I’ve been the official maintainer of SCORM in Moodle since 2008 when we implemented full SCORM 1.2 support thanks to funding from Moodle HQ. Since then with the help of a handful of other developers in the community I have spent over one thousand volunteer hours supporting and improving the SCORM module and occasionally funds have been provided for my time by organisations to fix a particular issue.
SCORM 2004 is now over 8yrs old and despite many efforts no-one has been interested in funding the time required to complete native support for SCORM 2004 in Moodle – I’ve run some successful GSOC projects which which have been a great learning experience for the students involved but have not made a significant dent in the work required to complete SCORM 2004 support. This year we received no valid GSOC applications for improving SCORM 2004 support in Moodle.
I spent a lot of time discussing the opportunity to run a crowd-funded project to complete SCORM 2004 in Moodle but it’s hard to define a fixed figure that would allow us to complete the project and I wonder if such a large amount of my time could be spent on projects that are more current.
Full support for SCORM 2004 is already available in Moodle by using the Rustici SCORM cloud plugin for Moodle and I think it is more cost-effective to purchase a subscription to their hosted solution which is much more stable/reliable and feature rich than what we could provide directly in Moodle anyway.
There is also a new version of SCORM (Tin Can) and I think it makes more sense to focus development effort on that rather than continuing effort to get an old standard working within Moodle that so far no-one has cared enough about to fund.
I will continue as a volunteer to maintain support for SCORM 1.2 and AICC packages in Moodle and the new Tin Can work that is currently underway. I will also make best efforts to avoid regressions in the existing SCORM 2004 code.
I will no longer be spending any time as a volunteer to support or improve SCORM 2004 in Moodle, I will accept patches from community contributors to improve SCORM 2004 support as long as they meet coding guidelines and are easy to test. All existing SCORM 2004 bugs will be closed as “won’t fix” – these will only be re-opened if a community member provides a good patch with full testing instructions or if someone funds my time to continue the work.
Thanks to everyone who has spent time working on SCORM over the years – hopefully drawing a line in the sand over SCORM 2004 support will allow us to focus on more current developments like Tin Can.