As a follow up from the GSOC post I thought it might be useful to mention a few things happening with SCORM at the moment.

There are currently approx 71 open issues related to SCORM in the Moodle tracker at the moment, of those 38 are classed as bugs/issues I should fix in stable branches at some point, 33 are issues that are really feature/improvement requests.

Issues about to be fixed and under development
MDL-46639 – External AICC packages not working correctly.
MDL-44548 – SCORM Repository auto-update not working.

Issues that are  high in my list of things to look at and I hope to look at sometime soon.
MDL-46961 – SCORM player not launching in Firefox when new window being used.
MDL-46782 – Re-entry of a scorm not using suspend_data or resuming itself should allow returning to the first sco that is not complete.
MDL-45949 – The TOC Tree isn’t quite working as it should after our conversion to YUI3 – it isn’t expanding/collapsing in a logical manner – could be a bit of work here to make this work in the right way.

Issues recently fixed in stable releases.
MDL-46940 – new window option not working when preview mode disabled.
MDL-46236 – Start new attempt option ignored if new window used.
MDL-45726 – incorrect handling of review mode.

New improvements you might not have noticed in 2.8 (not released yet)
MDL-35870 -Performance improvements to SCORM
MDL-37401 -SCORM auto-commit – allows Moodle to save data periodically even if the SCORM doesn’t call “commit”

New improvements you might not have noticed in 2.7:
MDL-28261 -Check for live internet connectivity while using SCORM – warns user if SCORM is unable to communicate with the LMS.
MDL-41476 – The SCORM spec defines a small amount of data that can be stored when using SCORM 1.2 packages, we have added a setting that allows you to disable this restriction within Moodle to allow larger amounts of data to be stored (you may need to modify your SCORM package to send more data to make this work.)

Thanks to Ian Wild, Martin Holden, Tony O’Neill, Peter Bowen, André Mendes, Matteo Scaramuccia, Ray Morris, Vignesh, Hansen Ler, Faisal Kaleem and many other people who have helped report/test and suggest fixes related to SCORM recently including the Moodle HQ Integration team (Eloy, Sam, Marina, Dan, Damyon, Rajesh) who have all been on the receiving end of reviewing some SCORM patches recently!

We are lucky to have Vignesh Panneerselvam working on the SCORM plugin as part of Google Summer of Code this year – there are 3 main areas of focus for his work:

• Improving the built-in navigation buttons
  I don’t think the navigation buttons in Moodle have ever worked correctly – we’ve made incremental improvements but I’m hoping Vignesh will help to sort out the remaining issues.
• Performance improvements.
  There are a number of areas in the SCORM code that don’t perform well on larger sites – one of our clients has over 250 Million records in the SCORM tracking tables and any small improvement to performance can make a large difference to the operation of the server.
• Code Cleanup
  Moodle’s Coding guidelines have improved/evolved over time and we haven’t always kept up to date in the SCORM code – Vignesh will help us to tidy this up a lot.

Vignesh has already made some useful contributions to the SCORM code – I’m looking forward to working with him as he improves the SCORM code.

Following on from an earlier post we now have 2 new methods for managing SCORM content in Moodle 2.6.

Selecting a Zip package as an alias from a repository.
When adding/updating a SCORM and selecting a Zip package from a repository in Moodle 2.6 you now have the ability to create an alias/shortcut to the file – you can then set an update frequency to set how often Moodle should check to see if there is an updated zip. To set this up follow the steps below:

1. Click the ‘Turn editing on’ button at the top right of the course page
2. Click the ‘Add an activity or resource’ link in the section you wish to add your SCORM package, then in the activity chooser, select SCORM package then click the Add button (or select ‘SCORM package’ from the ‘Add an activity’ dropdown menu)
3. Enter a name and a description.
4. click the Add button to open the File picker menu in order to choose a file a repository
5. Select the repository that contains your SCORM zip files
6. Browse and select the SCORM zip file  you wish to add – makes sure you select the option to create an alias/shortcut to the file.
   
7. Set the auto-update setting to “every day” – which will check overnight if a package update is required or “every time it’s used” to check if a new package is available every time a user enters the SCORM.
   
8. Click the button ‘Save and display’ at the bottom of the page and then enter the SCORM package to make sure it has worked!

Selecting an imsmanifest.xml from an unzipped SCORM in a file system repository.
This allows you to create a repository that contains all your unzipped SCORM packages – you can also share assets between your SCORM packages – for example if you re-use the same video file across multiple packages you can just link to that single video file from multiple imsmanifest.xml files – you can also update your content and as the content is loaded directly from the repository the user will always see the most up to date file. To set this up follow the steps below(some of this is copied from MoodleDocs)

1. First set up a new File system repository (you need direct access to your server to do this)
   
   1. Find the moodledata folder on the server
   2. Inside it, create a folder called “repository” (if it doesn’t exist already)
   3. Inside that folder, create a new folder for your repository of SCORM packages named appropriately.
   4. Extract your SCORM packages into appropriate locations within this folder.
2. . Enabling the File System repository plugin
   
   1. Go to Settings > Site administration > Plugins > Repositories > Manage Repositories;
   2. Select from the drop down next to File sytem “Enabled and visible”
   3. Click the Settings link..
   4. Click Create a repository instance
   5. Give it a name and choose from the dropdown the folder you created with your SCORM packages.
   6. Click the checkbox “Allow relative files” and Save.

   

3. Adding a SCORM package
   1. Click the ‘Turn editing on’ button at the top right of the course page
   2. Click the ‘Add an activity or resource’ link in the section you wish to add your SCORM package, then in the activity chooser, select SCORM package then click the Add button (or select ‘SCORM package’ from the ‘Add an activity’ dropdown menu)
   3. Enter a name and a description.
   4. click the Add button to open the File picker menu.
   5. Select the SCORM file system repository you created in the file picker window.
   6. Browse and select the imsmanifest.xml file you wish to add – makes sure you select the option to create an alias/shortcut to the file.
      
   7. After selecting the imsmanifest.xml file click the button ‘Save and display’ at the bottom of the page and then enter the SCORM package to make sure it has worked!

This method is only currently supported by the file system repository – it’s possible that some of the other repository types could be added in future.

Moodle 2.6(releases November 2013)  brings some great improvements to the SCORM module

One of the most voted for features in the Moodle tracker for SCORM has been to allow better use of alias’s and support for unzipped content – Thanks to one of our clients at Catalyst IT we have now implemented this in Moodle 2.6

Key components of this work are covered in the following tracker issues:
MDL-41434 – When updating a SCORM package we used to delete all the records in the scorm_scoes table and then recreate them which caused all sorts of issues – by implementing a sort field in the table we keep the existing data and order it correctly this makes updating a SCORM package less fragile.
MDL-28579 – The SCORM module previously used the basic filepicker element which didn’t support the use of creating an alias/link to a file, converting to the advanced filemanager element gives a lot more flexibility.
MDL-41580 – This was the harder part to get right – this patch allows a file system repository in Moodle to support relative linked files – this means that you can unzip your SCORM package in a file system repository and then when creating your SCORM inside your course you just link directly to the imsmanifest.xml file within your repository.

I will follow this up with a post that shows how to use this feature.

Mayank Gupta has been working hard on improving the SCORM player as part of his GSOC project – particularly to improve it’s use on mobile devices –  we now have a more responsive design and the SCORM TOC automatically collapses and hides on smaller screens and it seems to fit these devices a lot better than our older SCORM player – he has also converted a lot of the older code to make sure it meets the Moodle coding guidelines. You can see some of the details on this in MDL-39910 I’ll try to follow this post up later with some screen-shots of the updated player in action.

We have also improved the reporting in SCORM:

MDL-39926 – A new Objectives report like the existing Interactions report, some SCORM packages use objectives to report progress through a course so we added a nicer view of this data that allows easy export.

MDL-41290 – Improved user level reporting – the old user level reports were quite limited – we have added the ability to export this data and have added a more useful view of the interaction elements as well.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with funding or with development and testing of these improvements!