The Exhibit: Dr. Ed's SCORM Course
A working SCORM 1.2 course from 2013, preserved exactly as it was built.
How to Use This Exhibit
- Navigate the menu — Use the left sidebar to browse course sections. Click "What is SCORM?" to start.
- Enter a name — If prompted, enter any name. The login is cosmetic and uses cookies to remember you.
- Explore the grid — The course uses a grid-based navigation to lessons on packaging, runtime, metadata, and more.
- Try different resolutions — The course was built for 640, 800, and 1024px screens. Watch how the layout adapts.
Note: This is a preserved artifact. Some features (Flash intro, PHP registration) have been intentionally bypassed. The core learning content is fully functional.
Historical Context
"Dr. Ed's SCORM Course" was created by Dr. Edward R. Jones, Ph.D. while working as an ASEE summer fellow at the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Co-Laboratory in Orlando, Florida. Published in 2013 as a teaching tool for content developers learning to build SCORM-compliant courses, it represents the state of the art in SCORM 1.2 content development — built using the same JavaScript API and IMS Content Packaging that defined the standard over a decade earlier.
What You're Seeing
- Framesets — The course uses HTML framesets (top bar, left menu, main content), a common pattern before single-page apps.
- Cookie Tracking — Progress is tracked via browser cookies, simulating what an LMS would normally handle.
- Grid Navigation — Lessons are organized in a grid layout with resolution-specific versions (640, 800, 1024px).
- SCO Architecture — Each lesson is a Sharable Content Object (SCO) that could be independently tracked by an LMS.
Why It Still Works
The course's SCONav.js has a noAPI = true flag, which bypasses all LMS API calls. Combined with cookie-based tracking, the entire course runs client-side without any server infrastructure — making it perfectly suited for preservation as a museum exhibit.