ADL Initiative

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative was established in 1997 by the U.S. Department of Defense under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. Its founding mission was to create a common technical framework so training content could be shared across all branches of the military.

ADL's most consequential achievement was the creation of SCORM — the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. By synthesizing existing specifications from AICC, IMS Global, and IEEE LTSC into a single, unified standard, ADL solved the interoperability problem that had plagued DoD training for years. SCORM 1.2 (2001) became the most widely deployed eLearning standard in history.

ADL operated the ADL Co-Lab in Orlando, FL, which served as both a research center and a community hub for the eLearning standards ecosystem. The Co-Lab hosted Plugfest events, maintained the SCORM Conformance Test Suite, and provided free tools and resources to the community.

Recognizing SCORM's limitations, ADL funded the Tin Can/xAPI research project in 2010, awarding the contract to Rustici Software. The resulting Experience API (xAPI) — released in 2013 — represented a fundamental reimagining of how learning data is captured and shared.

ADL has also been instrumental in the IEEE standardization of xAPI (IEEE 9274.1.1-2023) and continues to support the cmi5 specification as a bridge between xAPI's flexibility and SCORM's LMS interoperability.