I was going to post this message in the Hot Potatoes forum at Yahoo but since Martin Holmes and Stewart Arneil, the Hot Potatoe guys, are hanging out here as well I thought this might be a better place to ask this question because perhaps more people who are also knowleadgeable about SCORM can be reading these messages.
OK, I've tried to export HP exercises in the SCORM format and use them in Moodle. I've found no major problems but I don't think I will be using this functionality because I think it doesn't have much added value when compared with the HotPot module available in Moodle. Actually, the HotPot module offers better reports than SCORM. And I must also say that I find the user interface for SCORM in Moodle leaves a lot to be desired (although I hear this is going to change soon).
Having said this, however, an interesting possibility that SCORM offers is to embed HP exercises in the middle of so called Learning Objects. So you get a sequence of texts and/or multimedia files and interspersed among them you have various HP exercises related to the contents of those documents as a form of self-evaluation.
I am pretty sure I saw an example of this in the Dokeos site in a demo course they had until very recently. Unfortunately, I'm not able to find it anymore because the main page for the site has changed completely (unless I'm mistaken and I saw this demo course in a different site).
Anyway, my question is: is this really possible and if so, how does one do it? The question is more complicated than it might sound at first because there is the issue of the reporting of the results from the HP quizzes. That is, it would seem rather trivial to embed the web pages created by HP as one more of the documents in the sequences of documents of all types that are usually part of a SCORM package. But if one does it like this, I'm pretty sure the results of the quizzes would not be incorporated automatically in the reports provided by SCORM.
However, since HP can now be exported as SCORM, I'm wondering whether it would be possible to embed a "SCORMed" HP quiz within another SCORM package and thus be able to track the results of the HP quizzes and include them in the reports for the SCORM activity.
I don't know whether I'm making myself clear but I will be happy to elaborate if needed.
Hi Josep,
my understanding is that the SCORMed Hot Potatoes exercises save, or will save, comprehensive details about the scores and student responses.
At the moment, as you point out, there is no reporting facility to get at this data. However, I believe that Martin and Stewart envisage it will be possible for a future HotPot module to be able to generate a report from the SCORM results.
Here's a post (from Feb 2007) about that topic:
regards
Gordon
my understanding is that the SCORMed Hot Potatoes exercises save, or will save, comprehensive details about the scores and student responses.
At the moment, as you point out, there is no reporting facility to get at this data. However, I believe that Martin and Stewart envisage it will be possible for a future HotPot module to be able to generate a report from the SCORM results.
Here's a post (from Feb 2007) about that topic:
regards
Gordon
Hi Gordon,
Actually my question added another level of complication. I wanted to know whether one could insert a SCORMed HP exercise in the middle of other resources within a SCORM package. The idea is to get a sequence of texts, audio or video and have Hot Potatoe exercises in the middle to quiz users about what they've learned.
Actually my question added another level of complication. I wanted to know whether one could insert a SCORMed HP exercise in the middle of other resources within a SCORM package. The idea is to get a sequence of texts, audio or video and have Hot Potatoe exercises in the middle to quiz users about what they've learned.
Hi Josep,
I agree completely that the SCORM-based functionality in Moodle provides much less useful reporting than the HotPot module. The reason we've added SCORM is that it should enable HotPot quizzes to work on any SCORM-compliant LMS.
I think it should also be possible to create larger SCORM packages which incorporate Hot Potatoes exercises. I think I would use the Reload tools to do that. In any SCORM context, and HotPot exercise should happily report its results back to the server; that's what SCORM is all about.
I'm hoping that Gordon will adopt SCORM 2004 as the basis for reporting in the new HotPot module, for reasons I've explained elsewhere. The limitations in SCORM reporting on Moodle are not inherent to SCORM; the fact is that SCORM 1.2 is not very extensive compared with SCORM 2004, and there are few SCORM implementations anywhere that make an effort to provide the level of detail and discrimination in their reporting that the HotPot module is able to offer. If Gordon were to work together with us on a SCORM 2004 implementation, so that HotPot exercises report all the details he needs through SCORM 2004, and his module knows how to get all those details and report them, all the time using the standard SCORM API, then we'd have the best of both worlds: the new HotPot module would support any SCORM 2004 content, the future version of HotPot would produce exercises that run under any SCORM-compliant LMS, and the combination of the two on Moodle would probably give us most detailed and useful reporting available anywhere. That seems to me to be a goal worth striving for.
Cheers,
Martin
I agree completely that the SCORM-based functionality in Moodle provides much less useful reporting than the HotPot module. The reason we've added SCORM is that it should enable HotPot quizzes to work on any SCORM-compliant LMS.
I think it should also be possible to create larger SCORM packages which incorporate Hot Potatoes exercises. I think I would use the Reload tools to do that. In any SCORM context, and HotPot exercise should happily report its results back to the server; that's what SCORM is all about.
I'm hoping that Gordon will adopt SCORM 2004 as the basis for reporting in the new HotPot module, for reasons I've explained elsewhere. The limitations in SCORM reporting on Moodle are not inherent to SCORM; the fact is that SCORM 1.2 is not very extensive compared with SCORM 2004, and there are few SCORM implementations anywhere that make an effort to provide the level of detail and discrimination in their reporting that the HotPot module is able to offer. If Gordon were to work together with us on a SCORM 2004 implementation, so that HotPot exercises report all the details he needs through SCORM 2004, and his module knows how to get all those details and report them, all the time using the standard SCORM API, then we'd have the best of both worlds: the new HotPot module would support any SCORM 2004 content, the future version of HotPot would produce exercises that run under any SCORM-compliant LMS, and the combination of the two on Moodle would probably give us most detailed and useful reporting available anywhere. That seems to me to be a goal worth striving for.
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks for the answer Martin. I'll try to put something together with RELOAD. If I understood you correctly, though, this wouldn't make much difference for what I'm interested in until Moodle fully supports the SCORM 2004 specifications. With the current implementation of SCORM in Moodle even if I were able to incorporate HP exercises within a learning object, I wouldn't be able to benefit from the full report possibilities of HP. Am I correct?
I'm not technically savvy enough to determine whether SCORM 2004 is the best basis for reporting in the new HotPot module. What I'm pretty sure about is that we can expect great things from the collaboration between people like Gordon and you guys. I'm pretty excited about the features Gordon listed for the new HotPot module and solid and extensible reporting functionalities are highly desirable in my opinion.
I'm not technically savvy enough to determine whether SCORM 2004 is the best basis for reporting in the new HotPot module. What I'm pretty sure about is that we can expect great things from the collaboration between people like Gordon and you guys. I'm pretty excited about the features Gordon listed for the new HotPot module and solid and extensible reporting functionalities are highly desirable in my opinion.
Hi Josep,
I think if you use SCORM 1.2, you could get HotPot results. I know HotPot SCORM output works OK on Moodle. It's just that the detail provided by Gordon's module isn't there.
Cheers,
Martin
I think if you use SCORM 1.2, you could get HotPot results. I know HotPot SCORM output works OK on Moodle. It's just that the detail provided by Gordon's module isn't there.
Cheers,
Martin
OK. Thanks. I'll give it a try and see what I come up with.
JM
JM