SCORM Learning Management System (LMS) Integration FAQs

What is SCORM LMS Integration?

The SCORM LMS integration will allow you to:

• Provide seamless integration with any LMS platform that supports SCORM

  • Launch SCW content from the LMS

  • Send scores and completion reporting back to the LMS for SCW Courses and Assessments

What are some common usage scenarios?

Course

A standalone Course provides a tailored learning pathway to build competency across a customizable set of topics. Adding SCW Courses to your LMS helps make it part of the standardized training environment that your users are familiar with, and allows you to leverage existing LMS features and processes for roll out, notifications, reminders, and non-compliance follow up.

Course with end-of-course Assessment

A Course with an end-of-course Assessment provides a tailored learning pathway with an important knowledge and skills verification stage at the end. The Course provides a place for participants to learn the required knowledge and skills, and then the Assessment is used to verify the knowledge and skills have been attained. When you add an SCW Course with an end-of-course Assessment to your LMS, completion will only be marked in the LMS when the corresponding Assessment is successfully passed.

Mixed LMS and non-LMS participants

In some situations, you may want some users to access the training material via your LMS, but some other set of users (e.g. contractors) to access it directly in the SCW Platform. For this scenario, we recommend managing these as two separate sets of Courses.

What Secure Code Warrior modules will be supported?

The initial release will provide SCORM-based LMS integration for Assessments and Courses.

Tournaments and Training will NOT be supported.

How much effort is needed to integrate?

Beyond creating the courses and assessments within the program, very little effort is required to integrate with an LMS. Simply download the SCORM package for your course or assessment and upload it into your LMS. Your LMS will likely have additional configuration around assignment to users, notifications, reminders, retries, and other options that your Learning & Development team should be able to help you with.

Where can I find the LMS integration option?

In Courses, you can find the LMS integration option within the Other Settings tab of the course configuration screen.

In Assessments, you can find the LMS integration option within the Advanced Options area of the assessment configuration screen.

What behavior does it change?

For both Courses and Assessments, enabling the LMS integration, will automatically set a number of other configuration options to remove restrictions within the SCW platform and delegate management of user assignment, invitations, reminders, retries, time limits and end dates to the LMS.

In line with SCORM requirements, users must launch the Course or Assessment from the LMS for completion results to be reported back to the LMS. As a result, Courses and Assessments that have been enabled for SCORM will not be included in Course or Assessment lists within the SCW platform for participants, and if a user navigates to a SCORM-enabled Course or Assessment directly in the platform, a warning will be displayed.

To support the above requirements, a Course with the LMS integration enabled will have the following automatically set:

• Course end date disabled

• Invites and email notifications disabled

• Automatic assignment for all company members enabled

To support the above requirements, an Assessmentwith LMS integration enabled will have the following automatically set:

• Start and finish times disabled

• Allow users to self-assess enabled

• Invites and invite scheduling disabled

• User retries enabled with unlimited retries

If an Assessment is set as the end-of-course activity of a course that has the LMS integration enabled, it will also have the setting automatically enabled. In this case, completion of the Course will only be marked once the end-of-course Assessment is passed.

Can we backfill results?

The SCORM standard does not encompass backfilling results of courses or assessments completed before the integration was available. However, this is possible through the use of our reporting API to generate data in a format that can be imported into your LMS or to call APIs provided by your LMS. In both cases this will be specific to your LMS so please consult the vendor documentation.

Are there any security weaknesses in the SCORM standard?

The SCORM standard requires that the reporting of completion and scores back to the LMS goes via the user’s browser, and therefore a knowledgeable developer could manipulate the data or spoof it. We strongly recommend that customers perform periodic audits against the source of truth (the SCW platform).

The issue arises because the trust model has evolved since the SCORM standard was created, and content is no longer static (e.g. articles, videos, and quizzes) and bundled into a ZIP file. Instead LMS platforms now interoperate with externally hosted learning platforms like ours.

It poses a slight risk of participants faking completion data back to the LMS. However, the Secure Code Warrior platform will always record their true results.

This issue has been known since at least 2009 (see this blog post) but has not been considered a serious issue by the industry, or the customers that we have spoken to about this.

There are also other fundamental issues in the security model of eLearning (e.g. never really knowing who is on the other end actually taking the assessment or course without proctoring).

One effective mitigation strategy is to periodically audit the LMS results

• Anything marked as complete within a very short amount of time can be flagged

• Completion results in the LMS can be verified against the Secure Code Warrior learning platform, which contains the record of truth

What are the metrics that will be provided?

Courses

• Completion

Assessments

• If a pass score is set

  • Pass or fail

  • Score

• If a pass score is not set

  • Completion

  • Score

For a Course with an end-of-course Assessment, completion of the Course will only be marked once the end-of-course Assessment is passed and the score will reflect the Assessment score.

If I update the Course or Assessment, do I need to generate a new SCORM file and re-import it into the LMS?

For Course updates, no new SCORM file is required as long as a new Course is not created and the Course is not cloned.

For Assessment updates, a new SCORM file will be required if a new version is created.

Within the LMS, should I embed the content as an iframe or should I open the content in a popup window?

Both options are supported in most LMS platforms and by our SCORM package, however, we recommend the content be embedded as it is fewer browser windows for the user to juggle!

What is SCORM?

Sharable Content Object Reference Model

• A specification for learning content to allow seamless plug and play in LMS platforms

  • Specifies how to package content so that it is playable in any LMS supporting the standard

  • Specifies how the packaged content can communicate back to the LMS to report completion/score

What version of SCORM will be supported?

SCORM 1.2, and SCORM 2004 

What are the technical requirements to use the LMS integration?

LMS platform that supports SCORM 1.2, or SCORM 2004