| Abstract |
The transition of today’s global economy to one based on knowledge and information in combination with the recent advances in the field of information and communications technology (ICT), resulted in the explosive growth of e-Learning. Over the years, a significant number of e-Learning systems and learning resources were developed bringing, as customary in such cases, problems of interoperability. Many organizations (e.g. IMS, IEEE, AICC) began drafting a variety of different standards and specifications dealing, however, only with parts of the interoperability problem such as content packaging, content to LMS communication and metadata descriptions. The first effort towards addressing the full spectrum of the interoperability problem was Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), by the ADL. SCORM was widely accepted and endorsed by the e-Learning community and managed to achieve great success with version 1.2. The following version, however, failed to continue that trend. SCORM 2004, with the addition of learning content sequencing capabilities increased in size and complexity and the adoption rate was negatively impacted. In this thesis we present the design and implementation of an architecture for integrating the latest version of SCORM (SCORM 2004 4th Edition) into a pre-existent learning management system. The proposed architecture deals with the importing of any SCORM 2004 conformant content package, the runtime communication between content objects and the LMS and the sequencing of learning activities according to the rules defined in the content package. The implementation was successfully validated using the latest test suite provided by ADL.
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Towards standards based e-Learning tools and technologies
