Information Security Warfare Systems - CTC Bremerton Instructional ...

ADL SCORM 2004 Demonstration: ISWS Course Conversion Lessons Learned
1.0 BACKGROUND
During the summer of 2003, the Bremerton, Washington office of Concurrent Technologies
Corporation (CTC) converted a CD-ROM based course to a Web-based SCORM 1.2 conformant
course.
The course is part of Information Security Warfare Systems (ISWS) training at the National
Defense University (NDU). The content serves as a supplement to a classroom-based course
(either group or lab setting) for network security professionals. It contains approximately 4-5
hours of training on appropriate responses to cyber attacks, including protection, detection,
assessment, recovery, and treatment.
The conversion team explored and documented instructional design and technical issues
associated with converting the course to a SCORM 1.2 conformant Web format. In addition, the
team identified interoperability issues associated with running the course on multiple Learning
Management Systems (LMS).
2.0 PROJECT SCOPE
In the spring of 2004, CTC undertook a project to convert the previously developed SCORM 1.2
conformant ISWS training to SCORM 2004. In addition to producing SCORM 2004 conformant
content for demonstration purposes, the CTC team agreed to analyze and document technical,
instructional, and project management issues noted during the project. Primarily a research and
development task, the goal was to provide the SCORM development community with sample
content illustrating sequencing specification, and a discussion of development issues impacting
the process. As with the previous conversion, one of the objectives was to accomplish the
SCORM 2004 conversion with minimal retrofit to the content itself.
This document contains the discussion of development issues, specifically focusing on lessons
learned during the project. It is intended to provide practical advice about the design and
development of SCORM 2004 conformant training content to instructional designers,
developers, and project managers.
3.0 SCORM 2004 DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
The CTC project team in Bremerton, Washington, is representative of project teams in the
current SCORM development community. The team has had successful experience in
developing for previous versions of SCORM for a variety of projects. A case study of one of
these projects, Systems-level Oil Spill Prevention Training, is available on ADLNet.
Conversion of the ISWS course was the project team’s first experience in developing for
SCORM 2004, providing a representative example of what a team in the development
community might experience when first encountering the 2004 specification, whether for the
purpose of converting existing content or creating new content.
While this document outlines the experience of one development team for the benefit of others, it
should be noted that the environment necessary to support the delivery of SCORM 2004
CTC Bremerton, May 14, 2004 2