将SCORM课程导入我的LMS

Question

I guess I'm gonna take a lot of heat about this question, and even some down votes but I am really lost here.

I know what SCORM stands for and what is it good for. I saw the paid "engines" like scorm.com but it starts from $20K...

I work for an LMS site software, we have videos, courses and whatever... my manager said "we have a provider that has a lot of courses in SCORM format, build a tool that import them into our database."

Oh god, help me, is there an easy way to do that or am I facing a year of hard, not satisfying work now? (don't know if I can use the non-free ones, depends on prices).

ASP.NET, C# platform.

Answer 1

Short answer: buy the Rustici guys' engine. If "a lot of courses" is let's say 500, you're looking at $40 per course. You'll probably sell them for more. Or think of it as 3 months work paid instead of 12-20 months of your own work and suffering. Like taking a train instead of walking.

Long answer. I think a lot of people here assumed you want to import SCORM courses and have them work flawlessly. I'm not sure that's what your boss wants you to do. Maybe if you simply import the courses (upload and extract zip files), determine the launcher file (described in easily parseable imsmanifest.xml) and launch it in a popup/iframe, the course will.. just work.

Sure, you will not be able to receive scores and completions. Sure, if the course relies on some data from LMS like student name, you won't be able to supply it.Sure, if the course cannot detect SCORM API, it'll throw an error at you. But you might be able to code a very basic fake API that does nothing or some basic communication functions with your own platform, and you'll be able to launch all those courses. Maybe you don't need 90% of what SCORM offers/requires.

Someone mentioned climbing Mt.Everest. Well, think of it as photoshopping your happy sun burnt face onto a picture of the summit. Not quite the same result but the effort invested is a million times smaller as well.

Answer 2

Nope, no easy solution here, especially for C#. The commercial solutions cost that much because their developers went through the pain of "a year of hard, not satisfying work". The open-source solutions are typically PHP-based. A few use Java.

Answer 3

I wrote an LMS using ASP.net. It took three of us over a year to write the scorm engine and player. It is basic and it was not easy. Tell your boss he just asked you to climb Everest without cold weather gear :)

Answer 4

$20K vs 1 or 2 guys salary for 2 years - if they can read fast or have prior experience with SCORM 1.2 and or 2004. Then all the pain and suffering in between. Rustici has all this figured out and it also works pretty quick compared to other canned systems.

Beyond the API, and XML Parsing, validation, access, sequencing rules, arbitrary limits, error codes and messages, your also deciding on a API implementation. There are LMS systems out there that literally talk to the backend on every GetValue/SetValue call, which seriously lags out the user experience. If I spent that much time building this, only to find out I did it the slowest possible way I think I'd be curled up in the corner somewhere rocking back and forth.

I would say though this space is filled with a ton of legacy code stretching back to the early 2000's that's drastically due for a overhaul. Any code you manage to beg borrow or steal is going to be some old school stuff. None of it tied into a 'managed code' format or anything you could unit test without building that all from scratch too.