DITA-to-SCORM Plugin Status

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@contrext.com>]

I've found my ancient DITA-to-SCORM plugin. It was last worked on as an example extension to the DITA for Publishers HTML2 transform.

It mostly just creates a SCORM package manifest and also does some translation of interactions into HTML markup.

I also found my copy of John Hunt's original sample plugin, on which my work was based.

One limitation of this plugin is that it assumes the use of learning-specific map and topic types, which is annoying.

If I was going to develop this now I would base it on the D4P EPUB transform where the infrastructure for producing SCORM-style packages is much more complete.

For SCORM transform there are essentially three challeges:

1. Generating appropriate HTML for the learning content, including generating the markup for interactions as expected by the delivering LMS.
2. Building the SCORM package. This is mostly about tedious record keeping and data processing. The D4P EPUB plugin provides general facilities for generating the required manifests.
3. Providing whatever is required by the target LMS, e.g., JavaScript etc.

Do we know of either an open-source LMS that we can target for demo purposes or some body of Javascript that can be used to implement a simple LMS?

If we can cobble together some sort of LMS I could set up a Docker container set that would make it easy to install and use.

It would be a really interesting engineering project but for myself I simply don't have available time to do this by myself given my current client and existing open-source commitments.

Cheers,

E.

--
Eliot Kimber
http://contrext.com