BlogDale

In these days of flux it’s often unsettling to think that your VLE is at the mercy of somebody else further up the line. At my school we host our Moodle VLE independently with eCognition, a company that will exist for as long as I do because I set it up to make sure that there was reliability and continuity of VLE provision to schools. We (my school) don’t feel the uncertainty that other schools might be feeling at this time when we HAVE to have a VLE in place before Sept 2008, because ours is set up and flouorishing and in a stage where exponential growth of usage is about to take place next term.

So how to add stability and peace of mind to those teachers who have created course content on their chosen bespoke VLE and are facing the prospect of having to move it to another VLE? Personally I would hate tha; going through all my files and courses and converting them to another format.

Well, if I were starting now (and some are) I would be seriously considering creating learning objects NOT within the structure of my VLE but in SCORM-compliant format. (Yikes. Even the acronym SCORM still makes me come out in a sweat). Don’t worry aabout the technicalities any more. Packages like RELOAD and eXe will help create and compile your learning objects into coherent course structures, but there’s still a learning curve. A nice online SCORM creator that I just discovered is myUdutu that allows you to export the packages you build for free, so you can then put them into your own VLE.

Basically, your course content needs to be delivered in some sort of framework. You create pages that deliver it, and you can then test the learning that has gone on in various quiz-type ways. The content can be any number of digital formats including text, pictures, video, audio etc. You pull them together in ways that you want your learners to experience and you test their new knowledge along the way. Then you bundle it all up into a package. That’s how online learning works in its simplest form, (the package is a SCORM-compliant learning object. You didn’t need to know that bit).

And the beauty of SCORM is that it’s a standard (*cough* well, mostly). So anything that is created in SCORM compliant format will import nicely into any VLE that says it will support SCORM (Moodle does. So do many most others). So whatever VLE your department/school/district/consortium/LA/RBC dictates you should go with, your SCORM packages are transferable between different ones. So whatever VLE you choose (use Moodle, do yourself a favour and save yourself much heartache - SCORM is just a minor trick in Moodle’s bag - there are many more learning-rich tools to use) you can import your SCORM packages with peace of mind.