Chalkface Blog

SCORM – the Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model is a standard for interchange of web-based learning materials. It is strongly promoted by Becta and Curriculum Online as the enabler of a golden age of e-learning in which teachers will have access to an inexhaustible supply wonderful interactive multimedia thingies that that will bring joy, light, good behaviour and quick learning to every classroom.

I, on the other hand, am a little sceptical.

I have long distrusted SCORM for two reasons. First, it was invented by and for the US Navy. The Navy invents new ways to kill people so frequently that classroom instruction just can’t keep up. The big problem is that what the military wants to teach is nearly all procedures. Remember Kipling’s “Today we have Naming of Parts”? It’s a great poem for anyone whose life depends on being able to assemble his rifle in the correct order, but you have to admit it’s not very strong on evaluation. SCORM, as a standard, has a strong bias towards learning procedure – and hence a bias against more complex learning styles.

The second reason is the SCORM objects I see at shows like BETT. At first glance, they look great. They are typically written in Flash. They are colourful, animated and have lots of drag-and-drop animation. This in itself is a good thing – but it’s achieved at the cost of shallowness. Research, empathy, debate, higher-order learning of all kinds are squeezed out, because the standard won’t support them. To add insult to injury, the graphics that so impress a middle-aged man like me cut very little ice with a teenager raised on the complex 3-D gameplay of Sega and Nintendo. The hoped-for engagement very quickly wears off.

Now it turns out there’s some academic thinking to back up my skepticism. In a paper called Three Objections to Learning Objects, Norm Friesen of Athabasca University cites a growing body of research that suggests SCORM is not the panacea it was once cracked up to be. Most tellingly he says

Dan Rehak, one of the “chief architects” behind SCORM, has stated that this framework, has “a limited pedagogical model unsuited for some environments” (as cited in Kraan & Wilson, 2002). “SCORM,” Rehak says, “is essentially about a single-learner [whose learning is] self-paced and self-directed. This makes it inappropriate for use in [higher education] and K-12” (Kraan & Wilson, 2002).

SCORM isn’t necessary to making elearning work in schools. I argued two years ago that much greater richness could be achieved if we simply put the interoperability at a different point in the process, in a white paper called Enabling e-learning success through a richer mix of learning processes (PDF) The principles I laid out are now enshrined in a thing called the “Schools Interoperability Framework”, though I can’t claim anything more than an indirect influence on SIF’s creators.

But that’s for another post.

We’ve had no new posts on our Business Studies message board for about a week now, and this has set me wondering about message boards in general. If you participate in a board yourself, you’ll know that they can be a great community focus and an invaluable source of knowledge. If you’ve ever set one up, however, you’ll also know that 95% of message boards don’t take off.

The problem, in essence, is this. An empty board is not expected to have any readers, so there’s very little incentive for anyone to write. And with no new topics, neither is there anything to respond to.

Boards that take off most easily are those that have a ready-made audience of people already desperate to talk on a particular topic. They will write anyway, whether they think anyone is reading or not, and they will respond to each others’ posts as well.

If you, as boardmaster, don’t have this, you have to resort to slower and less certain methods such as seeding the board with fake posts to start it off, twisting friends’ arms to contribute and promoting the board as widely as possible, for example blogging about it as I’m doing here. If you’re planning to set up a board, be warned that this requires considerable, sustained effort.

Setting up a board for teenagers presents a further challenge. What they want to write about most of the time concerns their world of who’s dating whom, which band is coolest and so forth. On the Business Studies board, we’ve found ourselves faced with a dilemma. Do we pour cold water on the board by deleting irrelevant entries, or do we allow it to lose its intended focus by permitting them. We’ve gone the former route, but it’s at the cost of dampening an already quiet discussion.

We’ll persevere with the Business Studies board, because the potential for a national message board based around each course or subject is clearly so huge. Before embarking on future message board projects, though, we’ll certainly think a lot harder about the real investment required to make them succeed.

First, what’s a blog? A ‘blog’ is a web log – an online diary, essentially. This one is written by members of the Chalkface team (usually CEO Ian Grove-Stephensen) and is intended to present discussions of our thoughts and issues about education in general and those elements we are directly involved with in particular.