Our client hosts a variety of learning and marketing materials on its own content management system, tracking use of assets and providing reports to its own customers on content use. Recently, there has been an increase in demand for hosting of SCORM content, and the only option looked seemed to be integration with an off-the shelf LMS or shifting to a new platform entirely.
The SCORM standards define a set of rules that must be followed by client and server in order that they can communicate with one-another, and it is this communication that was at the heart of our client's requirements. Their Content Management System sits on industry-standard technologies -- Linux, Apache web server, PHP and the MySQL database management system -- and has its own methodology for location and distribution of content.
When SCORM content was delivered by the system, it would look for the 'agent' it expected to be delivered alongside, through which it would communicate its status, retrieve bookmarks and student data, and so on. Failing to find this agent meant it would either run but fail to record and recall perhaps important data, or refuse to start and instead present the user with a message informing them that communication had failed and thus creating the impression that something was broken.
Without any SCORM support, the system was also unable to report on users' success or otherwise in completing tests and could not compile any meaningful statistics on scores, visits, etc.
Our approach was to build a small framework for the management of sessions so that each user's visit to a particular piece of content would be recorded, and to add to it the means of recording all content-communicated data in a standard format.
To handle the client side of things we created a small page that the system would deliver to the user, and this page now handles all communication with the server on behalf of the content, which interacts using exactly the same calls it would expect to see if delivered by any SCORM-conformant Learning Management System.
The extension to our client's platform means they are now able to host and report on content provided to them as SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004 packages, and has so expanded the opportunities for meaningful reporting, that a small sub-project immediately following completion of this one wrapped even non-SCORM content to report session times, etc. to the server automatically.