How to Create SCORM Courses for Your LMS

8 min readOct 26, 2020

If you’re looking for information on how to create SCORM content, you must have come across the term SCORM. Simply put, SCORM is an international standard for eLearning courses. If your course is published in the SCORM format, you can be sure that it will display on any learning management system (LMS). Even if you decide to change your LMS someday, you can transfer all your existing SCORM content to a new platform — it will work perfectly without any tweaking.

To get a comprehensive picture of this eLearning format — how it works, why it’s important, and how to implement it in your training program — check out our complete guide on SCORM. In this article, we’ll share two ways to create SCORM courses. See which one is best suited for you.

Creating a SCORM Course: The Manual Approach

If you’re wondering what it takes to create a SCORM package from scratch without any authoring tools, here are the steps for this process:

1. Collect all the information that you want to be included in the course

Text, images, pictures, audio, and video — save all of your source files to a specific folder and think about how you want all that to come together. Make a storyboard — draw a plan of the course on paper or write a simple outline using your favorite text editor:

2. Create an HTML version of your course

If you’re using an LMS, then all learning content that is uploaded to it must be displayable in a web browser. This means that before becoming a SCORM package, your course needs to be organized into a series of HTML pages — just like a website. You will also need to link all text and media in the HTML so they are played in the LMS as well.

If you’re not the tech type, this part may seem difficult to you. In this case, the best approach to content development for you is using an authoring tool. (We’ll cover this further on). Still, here’s one of the easiest ways to create an HTML version of your course manually.

Structure your course in Google Docs and use the File → Download → Web Page option to download the HTML version of the course.

Once you have an HTML version of your course that works in a web browser, you can tackle its SCORM compatibility.

3. Add the SCORM files necessary for the LMS

This step requires you to create a bunch of text files that describe your course using SCORM terms and put them in a ZIP package along with the HTML content you created in the previous step. This is needed so that the second SCORM-compatible product in the equation (your LMS) can process your course and properly record learning stats once your course is made available to learners.

There are no clearly defined instructions on how to complete this step, but here’s what we would do:

Download and extract this sample SCORM package from scorm.com.
Take a look at the file structure. See how HTML content is stored along with the SCORM files that “describe” it.

3. Copy the following files into the folder with your HTML course: Adlcp_rootv1p2.xsd
Ims_xml.xsd
imscp_rootv1p1p2.xsd
imsmanifest.xml
imsmd_rootv1p2p1.xsd

4. Open imsmanifest.xml with a text editor and take a look at it. This is the most important file for a SCORM course and the only one that you will need to edit. It contains such information as the course’s title, defines which version of the SCORM specification it conforms to, and lists all resource files that come with the HTML portion of it.

5. Adapt the imsmanifest file to your content: edit the text in <title> and change the links to the HTML resources of your course. The first resource in the list should be your main HTML file that has links to all the other resources of your course.

4. Package the results into a ZIP

Once you have a customized imsmanifest, add your HTML and SCORM files to a ZIP archive. Then you can upload the resulting file to your LMS and see if it’s able to process it.

As you can see, packaging a SCORM course on your own is a hassle and it definitely requires some IT skills. I would recommend going down that path only if your tech savviness and patience are rock solid.

Creating a SCORM Course Using an Authoring Tool

Creating a single SCORM course manually can be justified by virtue of exploration-induced entertainment and the acquisition of new skills. But what if your task requires you to design multiple SCORM lessons, each with lots of audio and video? This job can take months and months of tedious coding and editing SCORM files.

Luckily, there are software tools that can shoulder the weight of coding and packaging, so you don’t have to spend your precious time on anything but instructional design. These programs are called SCORM authoring tools. They can transform your courses from visual content to HTML-compliant SCORM packages that can be uploaded straight to an LMS.

Logical questions here would be: “But what kind of content can these tools convert to SCORM? How do I channel my vision of an eLearning module using a computer?” We believe that the simplest and the best answer to these questions is PowerPoint. Being installed on over 1 billion computers, it’s a piece of software that we have all used at least once. Plus, it lets you compose text, images, audio, and video into a series of slides, which is a great opportunity for making a learning module on any topic.

When you have your PowerPoint presentation ready, follow the steps to convert it into a SCORM module. Watch the video or skip to the article if you prefer reading.

How to create a SCORM course in 3 steps with iSpring Suite

Install the iSpring Suite authoring toolkit on a PC with MS PowerPoint — here’s the download link.
Open your presentation in PowerPoint and go to the iSpring Suite tab. Click Publish.
In the Publish Presentation window, select the LMS tab on the left.

4. Here you can enter your project name and select a folder to save the SCORM package in. You can stick to the output options set up by default or customize them to your needs.

5. In the LMS Profile drop-down list, choose the format your LMS supports: SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004.

6. By clicking the Customize button next to the drop-down list, you can set up different parameters to evaluate your learners’ progress and completion: lesson duration, passing score, a minimum number of slides a student must view to complete the course, and more.

7. When everything is set up, hit Publish to convert your course into a SCORM package. Wait for iSpring to finish conversion and voila, your course is ready.

Full-featured authoring tools like iSpring Suite can be so much more than simple converters. They allow instructional designers with any level of expertise to create interactive content. For example, with iSpring Suite, you can build the following types of content from scratch:

Slide-based courses
Quizzes
Screen recordings
Dialogue simulations
Interactive modules

Check this page for more details on iSpring Suite features.

How to Test a SCORM Package

Oftentimes, uploading a SCORM package straight to the production version of your LMS may not be the brightest idea. Uploading a large file like a SCORM course takes time, which may differ based on how fast your LMS is. Also, if you find a mistake in your course during a test run (for example, you find out that your scores are not reported after you try taking the course in the role of a learner), you’ll need to fix it and then replace the old version with a new file, doubling the upload time. To avoid these obstacles, experienced instructional designers tend to test their SCORM package before uploading to an LMS or sending it to a client.

The best and simplest way to test a SCORM package is a web-based service called SCORM Cloud by Rustici Software. This is the company that currently looks after the SCORM standard, so it deserves your trust.

Here’s how you test a SCORM package using Cloud SCORM:

Register a free trial here.
Upload your SCORM package via the Add Content button.

3. When the file is uploaded, click Launch to open your course.

4. Take the course as if you were a learner, then close the browser tab that you were using for this purpose.

5. Check if the status in Cloud SCORM changed to Complete or Passed. That will indicate that your course will work properly in a real LMS.

Really simple. If you’ve never used Cloud SCORM before, your life as an instructional designer will never be the same again.

Conclusion

Today, designing and publishing SCORM courses is easier than ever. But, there are still opportunities for “handicrafters” looking for a technical challenge. We hope this article satisfies both camps and makes SCORM less of a scary acronym and more of a powerful eLearning tool.

Have you tried to create a SCORM file from scratch using our article and did you test it with SCORM Cloud? Please share your experience in the comment section.

Originally published at https://www.ispringsolutions.com on October 26, 2020.