What is SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)?
SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is a family of eLearning specifications from the ADL Initiative. It defines how a course is packaged as a zip file with an XML manifest, and how the content, once launched, reports progress, score, completion and bookmark data to the learning management system through a JavaScript API.
How Personal Academy handles it
Personal Academy imports and plays SCORM 2004 packages with resume across several SCOs, plays SCORM 1.2 packages without resume, and exports its own courses as SCORM 1.2 packages.
A worked example
Suppose a 300-person logistics firm buys a forklift safety course from an outside studio, delivered as a SCORM 2004 zip. An administrator uploads the zip, the platform reads the manifest, and learners open the course like any other lesson. A learner who stops halfway through returns to the same screen the next day, because the package stores its bookmark in suspend data and the platform hands that data back on the next launch.
SCORM was first published in 2000 by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative so that a course built in one authoring tool could run in any compliant learning management system. Before it, every LMS had its own packaging and tracking format, and moving content between systems meant rebuilding it.
A SCORM package is a zip archive. At its root sits a manifest file, imsmanifest.xml, which lists the resources in the package, describes how they are organised, and names the launchable units, called Sharable Content Objects (SCOs). The LMS reads the manifest on import and decides what to show the learner.
At run time the course looks for an API object that the LMS places in the browser window. Through calls such as Initialize, GetValue, SetValue, Commit and Terminate, the content reads and writes data model elements: completion and success status, a raw score, session time, and suspend data, a string the course uses to remember where the learner stopped.
Two editions are in common use. SCORM 1.2 is the older and simpler one, with a small suspend data limit and loose rules. SCORM 2004 separates completion from success, raises the suspend data limit considerably, and adds sequencing and navigation rules that let a package with several SCOs control the order in which they are taken.
SCORM tracks what happens inside a browser session launched by the LMS. It does not describe learning that happens elsewhere, such as in a mobile app or on the job, which is the gap the Experience API (xAPI) was designed to fill. Even so, SCORM remains the format most authoring tools export by default, so the ability to import it, play it reliably and resume where the learner stopped is still the first thing many buyers check.