It has been about two years since someone asked me if LearnCentrix University is AICC-compliant.  Nowadays, everyone is more interested in SCORM.  And recently I had a client tell me that they considered LearnCentrix to not be SCORM-compliant because some off-the-shelf content that they bought wouldn't work without some tweaking.

I'm not going to attempt to defend (directly) LearnCentrix in relation to its SCORM-compliance.  I would rather focus on what that truly means.  Now, I'm no expert, but I have spent some time with the SCORM specs, and it appears to me that there are hundreds of ways to implement the "specification".  In fact, I contend that the vast number of optional methods (programming pieces) that may or may not be implemented by either the system or the reusable learning object content make the "standard specification" merely a set of guidelines.  The built-in flexibility dilutes its value. 

LearnCentrix programmers have implemented certain key parts of the SCORM runtime environment spec.  The API will capture data from the Shareable Courseware Object (SCO) and conveniently store it in a database.  If the data is useful to LearnCentrix, such as a score from the content or a bookmark, then the system will take action on it.  But what most e-Learning practitioners fail to understand is that thousands of other pieces of data could be stored in LearnCentrix by the SCO, and unless a SCO retrieves it later and processes it, that data is useless.  LearnCentrix doesn't know what to do with it.  It is data that is only useful to the SCO. 

That is only one example of the confusion around standards compliance.  And I have other stories to tell that I will hopefully type up later.  For now, I just wanted to make a claim to our community that will probably be controversial:

SCORM is more of a marketing tool than an information technology standard.

Anyone care to share their experience and wisdom regarding the realities of SCORM?