An object based authoring tool for creating SCORM compliant course

Abstract

In recent years, how to reuse and share the teaching materials and instructional experiences among e-learning systems become more and more important. Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), the most popular international teaching materials standard, uses the metadata to specify the structure of every teaming object and proposes the content aggregation scheme to package these objects with XML language format. In 2004, the Sequencing and Navigation (SN) in SCORM 2004 also define the sequencing rules which can be used to control the sequencing, selecting and delivering of teaming activity for the desired, sequencing behavior. Learning contents in SN is organized into a hierarchical structure, namely Activity Tree (AT). However, for teachers/instructional designers, it is hard to understand the complicated sequencing rules in SN much less using it to construct a SCORM course with desired teaming guidance. Therefore, how to provide a user-friendly authoring tool to efficiently construct SCORM compliant course becomes an important issue. Therefore, in this paper, based upon the concept of Object Oriented Methodology (OOM), the complicated sequencing rules can be modularized into several basic components with corresponding sequencing rules in SN, called Sequencing Object (SO). Each SO is like a middleware, which represents a basic sequencing building block as a cluster in activity tree (AT) with some corresponding sequencing rules on the SCORM view and represents a basic sequencing graph on the users' view. By appropriately combining these SOs, users can easily construct a complex structure of course with desired teaming guidance. Then, a transformation algorithm is also proposed to firstly transform the created graph based course structure into Activity Tree (AT) with related sequencing rules, and then package the transformed activity tree and related physical teaming resources into a SCORM compliant course file. Moreover, the authoring tool can be easily upgraded by importing a new SO instead of redesigning the tool only for new SCORM version. Finally, a SCORM compliant course built by the object based authoring tool is executed on the SCORM RTE system. The results show that our approach is workable and efficient.