I’ve just noticed this post on Rustici’s Blog -they’ve also mentioned in the past about the possibility of offering a commercial plugin for Moodle and their SCORM engine.

One of the questions posed on their post is:

Q: Would open source adoption increase revenue substantially?
A: Doubtful. If the SCORM Engine were part of Moodle, for example, would any Moodle user come to us for a support arrangement? Or would they go to a Moodle host? Would we continue to appear to be a distinct entity in the eyes of a user? We don’t think so, and given that, what’s the positive impact for us? (It is, after all, about us, in some respects.)

While this may seem selfish to some people in the open source community – it’s also a very important one that many open source communities battle with! Rustici is a Business that needs to make money to pay employees so they can pay their mortgages etc… I presume a large amount of their income comes from the licensing of their SCORM engine.  SCORM LMS development isn’t cheap – and it’s not always easy to find someone to fund the full development work, but it’s not as hard to find people willing to pay smaller amounts of money to get a SCORM compliant Engine! – So when SCORM 2.0 comes out finally – Rustici may be in a better position to spread the cost of development across a larger group of clients rather than the traditional Moodle method of a single up-front cost.

But eventually, an Open Source based LMS will implement SCORM 2004 and then 2.0 (maybe) – we’re hoping this will happen for Moodle soon! – So any income that Rustici receive for licensing may decrease significantly when that happens. But – if the SCORM engine in Moodle was an open-source engine from Rustici – then the profile Rustici would get from this integration could improve Rustici’s revenue rather than decrease it!

So will Rustici release an open source version of their Engine? – I would love to see it happen, but I don’t think it is likely at this stage! – in the meantime it will be good to see a commercial offering from them to allow people who really need compliance/certification inside Moodle to have a viable option!

Now that we’ve manged to get Moodle 1.9 Stable to pass all the SCORM 1.2 tests, there’s been a lot of talk between Moodle Partners and other Moodle users about SCORM 2004. I’ve posted about this in a few places in the moodle.org forums 1 2 and I’ve sent various e-mails to a range of interested users! – here’s my attempt at summarising it all in one post!

To get to where we are today took 3 months of solid funded work (thanks to Moodle HQ) from 1 full time Senior Developer(Piers), with 1 part-time Senior Developer supporting(me). This included closing approximately 160 issues in the Moodle Tracker, and modifications to support the ADL test suite.

The SCORM 1.2 test suite comprises of 2 test packages. SCORM 2004 contains 103 test packages, of which Moodle currently passes 2 (at least it did last time Piers ran the tests) – It’s really hard to define how much time it would take for us to complete SCORM 2004 so it passes all the different tests!

Sequencing and Navigation is a big chunk of SCORM 2004 that isn’t implemented – we expect that once this work is completed a bunch of the test packages will pass. I’ve seen estimates that put completion of SCORM 2004 work at 6-8 months or even more! – there are also a range of SCORM 2004 bugs that are related – for more details see MDL-7068

We’re currently attempting to source an initial 3 months worth of funding to continue work on SCORM 2004 – we believe that 3 months would be a worthwhile effort,  at the end of which we would have an accurate picture on what it would take to complete! – bounce me an e-mail if you might be able to help fund this! – dan@danmarsden.com