Can SCORM communicate both TO and FROM an LMS?

Mar 05, 2015

I've read somewhere that one way of visualising the flow of SCORM data is to imagine the LMS and the learning module (Storyline in this case) talking to each other. The example given was that the LMS says "The learner's name is...", and "Start now", while the module returns information like "Test score:..." and so on.

If this is right, it suggests that I might be able to automatically pick up the learner's name in Storyline, from the LMS, and display it on screen, but I know I might have completely misunderstood this.

Any suggestions?

7 Replies

Alexandros Anoyatis

9 years ago03/05/15 at 4:42 pm (UTC)

Not exactly.

While it is indeed possible to pick up the learner's name (or even other info), that doesn't happen through SCORM, but through the LMS API itself.

Hope this helps,
Alex

Drew Simpson
Author

9 years ago03/05/15 at 4:55 pm (UTC)

Thanks Alex, I suppose I'm not surprised that SCORM doesn't do this because I hadn't ever heard of it before - but It would have been nice though...

Alexandros Anoyatis

9 years ago03/05/15 at 5:02 pm (UTC)

It doesn't make a difference either way. You can pick up the learner's name and you can also send data back to the LMS - you can even report (or even modify) scores, for example.

The following post might help: http://elearningtemplates.com/passing-over-storyline-game-data-to-your-lms/

Drew Simpson
Author

9 years ago03/06/15 at 9:10 am (UTC)

Thanks Alex, that's really useful.

What I was really wondering about though was whether or not it's possible to communicate in the opposite direction - to use SCORM to pass the user's name from the LMS to the Storyline module, so that Storyline could greet the user with their name without asking them to enter it - after all, the LMS already knows who they are and it would be a nice feature if possible.

Thanks for your help.