What is SCORM 1.2 vs SCORM 2004?
SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 are the two editions of the SCORM standard still in wide use. Both package a course as a zip with an XML manifest and report progress through a JavaScript API. SCORM 2004 adds separate completion and success status, much larger bookmark storage, and sequencing rules for packages with several units.
How Personal Academy handles it
Personal Academy imports and plays SCORM 2004 packages with resume across several SCOs, while SCORM 1.2 packages play their first SCO without resume, so export to SCORM 2004 from your authoring tool when tracking matters.
A worked example
Suppose a 300-person insurer has two versions of the same compliance module, one exported as SCORM 1.2 and one as SCORM 2004. With the 2004 package, a learner who closes the browser on slide twelve reopens it on slide twelve, and the record shows completion and pass status separately. With the 1.2 package, the same learner starts again from the beginning. The team keeps the 2004 export as the version learners take.
SCORM 1.2 was released in 2001 and became the most widely exported eLearning format of its era. Its data model is small: a single lesson status that mixes completion and success into one value (passed, completed, failed, incomplete, browsed, not attempted), a raw score, session time, and a suspend data field limited to a few thousand characters.
That limit matters. Modern authoring tools store a great deal of state in suspend data, such as which slides were visited, quiz answers and variables. When a long or branching course exceeds the limit, the bookmark is cut short and the learner may lose their place.
SCORM 2004 went through several editions, the fourth being the most common today. It splits status into completion status (completed, incomplete) and success status (passed, failed), so a report can say a learner finished a module but did not pass it. It raises the suspend data limit substantially, and it adds the Simple Sequencing specification, which lets a package with several SCOs define the order in which they are taken, prerequisites between them, and rules for retrying.
The API names differ too. SCORM 1.2 content calls LMSInitialize and LMSSetValue on an object named API; SCORM 2004 content calls Initialize and SetValue on an object named API_1484_11. An LMS has to provide the right object for each edition, which is why a platform can handle one edition well and the other less well.
For a buyer the practical questions are simple: which edition does your authoring tool export, does the LMS resume both, and does it handle packages with more than one SCO? Where the platform resumes only one edition, exporting to that edition is the safer choice. Neither edition is the newer cmi5 specification, which is not covered here and uses xAPI underneath.