SCORM Authoring Tips and Tricks

This page collects recommendations for authoring SCORM packages targetting Moodle.

If you add a recommendation that makes things work with Moodle, but are known to break with another LMS, it is worthwhile to note the incompatibility. While this page is mainly for content targeting Moodle, many authors care about creating portable SCORM packages.

Tools

Brief list of tools we've had successes with, and tools people have had trouble with (and what kind of trouble)...

Captivate

Add here: options to use, types of content to avoid, tricks to take advantage of, bugs, gotchas...

Courselab

CourseLab version 2.4 has a few bugs. First is with audio. Sometimes (for some reason not known to CourseLab) the audio will restart, creating an echo effect. You will need to un-check the "autostart" mark of the Video object (vidoe object is used to insert audio too)and then define an action on some event that fits the case (for example on the slide's afterdisplay event) choose METHOD (yourvideoobject, PLAY. this will play the audio after the slide is displayed.

Another issue is with FireFox browsers displaying graphics with CourseLab. It is stated in user's manual that some objects utilize Explorer-specific features and author should avoid using them, if he wants to use the course in multi-browser environment. These are: Gradient Box and all AutoShapes. AutoShapes are VML-objects and VML (Vector Markup Language) is not supported by FireFox. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics - another vector format) could be the good alternative, but there are still problems with displaying inline SVG-objects in both Gecko-family and IE. (from CourseLab Support)

If these FireFox/Image display problems are not an issue then be sure to install the latest browser plug-ins.

ToolBook

[Moodle 1.9 / ToolBook Instructor 9.01] Tracking and bookmarking work well. The content should be exported using the SCORM 1.2 option; AICC and SCORM 2004 do not seem to work properly. Scoring works and is viewable within the tracking details, but does not transfer correctly into the Gradebook.