This blog post is part of our “Ask Andy” series in which we publish Andy’s plain-spoken, straight shooting answers to common or uniquely interesting (eLearning) questions. If you have a question, you can always fill out this form and ask Andy too.
Hi Andy,
Our company is making the switch to using Moodle as our primary LMS. We have a lot of content in various formats including SCORM 2004 and xAPI. My understanding is that Moodle can be limiting in what it allows you to import. I am evaluating our options to get all our existing (and future) content to live within Moodle as well as our other internal learning platforms. Can you point me in the right direction?
Thanks,
Noodling over Moodle
Hey Noodling over Moodle,
Thanks for reaching out as we get a lot of inquiries about adding standards support when using an open source platform like Moodle. You are correct, Moodle does not support all the eLearning standards, specifically SCORM 2004, which is one of the most widely used. While you can read more about what they support natively or through 3rd-party plugins here, it is in your best interest to ensure your content is in the SCORM 1.2 standard. Good news! We have a few options that can help get your mixed content library into Moodle.
Content Controller
We have a few customers that use Content Controller to bring content into Moodle in a variety of standards. Content Controller is a web-based application that acts as a content centralization tool that delivers courses into a Moodle environment with ease. When you upload a course to Content Controller, it’s immediately available to every other connected platform. Not only will you save time administering the courses, but you also get built-in multi-language support and consolidated usage reports across all learners in every system. For a typical customer using Content Controller and Moodle, the workflow looks like this:
- Import your content into Content Controller which supports SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 (2nd, 3rd and 4th editions), AICC, xAPI, cmi5, LTI (v1.1 and v1.3), MP3, MP4, and PDF imports.
- Test your courses to make sure they play as you expect.
- Share your content into Moodle. Content Controller exports a small SCORM 1.2 proxy package, which can be imported into virtually any LMS on the market. The course retains all of its properties that you would expect as the author, but as far as Moodle is concerned, it’s just a SCORM 1.2 package.
- When a learner launches the proxy file, the content is played and tracked by Content Controller, but is seamless to the learner.
- When a learner exits the course, the completion data you care about is captured in the Moodle Gradebook just like any other SCORM package and is also available in Content Controller’s reports.
Content Controller can be especially valuable if you introduce another LMS in the future as all your content will already be in one centrally hosted location. You’re no longer beholden to which LMS will support your content, and that makes migrating platforms much easier.
SCORM Cloud Dispatch
If you only have a handful of content packages that you’re trying to import into Moodle, I’d recommend our SaaS solution, SCORM Cloud Dispatch. It’s a similar step-by-step process to Content Controller, but you’ll import content into your SCORM Cloud account. Then, use the Dispatch feature to export the content back out as a small .zip package in a SCORM 1.2 format or LTI links that Moodle can accept. You can start immediately with pay-as-you-go monthly plans and no startup fees. You can find pricing for SCORM Cloud here and even sign up for a free trial today.
Check out our comparison of Content Controller and SCORM Cloud Dispatch to see a side-by-side comparison. Please let me know if you have any questions. I’m happy to schedule some time to walk you through Content Controller and SCORM Cloud Dispatch to help you determine which one is the best fit for your needs.
Best,
Andy
