I’ve spent a big part of the last week of my time lost in the abyss of IE 7 and XMLHttpRequest as part of MDL-28295 – it seems that under certain conditions a call to XMLHttpRequest crashes IE 7 when called from a child window….

Posting here in case someone else runs into this weird bug in the hope that it might save someone some time!
Pseudo code:
httpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
httpReq.open(“POST”, url,false);
httpReq.setRequestHeader(‘Content-Type’, ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’);
httpReq.send(param);

When “param” contains something like this it works fine!
id=&a=11

but when “param” contains something like this – it crashes IE 7:
id=&a=11&cmi_corelesson_status=incomplete&cmicoreexit=suspend&cmi_suspend_data=|&attempt=1&scoid=28

Initially I thought the encoding might be the issue and encoding the params using encodeURI() seemed to work – but further testing found it was still an issue.

The fix was to re-structure the code so that it didn’t call the code from a child window but from within the “parent” window…. crazy….

We’ve just accepted 2 GSOC students to improve the SCORM module in Moodle.

Mayank Gupta will be working on a SCORM Test Harness to allow us to automatically run the SCORM ADL tests on the latest code – this has previously been a time consuming process and can only be performed in IE – this will greatly improve our existing code review process and help to identify the issues with SCORM 2004 support and allow ongoing development without breaking compatibility with previous tests, for more information on this see MDL-26912 – a secondary task for Mayank is to add tracker issues for the failing SCORM 2004 tests and if he has time suggest fixes for a few of them as well.

Ankit Kumar Agarwal will be working on improving the quiz reporting in SCORM – presenting the responses to quiz questions (if the SCORM package reports them back to Moodle) in a more readable manner – for more information on this see MDL-27256 , a secondary task for Ankit(if he has time) is to look at some of the SCORM 2004 tests that are failing and suggest fixes for them.

In preparation for Moodle 2.0 we’ve been going through all the outstanding SCORM bugs in the tracker and have merged many of the fixes into 1.9Stable – we’ve closed over 30 bugs in the past 3 weeks with a range of issues from grading to support of buggy SCORM packages. Piers has also been working on a new SCORM player to hopefully fix a range of issues people have had with the old one – it’s based on the new player that Petr Skoda wrote for the new IMSCP Module in Moodle 2.0.

2.0 is looking like a great release!

now that I’ve got your attention…. The guys at Rustici have written an plugin for Moodle to connect to their Commercial hosted SCORM player – which is SCORM Certified for 1.2 and 2004

Bascially, they “host” your SCORM object on their SCORM Cloud, and the Moodle plugin redirects the user to their site, and allows their site to pass back information like the grade and duration data. The Moodle module is free to download, and you pay Rustici for “hosting” your SCORM objects. You can create a free demo account to test their SCORM Engine but to use on a production site, you will need to pay them for the hosting.

The Moodle code and the SCORM Cloud are still in beta, (I’ve just had a quick look through the beta code and reported a couple of small issues) but in the near future, this could be an easy answer to those RFP’s that require a SCORM 2004 checkbox to be ticked.

something like this could be used in those RFP’s(and in the moodledocs):
Moodle 1.9.5 is SCORM 1.2 Compliant and Certified, it supports some SCORM 2004 content, but if SCORM 2004 certification is required then the commercial Rustici SCORM Cloud can be used to host SCORM objects that require full SCORM 2004 support

With the availability of the Rustici engine at an affordable price, the urgency for getting the SCORM module in Moodle SCORM 2004 compliant/certified has definately decreased.

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!