This is an online course that many online educators will find useful. Those who know absolutely nothing about the world of sharable content as well as those who just need to fill in a few blanks will find a visit here worthwhile.

The ADL is the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative and it was created by the US Department of Defense to establish a set of technical standards for e-learning materials. Those standards are called “SCORM” -  the Sharable Content Object Reference Model – and they promise to make easy efficient sharing of learning content a reality. This vision has many implications for e-learning and this course is a good place to start understanding them.

The course describes an e-learning future where Sharable Learning Object (SLO) repositories will be easy to search. Appropriate content will be downloaded effortlessly and slotted seamlessly into your SCORM compliant Learning Management System (LMS). In this world the buying, selling, sharing, bartering and begging of “Sharable Content Objects” and their assembly will be the preferred method for constructing online courses. A tasty metaphor involving chocolate, marshmallows and some biscuits explains what SLOs are made of and how they can be “mixed together” to build courses.

The course describes how SCORM specifications are determined by the ADL. It explains the problems that people experience when developing courses for delivery via a specific LMS and how SCORM can address these.

The course itself is fairly standard consisting of HTML pages and a few Flash animations and activities. Content is broken up into topics which are accessed via a side menu. Back and next buttons provide the internal topic navigation and a bar shows you exactly where you are within the topic. Unfortunately it is very difficult to work out where you are within the course as the current menu item does not change or become highlighted in any way. The name of the section you are currently in is not displayed anywhere either. This led to a lot of blind “clicking around” when I wanted to move onto the next topic.

Each topic ends with a summary page and a review quiz, which takes the form of either multiple choice questions or Flash “drag and drop/ match 'em up” activities. Not particularly inspiring, but they do the job.

Friendly informal language and cute graphics that clearly illustrate concepts and processes make this complicated yet dry subject matter digestible and easy to follow. The section Functions of the SCORM RTE features animated cartoons of a Learning Management System and a Sharable Content Object sorting through their “communication issues” and makes the world of technology specifications, standards and guidelines almost seem like fun.