Making an "alias" to SCORM content

Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Darrel Tenter -
Number of replies: 10

We've just recently installed a 2.3 sandbox. I was eager to try out the new alias feature when adding a file. I'm still trying to fully understand repositories and how to manage them. Anyway, it seems that when adding a SCORM package activity I cannot alias the SCO file. I can locate the file in the repository but I think it gets copied to the course. I'd like to maintain a central repositroy of SCO's. My searches turned up results related to SCORM or AICC servers. I'm not familiar with how these work. So I have two questions.

  1. If I create a SCORM activity and the SCO is hosted on a server, is the SCO file still copied into the course or is it "linked"?
  2. If the SCO can be linked then I might be interested in creating a SCORM server. Can someone point me to a resource for learning how to do that?

Thank you.

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In reply to Darrel Tenter

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

you might be the first to try it with SCORKM in 2.3.

it will have to download the zip and extract it locally to work - but it should maintain the link to the external zip - if you set the auto-update setting it will update the locally stored version based on the frequency you set.

You could set up a repository of SCORM zip files using any of the existing Repository plugins.


make sense?

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Jon Fila -

I want to make certain that I understand this. So there is no way for an alias to work with a SCORM package, it's always going to unpack a copy just for that activity which will make the backups for those courses quite large.

Do I have that correct?

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In reply to Jon Fila

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

well... backups are different - they are supposed to be fully self-contained to allow you to restore them so they will include the package. There are also other methods of linking to your SCORM package where the file sits outside your Moodle site and in those cases the backup file will only include the reference to the file. look at the docs/settings/contextual help for more info.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Jon Fila -

Thanks, I'll keep working on this.

What if instead of making a backup I just imported the activities into a blank course, would this duplicate the file?

I thought that if I linked to the file outside of my Moodle site that it would not track student scores in the gradebook.

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In reply to Jon Fila

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

there are a range of ways to link to files outside Moodle - I've posted about these options in the forums and some information is available in docs.moodle.org and contextual help inside Moodle.

Moodle backups take a copy of your course and generate a complete backup file so you can transfer the course to another site... so it will include all files required to do this.

you should probably read this:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/File_handling

"Previously, if a file was used in different courses, it was duplicated. In Moodle 2.0, files are stored only once, saving disk space." - this doesn't apply to course backup files (unless you copy the exact same course backup file into another course)

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Sebastien Jaffredo -

The issue is being discussed in this tracker:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-28579

I'd suggest everybody in need to alias SCORM packages vote for it.

Four our part, we have hundreds of SCORM packages that we have to regularly modify. We uplaod them trough FTP but lacking a possibility to alias the files we need to open every single activity to update the SCORM package. Aliassing SCORM packages would be a major time saver.

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In reply to Sebastien Jaffredo

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Becky Lane -

Has anyone been able to successfully make an alias to SCORM files? I am in great need of this functionality and it doesn't appear to be working.

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In reply to Becky Lane

Re: Making an "alias" to SCORM content

by Becky Lane -

My SCORM aliases were not updating when I used the "Every time it's used" auto-update setting. However, when I changed it to "Every day", they updated the next day.

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