenances. The meeting will be held in conjunction with the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 meetings in London. This meeting about the stewardship organization is preliminary. An official charter and transition is likely to take until the Spring of 2008. Those interested in participating in this meeting or the stewardship organization committee in general can directly contact the ADL or request that I forward information.
