Tips for updating SCORM content
Updating a SCORM 1.2 or 2004 activity on an LMS is a practice to avoid. Netex always recommends that a new activity be published to the LMS that reflects changes made to the new version.
If you want to do this, you must make sure that the new version of the SCORM package doesn't have any change of structure compared to the previous version.
The following options are changes in structure in contents created with Author:
- Change templates (for example, switch from Basic Netex to Tokyo).
- Modify the title of the unit.
- Add/remove pages and/or popups.
- Add/remove components on those pages and/or popups.
- Add/remove questionnaires.
- Add/remove questions in questionnaires.
- Modify questionnaires questions: Add new options or change the correct options.
The option to update content depends on the LMS. Some of them will not allow you to update the activity if there is a change of this caliber. Others LMS will allow updating, but it will be possible to generate problems in the tracking of students who have already worked in the unit (e.g., if we add a page, a student who had completed it at 100% would no longer have it completed; and if we changed the right option for a question, a student could have it suspended.).
Therefore, the only changes that DO NOT AFFECT the structure (and that will be accepted by most LMS platforms) are:
- correction of existing texts.
- substitution of images and/or videos.
In addition, it is always a good habit to use a save/exit button for SCORM-type content, it is even more important to insist that students use this button to end the training, thus ensuring that their progress is correctly reported.
If we do not use it, we leave it up to the browser to send the progress for us when we close the window and not all browsers have to agree on their behaviour when the "close" button is pressed.