Testing SCORM?

Question

Hi,
I need to be able to test Captivate's SCOs locally to figure
out the SCORM API and calls, but no luck so far. I'm not using an
LMS yet, it is in late stages of development, and I need to be able
to test captivate SCORM before I can communicate with the LMS
developers about it.
I've not dealt much with SCORM before, so I need to have a
testing environment to figure it out. The testing environments I've
looked at: Test Track from Rustici and SCORM 2004 Wrapper by Claude
Ostyn don't seem to work with captivate files? Maybe I'm just using
them wrong?
Anyway, when I pubslish a captivate file with a quiz as
scorm, then launch it with SCORM 2004 Wrapper, or upload it ot Test
Track and launch, I get no communication with the API. Both test
environments tell me that the API is not communicating.
I'm using Captivate 2, publishing a quiz as SCORM 1.2. The
LMS developers are dubious about Captivate's SCORM capability as it
does not communicate with their API either. I'm not sure what I'm
missing here.
Any help or links of reference would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ari

Answer 1

Agreed with jbradley's suggestion as the first thing to try.
When an LMS launches a SCO, the spec dicates that the SCO
should work
it's way up the browser windows to find the API. So first it
will check
the browser window containing the SCO itself. If it's not
there, it'll
check the browser window which launched the SCO, and continue
to go up
the parent tree until there's nothing left to check.
As far as I know, Captivate does this properly. More often
then not, the
problem lies with the LMS not exposing the API
correctly...though I
can't give any specific situations/examples.
The SCO does not contain the API. The SCO contains functions
(generally
javascript) which looks for the API as mentioned above. The
LMS *must*
provide the API to handle communication to and from the SCO
itself.
If you're finding that you must wrap the SCO in an API, which
then can
find the LMS (or test product's) API, then something is wonky
- that's
not how it should work. Hopefully jbradley's suggestion is
the easy
answer. If that doesn't work, I'd ask the LMS vendor how
their API is
exposed and why Captivate can't find it by the standard tree
walk.
The ADL Test Suite;
http://www.adlnet.gov/downloads/downloadpage.aspx?ID=155
Is probably the best tool to use to test such things, since
ADL authors
the SCORM spec. If you're spec'ing SCORM 1.2, or want to look
at other
possible tools, check ADL's product download page:
http://www.adlnet.gov/downloads/DownloadsSearchResults.aspx?Category=Products
The LMS we use does not do anything to the SCO it presents. I
can't
imagine that any LMS forcing a wrapper over the content would
be a good
idea...
Erik
adoucette wrote:
> Hi,
> I need to be able to test Captivate's SCOs locally to
figure out the SCORM API
> and calls, but no luck so far.
Erik Lord
http://www.capemedia.net
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