Supporting Collaborative Learning Activities with SCORM

This paper investigates the data elements required to fully and flexibly support a broad range of collaborative learning activities and proposes extensions to the SCORM data model to enable support for collaborative learning designs within SCORM. The analysis is partly based on a range of well established collaborative learning designs that cannot be implemented within the SCORM 1.2 specification. Educational technology standards should ideally offer teachers and students the greatest possible pedagogical flexibility, and encourage the full exploration of new pedagogies as well as offering other benefits through standardisation. The proposed extensions would enable support for collaborative activities delivered from within Sharable Content Objects. The proposal involves the addition of 14 course related data elements and 11 session related data elements to the SCORM data model.